Sitting on a balcony in Pune listening to the neverending noise on the streets below and thinking what a truly magic place India is, in all its noise and smell and dust.
How do I even begin to describe this place? Seeing it as I am through my wealthy western eyes, India is a place of devastating poverty, disease, disfigurement, and filth. Looking closer, there are brilliant smiles, woman in sarees and churtas of every imaginable colour, and an order and grace to a place that at fist glance is the very epitamy of chaos.
When I arrived in Mubai on Thursday afternoon, exhausted from almost 36 hours in transit, the first thing that struck me was the uniquness of my whiteness. It is such an interesting sensation after a life as part of a majority to suddenly find myself painfully aware of my minority status. Somehow I had carried with me to India a mistaken assumption of multiculturalism.
Rather than go into the day by day details of what I have been doing, I want to record my impressions of this place. I spent the day yesterday assisting in a camp being run to perform corrective surgeries on children disfigured by muscular dystrophy, polio and conjenital defects. Attempting to write what is was I was able to witness is so difficult. These children came through the door on hands, feet, knees and whatever else they could use to allow them to get around. After the doctors spent a few minutes with each to establish what could be done, I helped the nurses soak and wash their gnarled legs to get through the layers of dust in preparation for surgery. They were so nervous and afraid but all I could do was smile at them in lieu of any shared language. The smiles on these kids were so amazing, even as scared as they were, they smiled right back at me.
Later in the day I was helping remove the plaster casts from kids who had been operated on a few weeks earlier. There was one beautiful little girl with polio who's father spoke a little English. He was able to tell me that when she came in for surgery, she was only able to crawl and shuffle about on her bottom (her father did a great imitation of this to get the point across!). After we took her cast off, she slipped off the gurney, grabbed her fathers hands, and walked out of the room. She had been calling me Aunty Katta.
The people here are so very beautiful.
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