ARRIVED

So we left Friday afternoon and sat on a plane on the tarmack for about an hour and a half due to weather in Houston -- little did we know how much that would hurt us later. But we still were able to make our flight (after sprinting through the Houston Airport) from Houston to Dubai. This is a 15 hour flight. But was decked out with every movie you could ever want to watch, video games, and TV shows. We than flew Dubai the Chennai and arrived at about 2 AM. They were three of us that traveled on this flight (Paul and I and another girl in our flight). We than did meet up with the other three students later that day. We ended up spending about 12 hours in the airport - very sleep-deprived and without luggage. Pictured above is Paul sleeping on the clean floor. We later found out our luggage did not make it to the Dubai flight in Houston. I was expecting for them to be able to get on a computer and look up our luggage number to find where our luggage is right away -- but no so much. So we are praying we will see our luggage again - and have been told tomorrow it will come. My jeans are looking a little dingy now.
We arrived to Vellore via bus at about 5 PM Sunday. The picture above is our sign we made to try to find our bus driver. Everyone had signs for the passengers they were looking for, but ours was no where to be found. So we thought maybe we could find him -- we did find him about an hour after he was supposed to arrive.
We found our room and laid down and slept for a couple hours before dinner. The housing is very safe and the campus is very pretty with many flowers and nice greenery around and away from the chaos of the city. We are staying at the Christian Medical College's housing. The 4 girls are staying in the Housing Complex which is not usually for students but the student hostel is all full. The 2 guys are staying in the Big Bungalow Annex - which is pretty nice and they have a nice screened in porch. We had some friends in our room - Rebecca is my roommate - she named them Larry, Jerry, and Tom. Nice Texas sized cockroaches -- and there were more that were not named. We did get some roach spray today and hope to not see too many more crawling on our feet as we take semi-showers. We do have hot water == YEAH!!
We were awakened this am about 4 to blaring music that lasted 2 hours. This is a month long religous ceremony that occurs we were told today. I think we are going to invest in some ear plugs. = ) We than road the bus to the hospital and were told we were to start back at the campus where we came from. So we first did a little shopping before having our first ride on the auto rickshaw - an experience. The top picture is what an auto rickshaw looks like. A rickshaw is similiar but with the auto part -- like a carriage pulled by donkey or oxen. This is the taxi system here. A ride for us usually runs about $1 or $50 rupees for 3-4 of us to ride in one to where we need to go. It usually takes 15-2 minutes to get anywhere - probaly only going a couple miles though.
We got our rotations set up today. I will spend this week at the Pediatric ward. Next week doing CHAD - which is the community health program where the doctors and nurses go and see patients in the community. And the third week I will do Dermatology and hopefuly get to spend some time at the leprosy clinic. I think it will be great. I hope to have my stethoscope soon to be able to do some physical exams. We did already see some rare diseases to us during the short period we were at the hospital - from polio to spina bifida. I believe I will learn alot from the people here.
We have all eaten well on campus and everyone is feeling well.
We have also been able to meet people from all over the world as different types of students come here to do rotations - Australia, Turkey, Sweden, and Germany. AND a nephrologist here from our school in San Antonio ( a small world).
Here is Paul's blog site if you would like to read his as well... http://paulbgravel.blogspot.com