First, I want to thank my fellow Pratit members here in Kolkata: Mike, Ritwik, Jen, Sudipa, Niyoshi, Turja, Ankit, Sandeep, and Kalyan. They’re working incredibly hard while maintaining a relaxed and fun-loving environment that’s making my trip far more comfortable. Second, I want to thank Turja Chakrabarti and his family for hosting us and orchestrating everything.
We began our adventure in a classic Victorian hotel suited for modern European explorers. After a briefing in our meeting room this morning, we embarked for the Rajabagan bustee (slum). Ten people packed into an ambulance that was described as new by its owners but clearly is more than thirty years old. Five minutes in, we were stopped dead in traffic by a protest for forty-five minutes. The experienced protestors gradually let traffic pass, thus we got to see their stage, plastered with the likeness of Mamata Banerjee, that blasted recorded Bengali speeches about “the untold story of capitalized Marxism.” The communist party that runs West Bengal is the longest tenured communist regime in history.
After passing the protest, we stopped at hole-in-the-wall medical supply shops to gather final supplies. They were naturally located across from the expansive medical school. My personal favorite school building: “HOSPITALFORTROPICALD I SEASES.” (The ‘i’ in disease is separated from the rest of the letters.) Greenery sprouted from the cracks of the tropical diseases building. As we tried to leave the area, children climbed up the sides of our ambulance and made faces at our cameras. The brown-stained windows didn’t dampen the enthusiasm on either side of the lenses.
Significantly behind schedule due to the protest and extended shopping period, we turned on the ambulance siren to make our way through traffic. While people did not pull over for the ambulance, they usually made a lane and waved the ambulance through. The traffic guards were of particular helps as they let us through at every intersection. This apparent regard for emergency vehicles contradicts stories I’ve heard about inconsiderate drivers in regions with unruly traffic.
We stopped by Turja’s home for refreshments before entering the slum. The graciousness of his family allowed us to experience a home with three generations and a very extended family situated in a more typical Kolkata urban neighborhood. As we left his home, I snapped a photo of a man showering himself with a bucket of water. He caught me and proclaimed, “Can do! Can do! I love you!”
The Rajabagan bustee is five minutes away from Turja’s home. It is surrounded by roads, a new overpass, a railroad, and a massive filthy water hole. A cloud of dust hovers over the brick huts, likely due to the trucks that transport materials past the slum. With ambulance windows down, the stench of sewage immediately took my nose and stomach for a ride upon driving into the settlements’ car-width dirt paths. We stepped out of the ambulance in front of the social club building where we would be holding the camp. Around twenty people migrated toward the ambulance and surrounded us in near silence. After a few minutes of quietness from both curious parties, a leader of the social club took charge and we commenced our initial tour of the slum.
A fluctuating throng of fifteen or so people followed us as we were taken directly to the mosque. We were instructed to go inside and knowingly interrupt the children’s prayers. What an entrance! Next came a demonstration on how the residents acquired water, followed by a long-distance view of the thirty-five tarp-covered latrines, and finally a moment before the cement, pink, and locked Hindu temple. What a sequence!
I plan on emphasizing the social, physical, and political-economic conditions of the slum in future entries after we perform more thorough interviews. However, I want to quickly elaborate on the water supply. There are five water taps total, each one a pipe rising no more than a foot out of the earth. People have to suck on the end to create a water flow. This reminds me of how my family would clean out the fecal water in our smaller fish tanks. We would simply suck on the end of a clean tube, creating a flow that removed dirty tank water. This was followed by refilling the tank with freshly mixed salt water. While my family sucked on tubes to remove water from the home of prized blowfish and sharks, the slum population was sucking on the ends of dirty pipes so they could have contaminated drinking water. I loved those tanks and wrote about their inhabitants in a college essay that is indirectly responsible for allowing me to participate in these medical camps.
Our tour back to the social club led us past a mound of burnt garbage. Chickens were feeding at the peak and a dog was nursing puppies at the base. I also noticed a girl carrying a white baby doll. This was the only other non-Pratit white person I have seen in Kolkata in three days since leaving the airport. People are staring at me everywhere, going as far as repeatedly leaning out of a stopped bus so they can turn around and see me in the ambulance behind them. Friends here have asked me what it feels like to be a “superstar,” but I can’t decide whether or not to laugh. It seems that every time I go to a country of people with darker skin than my own, I am the focus of countless stares. This time, I can’t seem to escape or ignore the stares. Being in the overwhelming racial minority is not a challenging adjustment for me. However, the glances of most Indians that I pass make me feel exposed and unworthy of such attention. Why do I feel exposed when I have no idea what others are thinking?
We immediately set up the clinic when we returned to the social club. With our backs turned to an enduring throng of fifty or so people, we set out the medicines on a table in front of the brick building. I felt like we were putting on a show of our wealth and power, but space and time constraints demanded this arrangement. When the clinical work began, I had the first shift with Jen at the pharmacy table. Dr. Charkravorty’s medical assistant was much more proficient at locating the medicines, meaning our job was mostly to learn the medications and what they were used for. And considering the language barrier, we couldn’t give the patients simple descriptions on how and when to take their meds. Grown men and children, with women noticeably absent, surrounded the pharmacy table, curiously staring at me and the medicines for the entire time I was out there.
During my time at the pharmacy, I kept an eye on a very old man with blackened skin and sunken cheeks. He repeatedly caned his way to the pharmacy table to ask if it was his turn yet. He had to rely on local youths to tell him otherwise because I can’t speak Bengali. My inability to communicate with this man was the first time I was angry with myself for not knowing the language. After his consultation a couple hours later, he looked me in the eye from a foot away, seemingly waiting for me to say something. His white-washed cataracts, reflecting the floodlight set up for the night, added to the communication barrier between us. After we filled his prescription, club members used English with me for the first time to say that he was 103.
My experience inside the clinic was a rush, to say the least. With 15-20 people working in a 15x20 ft. room, breathing room was far from ample during my first clinical experience. I started out taking vital signs and doing a physical exam while standing up. The first seven or so went well but definitely not smoothly. I became frantic Collin with the eighth patient, a young boy, when I had to try multiple times to get his blood pressure. I decided to take a break and go back to the pharmacy table, where I felt even more inadequate as I had little idea what the doctors’ prescriptions said and where the medicines were located. The floodlight bore down on me and I took off my mask to breath in the dust cloud.
After focusing on my own breathing rather than the lung sounds of others for some time, I went back inside to give clinical questioning a shot. I performed clinical questioning in Guatemala through a translator a year ago, so this was not as stressful of an experience. I’m confident that my questioning was thorough and quick, and I enjoyed it significantly more than the physical exam because of the creative conversational nature.
We wrapped up the clinical work after over four hours at the social club. We provided consultations and medication for eighty patients with the help of three physicians, four translators, and countless community members. We’ll be providing expensive blood tests and scans for three patients. Finally, we are going to fund surgery for a man that has had a four-foot hookworm for seven years.
We hit a traffic jam immediately after leaving Rajabagan. Our driver somehow managed to turn the ambulance around and drive against traffic on a one-way street. Just as someone asked where the police were in India to prevent such things, we realized that there was a police car in front of us temporarily making the one-way street into a two-way street. It was a bumpy hour-long drive back to the two-bedroom apartment where ten of us will be staying for the next 2.5 weeks. The apartment has more than enough space for us to sleep, eat, and hang out comfortably. I’m definitely with the right group of people for this living and working experience!
