Hospital Day Three

I stayed with J in the am at CICM(Central India Childrens Mission, I was referring to it as the orphanage,where we are staying) That was good because it allowed me to catch up and post a few pictures to the blog. Then at noon I was called over to the hospital because the monitor we were waiting to get had arrived. We plugged it in and tested it. We had to adjust a few settings but eventually we got it to work. After we got it to work we had to put together a way to get it all together and make it portable. I got some help from Mister MacGuyver in building a unit that would fit our purpose. We managed to use zip ties, duct tape, and velcro! It is quite the set up now.

Im between the set up I watched a little slide show that J had put together. He is filming here and taking pictures and I asked him if he could throw a little something together that we could share over the teleconference if things did not go as planned. He also took some time to show me a few of his photography lesson that he uses to teach his kids back home. I learned an amazing amount of useful information. I am learning how to better utilize my fancy camera:-) Its amazing that some of the rules of photography I was doing just naturally without knowing they were rules!

I then took the traveling Gnome around on a picture tour of the hospital. He had quite the adventure and we got alot of really nice photos. The crew here is just amazing. I am in awe over how well they function together and what a beautiful job they do with these patients. There are many issues that pop up over here and nothing seems to slow them down. The power here gets cut off at 6am-10 am and then again at 5pm to 6 pm. The hospital then has to go onto a generator. There is usally a lag time in between when the generator kicks on and the power is cut off. It only took me this long to figure out that it happens every day at the same time.

My ride over to the hospital this time was at noon. It was quite neat to see the town in full swing. Kind of like a monday in the US, everyone was back to work. The driver told me that Damoh is known for making Bidis which are little cigarettes. The families roll bidis and get paid 40 rupees for 1000 bidis.It takes them all day to roll 1000. When I asked him how much does it cost to feed your familiy for one day here he said about 240 rupees to feed a family of 4. One US dollar is worth 45 rupees. Also I learned that Damoh has 1.5 million people here. I am not sure what the amount of landspace is but it is incredible! After investigating a bit more Damoh has about 150,000 people in the town itself but the District of Damoh is 1.5million people. Damoh is 2821 sq miles, which is close to the size of Delaware at 2489sqmi.

When I arrived I was given the monitor for my project. The only known flat panel high definition televinsion in Damoh. We hooked it up and tested out the Lifesize. Its the portable unit we use for the telemedicine conferences. We managed to get it connected, just had to change the dns server address and a few other settings. Our speed was pretty poor 126kb but it was possible that it might just work. So we went to planning how we would conduct the conference. We planned to try and show them what life was like here in Damoh at the Hospital. How there are so many cases of Cleft lip and palate here the numbers are just amazing.

The staff set up large tents which the people stay in while they are here if they cannot afford to stay elsewhere. They travel many hours by bus, some of them walk for days or weeks to get here. Sometimes many of the family members come along. Sometimes its only the father or grandfather. They cook on open fires and bathe by dumping water over themselves.

It took a few hours to get set up and after the planning we loaded up and got on the bus back to CICM. Reports from the other crew came back that the mayor of Damoh had come to visit the hospital after the first bus of people had left (which I was on) Interesting that he chose to come after 9pm. At any rate I hope it was a good visit for the people who run this hospital.

Still hoping that things will go off without a major hitch and the live broadcast works!