RANDOM GOING-ONS
For the week of the 10th, we mainly had classes, did some outdoor activities, and watched a few movies on our spare time. Class topics included the caste system, childhood diseases, the mobile health team, violence against women, and the farmer’s group. I’ll post more on the topics later. But we went to two villages, making rounds with the village health workers. One nice part of the trip was when we visited a pregnant girl of about 18 years. She was about 7 months along, and came back to her mother’s house to give birth. Interestingly, her sister-in-law came with her. That seemed a little odd from what we had been learning, which was that the father’s family wasn’t very supportive of the wife. I, Samira, and Angela got the chance to listen to the heartbeat the fetus. It was barely audible, but it was pretty amazing to know a little person was just on the opposite side of the wall.
On Tuesday the 11th, we finally got our class party. We went to the roof of Dr. Shoba’s house. We finally met Ravi, Dr. Arole’s son, who helps in running CRHP. He’s been very sick lately from a clotting disorder, and was in Pune before we arrived. Alex, the Professor’s very accomplished mentee, and Smisha, another coordinator of CRHP, Kris and Yoshe also came. For dinner, I had pasta and delicious veggie burgers. Eventually we were all sitting around a fire, eating and chatting away.
The next day after the domestic violence lesson, I saw one of the health workers, Mumtaz outside. I remembered she was Muslim, and so when I saw here I said “Assalamualaikum.” She was very happy to learn that Samira and I were Muslim and she replied “Wa-alaikum assalam!” with much enthusiasm. We got a picture with her and two other women who wanted to join in.
The first movie we watched was the Constant Gardener, which was about how pharmaceutical industries conducted illegal trials in Africa so they could save time, and hence earn a lot of money. The second movie was Monsoon Wedding, which was about the drama surrounding a certain family. The family was pretty bizarre and it just wasn’t good overall. On Saturday afternoon we saw Outsourced, about a guy who’s forced to move to India and train some people there. That movie also wasn’t good. Ravi gave us this movie called Peepli. We were hoping to watch a silly Bollywood movie, but Peepli had no megastars or music or anything. It was a serious movie about poor people and it got very political and economical and we were just not in the mood for a movie that requires a lot of thinking, so we stopped watching it after 30 minutes.
