Oh man, Internette Followers. I am so very sorry for the horrific delay between this post and my last one. I imagine all two of you that read my blog have been sitting at your computers, dehydrated and sleep-deprived, clicking the refresh button at five minute intervals. Your eyebrows must have grown to the floor by now! Fear not, I have returned, although my computer is baroque-n, and I am required to steal other people's laptops. This means no pictures of Kolkata, for the time being. If you want a visual fix, you can check out Collin's blog.
I have been in Kolkata for a week, and plan on being here until the 29th of July. I am volunteering with a Penn organization called Pratit, which runs medical and educational mobile camps in several slums across Kolkata. Pratit is entirely student run and staffed. There are eight of us here right now, from Penn and the University of Illinois. Our fearless leader is Turja Chakrabarti, who founded the organization, is a Kolkata native, and holds our hands for most of the day. Technically, I am supposed to be on the education team, but because we are understaffed, everyone pitches in everywhere, and I am also working with the medical team. More on this ill-fated pairing soon.
We have hosted one official education camp thus far, with another one planned for tomorrow. School children in Kolkata attend tutoring centers in the afternoon, from 2:30 to 5:00, where there is usually one teacher for twenty to thirty age-varied kids. These children come from neighborhood government schools, which suffer from a multitude of problems. Teacher absentee rate is the most detrimental; because teacher positions are government-jobs, the benefits are limitless, which apparently includes never getting fired, no matter what. These children are not receiving the proper educational support that they deserve, and many of them are well below the math and reading levels that they should be at. Our goal is to provide some after-school education that will give them some science, English and math foundations, that they can then apply to their schoolwork. We also want to stress the importance of innovation and creativity, and want to encourage the children to partake in art and music activities.
Last week was a name-tag making extravaganza that involved too much glitter (that curiously is still all over our bodies, glitter actually never dies) and assessments of the students. Song-i (head of edu. team) and I pulled out students one by one and had them complete English reading passages and questions, as well as math. We have two translators working with us, Turja's cousin Godaih and Chandan. They are awesome. However, we were only able to get through seven of the oldest children. These older girl struggled with English, which is actually quite handy. Our greatest asset right now is our ability to speak and teach English, which other teachers might not be able to do so well. I do not trust myself to teach anyone math, even a thirteen year old, so it was a good thing that they zipped through the math section with much zeal.
Being more of a humanities and social science type person, I assumed that I would enjoy working with education much more than medicine. To be frank, science baffles me. Microscopic cells and atoms and Golgi apparatuses and all that other stuff really confuses me, and I find it easier to chalk it up to magical elves wearing pointy shoes with bells on them. I am also extremely squeamish when it comes to blood or any body abnormality, and I get way too emotionally involved with people's problems to actually help them. In short, I have all the qualities that you wouldn't want in an EMT. My first medical camp was on Monday, in a large slum under a busy highway. Pratit's first medical camp as a team had been the day I arrived, and Collin and Shomik whisked me from the airport to the clinic at the slum, where I was told to sit in a chair and not touch anything.
This time around, I would be touching things. Turja held an info session for those of us who were new to the program. Song-i, Rikka, Moshe, Alex and I were taught how to take vital signs (blood pressure, pulse, temperature, eyes, skin and lungs) as well as patient questioning, which follows the acronym "SAMPLE OPQRST". Do you have any idea how hard it is to take blood pressure? It's frightening. Sadly for Alex, he offered to let me practice on him. After taking his blood pressure five times and messing it up each time, I feared that he might actually faint. It's a complicated dance of pumping and listening to blood drops (gag) and turning the dial juuuuusssstttt so, and it is impossible. Turja had the wrong idea that we all "Got it? Great!", now we could just plunge head first in the lion's dens.
How these medical clinics are set up is pretty hectic. First off, we have a couple of doctors that come in, all through Turja's connections. They are assigned two Pratit members, one who takes vital signs and the other who asks the SAMPLE OPQRST questions through a translator. The doctors prescribe the medication. These doctors are wonderful people for dedicating their time and energy to this task, but most of them want to work in terms of quantity. Our job is to slow them down, and make sure they collect all the necessary information from the patient. Most of them just want to immediately make a diagnosis and prescribe medication, in order to see as many patients as possible, and then leave quicker.
Rikka and I partnered up, and were assigned a doctor. I was handed a stethoscope, a blood pressure cuff, and some sanity, and told to go at it. For three hours straight, patient after patient streamed in, and I took countless blood pressures, listened to creaky lungs, and felt for faint pulses. I think the doctor was misinformed and thought that I had some knowledge of what I was doing, because he asked me to check the patients' stomachs several times. "Um," I replied, "I feel something tough over here....?" Luckily, none of these patients are deathly ill and bleeding profusely, so I don't feel like I am actually endangering life. We mostly got old people. One woman came in who was shaking, clearly mentally unstable. I smiled and said hello, and she smiled back and broke my heart. Even her lips were trembling. The doctor rushed through the medial questions and wanted to prescribe her some vitamins. I have a morbid fascination with mental disorders, and spend inordinate amounts of time on Wikipedia studying depression and panic attacks and so forth. I asked the doctor to ask this woman some social questions about her life. He laughed at me. "No," I insisted, "her respiration are shallow and rapid, she can't stop trembling, and she seems skittish all around. I think she suffers from anxiety and depression." The doctor asked her some questions, and it turned out this woman lived all alone, suffered from depression and panic attacks, and was just generally unstable. We didn't have any sedatives at the clinic pharmacy, but the doctor prescribed therapy and meditation.
These clinics aren't very uplifting. Egotistically, it feels insanely gratifying to be able to "help" someone so personally, but I can't help but feel that my impact is minimal. We have no way of knowing if these patients are actually going to take their medications, if they will get better or worse, or where they can get the money to pay for surgeries. A woman with a baseball-sized malignant tumor on her throat as a result of thyroid swelling kept asking me for money. Besides the fact that I had left my wallet at our dorms, I couldn't pay the money needed for the investigation and subsequent surgery(s). In the end, Pratit gave her some money for the investigation. But we can't give money to some people and not others; this is not a substantial way to help communities in the long-run. This whole experience kind of makes me want to be a doctor, to work with people and improve lives. But then I would have to study chemistry, and that's no fun.
I'll be back soon, promise!
No comments:
Post a Comment