Trip to India Part 2 (July 14th to July 20th)

So on July 14th, 2014 I began my clinical volunteership program at the Sankara Eye Hospital in Coimbatore. The facility is also known as the Sri Kanchi Kamakote Medical Centre. It was established in 1977 by Dr. R.V. Ramani and became the headquarters for the Sankara Eye Foundation. On the first day, we (my sister and me) were given a tour of the hospital and were introduced to all the head nurses. We made our way to the camp ward where we would spend most of our time at the hospital.

Camp Ward filled with non-paying patients (Photo by Abinand Rejimon)

We also met 4 other students like us who were volunteering at Sankara. However, unlike us, they were staying on the campus of the hospital. We didn't do too much on our first day. We were not assigned too much work on usually just cycled through the hospital asking different nurses to give us some paperwork related jobs. We did get to serve lunch to all the non-paying patients at the hospital (pictures below). The lunch ladies were extremely nice to us.

Dillon and I serving food for non-paying patients (photo by Krishna Patel)

They especially took a liking to my sister and me because we could fluently speak Tamil whereas the others could not. One lunch lady, Lalitha, struck up a chat with me about her son who is apparently the same age as me. He studied engineering and is now working at firm in Chennai. She was extremely proud of him and I was happy that someone in hospital was willing to talk to me. So all in all, our first day was pretty dull, but I was optimistic that we would be happy helping out at the hospital.

Unfortunately, our first week did not improve too much after the first day. We did get to serve food every day at 12:30 and by the end of the week all the lunch ladies took to calling me "thambi" or brother in Tamil which I liked. We did do lots of paperwork at the hospital. We took care of all of the post-op paperwork for a patient. I also completed a case study on the Thursday of our first week. Her name was Rahamath Bee, a 60 year old housewife who had cataracts in both of her eyes. She had just received surgery in her left and would get the right one operated on in another month or so. She was an extremely nice lady who was very happy to answer all of my questions.

Dillon and I filling out paperwork (photo by Jwala Rejimon)