Monday evening, Sept. 14

Hooray!! Hooray! I made the big leap in sleep and snoozed right on through the 4:03 a.m. call to prayer (goes on for a couple of minutes). I was so excited when our music came on at 4:50 and I realized I had missed that little annoyance :-) !!! I actually had the best night's sleep I've had since we got here - nice! I also have been without a fever for over 24 hrs. now which is wonderful. Still have a slightly juicy sounding cough but even that is diminishing and without a fever, is looking good. I've come to realize that I wasn't getting quite enough water each day even though I was getting close to 3L. I now go for closer to 4L. I guess my Scandinavian/northern European genes don't quite know what to do with this kind of heat and humidity and something goes haywire telling my body to just produce massive amounts of sweat!! I've found it to almost be funny (notice I said "almost"). Well, I mentioned that I would share with you about the dispensary that we go to M-W-F from 3-5. It is down by one of the train station stops, not too terribly far from the slumbs I think. Anyway, Laura had worked there one day last time she was in Calcutta and really enjoyed it. As she had shared with me about it, I got a mental picture of the place - I pictured a very plain room with several older looking (maybe 1940/50 era) little medical stations - you know, maybe a little laminate table with some basic medical supplies , a regular looking stool on one side for the volunteer and maybe a slightly smaller looking stool on the other for the patient. I thought this was a reasonable image. Oh, my -- I could not believe how far off I was! Well, the row of 1940/50's looking tables ended up being two old, painted benches, located at either end of a fairly small room with these midget sized stools (also old and painted - all brown), one on each side of the bench. Yes, our work station is the surface of the bench!! Later that day I just laughed and laughed as I shared my expectations with Garrett and Laura and how very off I had been. So, when we get there (there are about 5 of us), we get our supplies together (2x2s, 4x4s, a tray with tweezers, scissors, clamps, a little metal dish with some betadine, gauze wrap, some white pasty stuff in a jar - silver something-or-other which is really good for burns, etc.) There are other supplies on a shelf that we can use also but it is quite pathetic, very meager! Then in come the patients and you just get whoever shows up at your station. Almost totally we are looking at wounds and I'm not talking anything like what you would typically see in a dr. office. These are major wounds - very large on the feet and lower leg. Some very deep, some infected, some with dead tissue surrounding it - oh, I won't go into too much detail for those with sensitive stomachs. It's good to be able to help but they need so much more but... Definitely is good to clean them up and re-dress them. Today, my two hours were spent with three different patients. One of the volunteers didn't stay to work in the dispensary today as he had noticed a gentleman who was laying outside of the building and the volunteer didn't think he looked like he was going to live long so he and another took him to Prem Dan. Tomorrow is a "short day" with just volunteering in the morning - still haven't gone back to Prem Dan because it's just so much more physical work and I don't think my body is quite ready for that. The sister is charge of volunteers is happy to have my help still so I'll stay there again in the morning. Well, I've reached my limit of heat for today so I'm going to go enjoy the airconditioning of our room!!! Hope your week goes well.