The Past Few Days

  The past few days have been good ones, but I haven't been sure what to write about on the blog.  Yesterday I was in the medical group.  We went to a hospital.  We were each assigned someone that we had picked up on our way there.  Our whole purpose was to make sure that they were not ignored or pushed back in line because they had leprosy.  I guess that is what often happens when they go to the hospital.  Rani was who I was assigned too.  The only problem was that, unlike the others, she did not seem to want me to be with her.  So when we got to the area where she was supposed to be, she made me sit far away from her, where I couldn't even see her.  I kept trying to go over and stand by her and she would take my hand and send me back to where she had told me to sit.  So I sat there feeling completly worthless in this hospital that I couldn't even understand anyone in.  Finally I made friends with this cute lady that was probably around my age.  She spoke some english so we had a funny conversation trying to understand each other.  At least she could tell me that the reason why no one was moving anywhere was because the doctors for that section were not even in.  I ended up being there for almost 3 hours before the doctor came, but finally he came and then everything went quickly.  Thanks goodness and afterwards when I asked if I could take a picture with her, she smiled and said gave me hug.  I guess she just wanted her independence and I just wanted to feel like I was worth something that day.  Oh well. 
     Another day I was on construction.  It was funny because we ended up throwing back down all the broken bricks we had brought up the week before.  The other groups had helped build a wall on the building.  Then we had to scoop up all these rocks and carry them into another room.  They gave us this funny little shovel scooper tool to use.  I ended up being the shovel scooper user.  It was kind of fun.  To use, although much more difficult than using a regular shovel.
    The funniest part of the whole day was after we had moved this whole pile of bricks and sand into a pile the person incharge came up to us and told us to throw that pile over the wall.  We started to laugh, because from the beginning we had asked if we should throw it over the wall and he told us no.  Now we had to not just scoop it up, but it had been somewhat wet so it was patted down very nicely and became much more difficult to scoop up.

      At the end I actually learned a lesson.  The whole time we were working people were complaining and finally many from my group left because they did not want to do what they saw as a waste of time.  My friend Janalyn came home later that day from being on medical and started telling me how hard it was to see the people she had seen and how mangled up they look and yet as people cleaned their ulcers they tried so hard not cry because of the pain, because they are given nothing to numb any of it.  I thought about how we had complained about doing regular old clean-up work because it wasn't "fun" or "cool" and it wasn't what we had thought we were coming to India to do and yet it was still work that had to be done, even if we did have to do it the hard way and less efficiently.  At that moment I felt like a spoiled brat.  These people have so little and yet they put on their best front and we who have so much couldn't handle doing a little raking up of leaves.