india, Day 1

As soon as my roommate Kayla and I woke up at 6:45am this morning we smelled it.  A dirty, musty, chemical smell permeated the ship . . . and we were still one hour outside of India! At 8am we pulled up to the port, greeted by military men with rifles. Welcome to India! The floors of the ship are covered with cardboard and I hear that they cover the walls with plastic, as well. At the diplomatic briefing they told us that the “intestinal distress”that we will get here will surpass that of any other country. Awesome!

 

So this morning and afternoon I was on an FDP with my Demography professor, Dr. Grindstaff. The program was called HIV/AIDS in India. A bus picked us up at 10am. The bus was one of the nicer ones in India, because it had “air conditioning”which was extremely inefficient but was better than nothing. The bus was also chock-full of mosquitoes (India is a malaria risk area). Everything is dusty. The high today was 95 degrees, but since women dress conservatively I wore longer capris and a t-shirt. It’s hot. As we drove we passed goats, dogs, cats, and cows, all walking along side and in the roads. The scooters, bicycles, surreys, buses and cars have no rules when it comes to the road, so the traffic is pretty much a free for all. I have never and don’t think I will ever see something like it in my whole life. You just have to look the other way and not think about the cars coming straight toward you. We passed a beach, the second largest in the country, and it was lined with canoes. On the sidewalks women were washing clothing, but they were scrubbing them on this dirty, sandy sidewalk. Things aren’t too clean here . . .

 

The first place that the FDP went to was called APAC, or Aids Prevention and Control Project. The branch we went to was in a hospital and worked in the state of Tamil Nadu, where Chennai is located. The hospital where it was located was fascinating. There were different small buildings for each specialty, such as diabetes and HIV. There are only 198,000 people in Tamil Nadu who have HIV/AIDS, which is an excellent statistic considering the amount of people who live here. The rate of HIV/AIDS is less than 0.3%, which is actually pretty good. We all sat in a room with a long table and watched a PowerPoint presentation that talked about the mission of APAC.  Something that I thought was interesting was their classifications of the types of at risk people. There are three groups, FSW (Female Sexual Workers), MSMs (Men who have Sex with Men), and IDUs (Intravenous Drug Users) . . . blunt, but it works. APAC was so hospitable. They brought us water and cookies, and later soda.

 

We moved from that room to the Y. R. Gaitonde Centre for AIDS Research and Education for Academicians, which was upstairs from APAC. Here they do HIV/AIDS testing and research, to hopefully some day find a cure. They are very proud, also, that they have developed an HIV test that is much cheaper from the typical one found in the US and in every other state in India. This test makes it possible for more people to be tested, therefore preventing the spread of the disease. 

 

Next we walked a block to the YRG Care center, where they currently care for 3,000 HIV/AIDS patients. Not many of these are in-house care, and most stop by for medicine weekly. Here, they fed us some cake and juice (juice-boxes) and we watched a short presentation.

 

Finally, we had lunch. We went to this Chinese Restaurant that was in a hotel somewhere. The food was extremely good, and my meal only cost 190 Rupees, or less than $4. I thought it was funny, though, that we ate at a Chinese Restaurant in India. After that we were supposed to go to an orphanage that is home to individuals with HIV/AIDs, but there were about 12 of us who needed to get back to the ship in order to prepare for our trips that leave tonight. Our trip was running about 1.5 behind schedule due to extended presentations and a long lunch. We all got into one bus to take us back to the ship, while the other people went to the orphanage. I am sad that I missed out on that experience, but it wasn’t worth the stress of worrying if I would make my night trip or not. 

 

So, my first impressions of India: dirty but colorful, smelly but beautiful . . . impactful and humbling.