boring days and sleepless nights

Well, yesterday, after deciding that I need to get out of the compound some more and explore the city a little bit I was hit with a really nasty cold. I had the one-nostril breathing going on, and in my attempt to prepare for the diarrhea and yeast infections I never thought to bring some nasal spray!! So I went to sleep at about 9pm without any diner last night, too exhausted from the day to eat anything – especially spicy! I woke up at about midnight and decided that I needed to take my anti-malarials, and went promptly back to sleep….until a few hours later, when the dreaded shits took hold of me. So I was up half the night on the toilet, trying hard not to feel terrible. When I woke up this morning, I felt even worse, so I basically spent the entire day in bed, save the few hours I took to phone my mom and dad for some parental sympathy. Anisha gave me some Tylenol, which didn’t help the stomach problems, but it did help the aches and pains in each and every joint in my body.

So about half an hour ago, I decided it was time to get out of bed for a little while, and try to answer some emails. And wouldn’t you know it, but the sky had clouded over and it looked like it was about to start pouring rain! Hallelujah! All I can say at this point it that it had better rain hard enough to actually cool things off a bit, or at the very least it had better continue to rain for a few days so I can get out of the goddamn sun. Those of you who know me know that I don’t particularly like the sun, especially when it’s hot. Give me some good old-fashioned British mist any day of the week and I’m happy. I can only hope that that is what is in store for me for the next month until the weather start to cool down!

As for Tuesday, I spent most of the day farting around with very little to do, which is becoming increasingly annoying and frustrating. I think that I dread the days because I feel as though I should be doing something productive here at the clinic but have nothing really to do. The original idea for my internship was that I would be able to do focus groups with women about health (specifically reproductive health) as it is a subject that is still quite taboo in conservative Bhopal. However, because my Hindi is far from what I would call fluent, Sathyu suggested a different project for me. (Skip this if I’ve already griped about it, but I don’t think that I have.) His idea was that I would do research into skills and techniques that could then be disseminated to the community health outreach people (who are volunteers living in the gas-affected communities) via the professional community health outreach workers here at the clinic. Even though this seems somewhat far removed that what I had thought I would be doing, I still thought that it wasn’t a bad idea. The only thing is that there are two other volunteers here right now who are helping to conduct a study about premature menopause with the community health workers at the clinic, so they are busy with that right now. Tuesday morning I went to a meeting with all of them about the survey, which Sathyu had some criticisms about, in an attempt to insert myself into the workings. Unfortunately I don’t think that my evil plan was all that successful because Anisha and Sathyu just had to translate whatever was going on in the meeting for myself and Casey (the other volunteer). At any rate, I’m hoping that eventually I could go out to some of the communities where they are doing the surveys, so perhaps tomorrow I’ll feel good enough to do that.

On Tuesday late in the afternoon I went to the Bhopal train station with Anisha, Joe and Casey to get our tickets to go out of town for the weekend. The train station was air conditioned (thank god, the only other place I've found that has a/c is the tiny little cubicle the ATM is in), so the trip was actually kind of fun. the traffic is starting to make me les nervous, and we always take one of two rickshaw drivers that hang around the outside of Qazi camp, and they both seem to go at a reasonable pace. This is for mom's benefit, because our neighbour in Toronto, Rena, has made her utterly paranoid about the taxi drivers here. Originally we were going to go to some erotic temple, but it turns out that despite being only 250Km away, it is about an eight hour drive. So we’re going somewhere else (don’t ask me because I can’t for the life of me remember). But I decided that it was time to stop moping around the clinic missing Dan, and go see some of the rest of the country. So hopefully my diarrhea will have subsided by then…

The photo project is on hold for the time being, as I think that it is going to take some time to get a group of kids that are mature enough to do it. Although they are all really sweet, a lot of the kids are totally undisciplined, making it hard to get them into a group for something like this. As per my mom's advice, I'm going to slowly infiltrate the group and pick out a few of the kids that I think would be able to handle it. I already have a few in mind!

Keep tuned for tomorrow's updates, as I have to go and register with the provincial police because I am here for longer than six months! Hopefully they don't give me a hard time. I'm going to get Masaum to take me, because he's so good about doing things like that.