Over the past four weeks I have come to like, even love, parts of India. There is a unique blend of old and new, rich and poor that defines the country and traditions that unites its over one billion citizens. Things are a lot different here than in the states and it takes some getting used to, even for someone like me, who has traveled before.
To be honest I hated my first two and a half weeks here. The
evenings and weekends when we would go out were nice, but overall my thoughts
centered on wanting to go home and not come back to India ever again. It wasn’t
that I was treated badly or that I couldn’t handle the culture shock, its that
I didn’t feel like I had a place, that I just didn’t belong here. I didn’t
dress right, I didn’t eat right, I couldn’t connect with people.
I recognized that my attitude could use improving so I spent
the second and third weeks trying really hard to like what I was doing and
reach out and try to connect with the people around me. Slowly it started to
work. I read about India and Hinduism on the Internet. I asked a lot of
questions. For lunch one day I attended the Brahmopadesham of a local Hindu
boy, a religious coming of age ceremony of sorts. The next day I went to a
Hindustani vocal concert. I also started reading a non-fiction book about India
called “Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai
Undercity”. That weekend I went back to Goa with my multi-national friends
where we enjoyed a night out and a relaxing couple of days on the beach
complete with dolphin spotting while kayaking. More recently I signed up for a
volleyball tournament with my friend Sara, from the Netherlands. Finally I can
say that I do like India despite all of her faults and I hope that my final
week and a half here go well.
The original purpose of this post was to tell you all about my experiences with attempting to do research here, so I will try to do so briefly. Attempts to contact the department with which I am working here in India last fall were unsuccessful and I showed up with no idea what I would be doing. Taking Dr. Suma Nair’s suggestion, I decided to look at blood pressure control of hypertensive patients who were being treated in the clinics run by the Community Medicine Department of Kasturba Medical College here at Manipal.
The problems were multiple and included language barriers,
staff shortages, lack of privacy and incomplete medical records. The informed
consent that we are taught so much about is largely ignored here. We did manage
to get most people’s signatures but they weren’t very informed in my opinion.
During my last two days of data collection we had some information sheets about
the project available in Kannada but most participants were either illiterate
or not interested in taking the sheet with them. I tried to voice my concerns but
was largely ignored. We did get data from sixty-four patients and, although we
did not have a sufficiently large enough sample size, we did get some
significant results. Having a family history of hypertension and being on
medications other than those given by the clinic were both associated with
decreased blood pressure control. I know this probably doesn’t interest most of
you, but if you are I can send you a copy of my paper.
Tomorrow night I leave for North India. I am meeting up with
my friend Crystal on Sunday and will be exploring Jaipur, Delhi and Agra (Taj
Mahal) before flying home on March 10th. Hope all is well with
everyone reading!
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