some pics!





Our first Indian meal! This was halfway to Jamkhed. We were so tired at this point! From left: Me, Anna, Hillary

  



This is my home for two weeks! My bed is on the left, Michelle's is in the middle, and Beth's is on the right. We got the best room by far, even though the beds are hard as a rock!

 




Here we are outside our classroom, right after we had a class with these women. They are village health workers.

  


Taking a break from class outside in the sunshine. From left: Michelle, Beth, me, Hillary




Here we are at the cattle market that we visited on Saturday.  There are hundreds of bullocks and water buffalos that men come to sell here.  Behind us are bullocks.




This is the main welcoming sign in CRHP, Jamkhed.  Roomie pic!


I LOVE sharing pics with all of you! Please understand, though, that it takes FOREVER to load them up on these slow computers, so consider it a once-in-a-while thing. I'll write more about my day tonight! P.S. I'm going to try to remember to edit the time so that it's the correct time that I publish the posts. This one is correct!

Love,
Car

my words are few.

I asked God to teach me. To break my heart. To show me. To open me. To humble me. He's doing all of that in ways that I never would have expected.

There is no way that I can begin to describe what I've experienced today. This morning, after breakfast, we talked to 5 village health workers for 3 hours.  They are the real deal. These women are the main source of CRHP's success in communities in Maharastra.  Most of the women are chosen from their villages by the doctors here at CRHP.  What makes them unique is that they are usually from the lowest caste, or they are outcastes for one reason or another. One VHW (village health worker) that we talked to today had leprosy, and so was kicked out of her village. CRHP selected her to be trained at the compound. Another woman was kicked out by her husband because she didn't have any male babies.  When women are kicked out of the house, they are lower than the lowest caste - they have no value.  But CRHP selected her to be trained too.  CRHP then teaches the women basic and practical health knowledge: how to deliver babies, how to tell when a woman is pregnant, how to cure illnesses all the way from the common cold to things like TB and leprosy.  They are taught to practice medicine with limited supplies and resources already available in their villages. AND, all of these women are illiterate.  It is incredible.  Their villages have responded to them, accepted them, and the VHW are eliminating malaria, bringing infant mortality rates down to near 0%, and at the same time throwing away the caste system. AMAZING.

We took a break for lunch, and afterward, we went with our whole group into the market. HOW CAN I DESCRIBE THIS?!?  It was the craziest, busiest, most explosive place I've ever been to.  We walk through super narrow streets, where tons of people are walking and cars and motorcycles drive down.  There are stores everywhere. Pigs digging in trash. Goats crossing the street. People selling veggies. Cows laying down.  Children from the school ran outside to greet us and ask our names like we were celebrities.  Groups of old men stared.  Women yelled at us to buy their chickpeas. Wow.  We ended up in a sari shop :)  I bought a sari! It's magenta-colored with some really pretty teal and silver accents. Now I need to learn how to put it on! A tailor is coming to CRHP to fit the fabric to all of us that bought fabric today. How exciting!

Lastly, in the afternoon, we visited a slum that is across the street from CRHP.  I still don't understand the difference between a slum and a village, but I think it is that most of the people are nomads... in between jobs, and they are mobile people in general.  This slum is being transformed into a village with the help of CRHP and their village health worker. But we walked through it today, with a guide of course. Poverty looks the same around the world.  And my words, any pictures that we took.... none of it can do justice to what we saw today.  The condition that these people are living in is indecribable.  But CRHP is helping these people find work through the skills that they have, and the conditions in the slum is overall increasing.  Also, the VHW has been working to help people have toilets... a huge improvement.  Now, 60% of these houses have toilets! That itself has a dramatic effect on the health of this 3,500-person community. More to come on the slum later.

Time for bed over here! My brain and heart are tired.  I'm thankful for these experiences that are teaching me so much about the world and about Christ and His people.  All my love to loved ones at home.

Love,
Car

hello Jamkhed

I still am short on time to write these posts, so I apologize for scatteredness and/or improper grammar (sorry Mom!). As I was trying to fall asleep last night, I realized that I forgot some awesome details about our 12 hour bus ride to Jamkhed yesterday! I had many firsts:

1. My first monkey spotting in real life! They were just chillin on the side of the highway - it was hilarious! We were driving through more of a highland region when we saw them. Cute litte things, though I'm sure they're full of diseases.
2. My first experience using a squatty potty. Here are some good tips: spread your feet wide, and squat low. I managed to do this successfully without getting anything on my pants or feet. Success!
3. My first experience eaing real Indian cuisine came when we stopped for lunch at a hotel restaurant on the side of the road.  I think we frustrated the waiter a lot (he actually ran his fingers through his hair and pulled it at one point), but we tried two dishes at my table: Chicken Methie and Chicken Chili and Noodles. They were surprisingly good! We also had buttered nan on the side, which is similar to a thick tortilla.  The only downside to the eating experience is that my pee smelled like the dishes that I ate for about the next 12 hours. Weird.

So those are the bus ride details that I forgot to write about yesterday.  I'm rooming with Michelle Busscher and Beth Cousinau, two other senior nursing students. Don't remember if I said that in my last post? We're having a lot of fun figuring out how to use the water heater in the shower (which only keeps water warm for about 1.5 minutes, seriously.), looking for spiders underneath our bed, and reminding each other to take our malaria pills and use bottled water to brush our teeth. 

At 6am every morning, we learned, hundreds of crows descend upon the compound in trees right next to our window. Convenient. They sqwak like nothing I've ever heard - they're so loud that they actually wake us up! Then, after we're good and wide awake, the crows leave around 6:45am. Thank you, crows.  Thank you for a consistent wake up call. Apparently there's also a lot of gekkos here, which help keep the mosquito population down.  No sign of those yet, though.

This morning we heard from Dr. Arole himself - one of the original doctors who began CRHP.  His story of how this compound came to be, and how they were successful, is incredible.  I'll write more about this later, I'm sure, but they used the caste system to both empower women and those in the lower castes to improve their health and the health of their communities as a whole.  As we are learning, health = development for communities, especially those in poverty.  Health does not equal medical care, but instead correcting problems such as poor drinking water, unsafe environmental conditions, and malnourishment.  50% of children in India do not have enough to eat.  These are just some of the detials that we are learning about, and we have so much more to learn.

How is the weather in Michigan? Outside the sun is shining, it's 76 degrees, and my face is actually a little bit burned.  Just thought I'd rub it in a little :)

Love,
Car

arrival.

Hello from India!
After 2 days straight of traveling, we have finally made it to Jamkhed.  Today was just an explosion of India - I feel overstimulated and exhausted from everything that we experienced today during our 11 hour bus ride from Mumbai to Jamkhed.  There were smells of burning wood, trash, dung, spices, pollution, sulfer... all wrapped into one.  There were people everywhere, goats in the streets, innumerable cars shoving their way down the highways (which look like backroads to me) without traffic lights or any type of traffic laws.  I can't even begin to describe everything that we've experienced in just one day in India.

I'm short on time tonight because the library closes at 10pm, but wanted to send a quick update while I could.  Please continue to pray for our group's safety, and also for me in particular... I seem to be having a difficult time adjusting today. Maybe it's all the travel and I'm just exhausted, but today I've been pretty homesick, and missing people in Michigan. Please pray that I would be able to enjoy my time here, and that the time would pass appropriately and not drag on.

Tomorrow we tour the Compound, including the new hospital that was just built.  We also have our first class session about Jamkhed - the history, people, current status, etc. No rest for the wicked! Weary? However that expression goes, I'm headed to bed.

All my love to my roommates, family, friends, and boyfriend.
-Carolyn

down to days

We are down to the final days! Last minute events include packing, going to the store for odds and ends I don't have at home, packing, reading the required book Jamkhed, packing, making copies of our daily events calendar for the parental units, packing, worrying, praying, and packing.

The book that I'm reading, as mentioned above, describes the series of events that led Drs. Raj and Mabelle Arole to be the creators of the Community Rural Health Project.  It's truly amazing what they have created.  Through their training at Johns Hopkins for their Masters in Public Health and also through their experience growing up in India, they recognized the health problems faced by the underserved and poorest populations in India.  They then targeted these issues, realizing that health care must involve both curative and preventative medicine.  For example, they kept seeing repeated cases of cholera.  The Aroles soon realized that it was not enough to just cure the disease and send patients back to their villages, (where poor sanitation and unclean drinking water still prevailed) for they would end up at the hospital with another case of cholera again soon.

So the Aroles led a response to these issues: trying to eradicate all social and economic problems that so heavily influenced patients in these rural areas.  They raised funds for the building of wells, providing clean drinking water to villages.  They educated a few people from the villages to become village health workers - and they in turn cared for the village with simple and practical health care knowledge.  The Aroles empowered the underserved, and empowered women, to have the tools both socioeconomically and medically, to improve their health and their lives.  Through this, they also defied the caste system in these Indian villages, because the communities understood their reliance on each other and on the village health worker, regardless of that individual's caste. It's completely incredible.

Reading about all of this fires me up, because it involves both social justice, and caring for those who have been forgotten.  Health is so intimately related with quality of life, and all people deserved to have an opportunity to have optimum health.  I can't wait to see all of these issues and solutions in action in Jamkhed.  I'm looking for all the ways that this trip will educate both my mind and my heart. Thanks for listening to my rant.

6 days till departure.

just under the two week mark!

Here it is: a map of the country of India. Where we are going, although it is kinda blurry, is the pink Regional State in the southwest part of India called Maharastra.  That's where Jamkhed is.  And, crazy enough, India has it's own time zone - it's 10.5 hours ahead of Michigan.  Just some info that we've learned in the past few weeks.

So I'm starting to pack things up as our departure date draws nearer.  On our packing list are some interesting details, including packs of tissues to use as toliet paper (for squatty potties that supply no toilet paper for you), 5 safety pins for the women to pin up and wear sari's (can't wait for this!), a tub of peanut butter for when Indian food is not very appetizing, and an around the neck passport holder for the times when we're in the city or otherwise sight-seeing. 

I can't believe it's almost time to go.  At this point, I go from being really excited to really anxious.  I'd appreciate any prayers for safety, especially all of our plane rides, and for God's blessings on our trip.  Well, that's all I have to say for now.
-Carolyn  (13 days till departure)

on to the next big thing...

The 2010 volleyball season has come to a close. It began in mid-August and ended on November 22 with the National Championship Finals. The fact that the season is over means so many things, but in regards to this trip, it means that our trip to India feels closer than ever. And we ARE closer than ever - just over one month away.  How incredible. I'm having increasingly more conversations about India.... with Prof. Feenstra, parents, friends, random people who ask what I'm doing for Interim, and Nick.  It's like I need to talk to everyone about it for different reasons, but all of those conversations are bracing me in different ways for this experience. Some things I've recently realized and/or learned:

1. India is far away. Really far away.
2. India will be an uncomfortable. And smelly.
3. I won't be able to talk to people back home except via the internet. (I knew this all along, but it has actually sunk in)
4. I will miss home and people back here. (Didn't ever think about that before...I've been too excited)
5. God is setting me up for the experience of a lifetime. I know He will break my heart in what I see and experience there, but I am excited. The part of my heart that is passionate about travel and other cultures beats faster when I think about this trip.

That's all for now folks.

34 days.