Eye on my foot

Namaskar

Yesterday I got a piece of eye on my foot.

I was in the operating theatre. The surgeon had just extracted the lens from a cataract patient. Passing his tools and the lens to the nurse, she threw the lens at the bin – which missed and landed on my foot. We all had a bit of a laugh – being hit by a piece of a patient’s body is funny in any culture.

The view from my room at dusk

That’s about the only exceptional thing worth reporting. The rest of this post deals with the mundane, to give you some idea of what life is like in this part of India. Forgive my tardiness in posting, but the hospital internet tubes have become blocked again, so I have to walk 30 minutes each way to the internet café in the village.

                           

Accommodation

Despite the Orwellian overtones, room 101 is good without being plus-good. The bed is un-good. The roof fan is a life-saver, although power cuts at night leave me uncomfortably hot.

Food

Something I love so much, I engage in it at least three times a day. Breakfast usually consists of a selection of (in descending preference):

-         2-minutes-noodles-in-a-vaguely-curryish-sauce

-         bananas, which are about 10cm long over here

-         breakfast-vege-curry-with-peas

-         deep-fried-bread-with-curried-potato-stuff

A surgeon investigating a patient using the slit-lamp

If we’re heading out to the vision camps, we’ll stop at a local restaurant, which serves the vege curry with either bread (pudi) or funny little rice cake things (idli). I can confirm that a sample of available Orissans and Bengalis do not like Vegemite and think it tastes ‘like medicine’ – not surprising, as few raised outside Australasia can tolerate Vegemite (apart from a couple of Québecois).

Lunch usually consists of rice with dhal on top (yellowy curried lentil sauce), plus some combination of fried/curried vegetables with the occasional fried egg. I’ve had fish twice and chicken once in 20 days. Dinner is pretty similar, but with the addition of chapatti (flat bread, like tortillas).

Orissans eschew utensils and eat with their (right) hand – I think this occurs all over India. I have progressed to the hybrid right-hand-plus-fork-in-left-hand method, because frankly it is pretty tricky eating rice with your hands. I aim to be proficiently utensil-less by the time I get to Nepal.

The food isn’t bad, but it makes me realise how spoiled for choice we are in the West – particularly Auckland and London. In the week before I left London, I ate Chinese, Polish, Eritrean, Vietnamese, South African and a massive bloody steak (oh how I crave red meat). Here – it’s pretty much the same food every day. Sadly, the Indian dishes I love the most are from different parts of India (i.e. Vindaloo is from Goa, on the other side of the country). I haven’t managed to find a curry to beat the balti chilli masala from the brick lane Clipper, but I think I can by November.

Language

Wow, this is tricky. There are many, many languages in India. They speak Oriya here rather than Hindi. A few hundred clicks up the road they speak Bengali, although is similar enough to Oriya to allow cross-communication. Most of the staff here speak English to varying degrees, although the tricky thing for a native English speaker is to adjust to Indian English which has very different pronunciation. I was asked one lunch if I wanted ‘peas’ – I said yes, and some fish showed up. Oh, ‘peas’ is fish. Right. Being white usually means people (usually) speak English to me, although a few have tried speaking Oriya and appeared shocked when I stared blankly back at them (Oriya is hardly the first-choice Asian language to learn in New Zealand…).

Cultural differences

We’re certainly not in Kansas anymore, Toto. I should have written about ‘cultural similarities’, which would have been a shorter paragraph consisting of one word: cricket. I’m trying to get my head around just how populous India is. Orissa has 37 million people – about 9 times New Zealand’s population. Orissa has only about 3% of India’s population. ZOMG. New Zealand is tiny.

Elmo is a God here?

I get stared at a lot here. To be fair, I’m in a pretty rural part of India (think of flying into Gore then driving a few hours into the wops) where foreigners are pretty sparse (again, we forget what cultural melting pots London and Auckland are). Orissans apparently don’t have the same taboos against excessive staring that we do in the Anglo world – even returning the stare doesn’t stop the staring. I’m starting to get used to it now, but it does make you feel a bit paranoid.

Strangely enough, barely anyone smokes over here. Instead, all the cool kids chew a combination of tobacco and betel nut. This results in a lot of spitting, and red spots all over the ground; in addition to staining teeth brown. I have seen a few shops selling beer, but alcohol certainly doesn’t have the same visible presence it does in NZ & UK. Needless to say, I’m looking forward to the first beer in Mumbai when Nick and Ben arrive!

Rush hour in Orissa

Transportation

Wow, I’m glad I don’t have to drive here. There appear to be no road rules, and eternal horn use is the price for, um, partial safety. The only norms I have picked up is that traffic gives way to those coming on to a roundabout, and that it is the duty of the oncoming vehicle to avoid a collision – people will cross the road or pull out at any moment without looking. Oh yeah, and try to avoid the ubiquitous cows, goats and pigs on the roads. Buses are full of people (both inside and on the roof). I have yet to see the iconic ‘train with people clinging precariously to the sides’, but I will be taking a train in a week so we’ll see.

Some of the decorated trucks that grace Indian roads

Oh, and there are countless thousands of trucks painted in bright colours, like these:

I only have a few days left at the hospital, before I am off on my own again. I will be spending a few days around Orissa, heading to the beach and checking out a zoo with white tigers.

Until then, Namaskar!