The freezer

I spent a decent amount of my day talking about a freezer. Specifically, a freezer capable of maintaining an arctic -80 degrees. This seems to be the temperature that human biologic specimens like best, and what you need to run a lab. Someday PHRI is going to have a fantastic lab, that tests for the sexually transmitted diseases that affect poor women all over the Mysore Taluk. Right now we have a freezer in the basement, and a washing machine in the lab. Turns out, it's not easy to get a -80 freezer up and running, even in San Francisco. Fortunately at the City Clinic were able to give up and just sent our business to Stanford. Here, we need approval from the Karnataka Electrical Board to get more electricity from a grid that fails a couple times a day at baseline, a signature from a landlord who apparently resides on the other side of the planet, recognition as a charitable organization to make it affordable, a special vent installed, and an electrician to give us his blessing that we can turn it on without draining the entire neighborhood. It will happen, it will be great, and really really cold.

I get dressed

It took three PHRI staff several persistent hours, but I finally have an acceptable wardrobe. They inform me early on in the day that I'm going to need to let go of my moody San Francisco tendency towards black. In India, the brighter the better. The only thing holding back the sequins is the sheer weight of a million of them attached to 5 meters of sari fabric. I finish the day with outfits in several fantastic technicolors. As the experts were draping me in my turquoise sari my only concern was finding an occasion suitable to wear such a glamorous outfit. Fortunately, the sari store owner is getting married, and I'm invited.

Murudagalli

Today is my first day visiting one of the rural villages in the Mysore district. Our first stop is at the preschool. The government provides each village with a preschool and a teacher. The teacher is responsible for not only the care and well being of the village's near-toddlers. She also does weekly surveys of the health of the village, and has the most current count of pregnant women. The most remarkable part of the whole operation is the 20 children who sit quietly waiting while we talk to her. Having fairly recent AmeriCorps experience attempting to corral American kindergartners into "circle time," I'm totally amazed.

In the village we survey women about their birth and pregnancy histories, and then identify and interview three Traditional Birth Attendants (TBA's). This woman tells us about reviving
babies who aren't born crying by placing cow dung on their bellies and umbilical cords. We give her a few of the several hundred "birthing kits" I didn't declare at customs on my way into the country. Each kit has gloves, a plastic sheet, a clean razor, some soap and string.

It's hard not to notice the sweaty, febrile, ill-appearing child quietly moaning in the lap of her TBA/greatgrandmother. The family tells us they plan to take her the 16 kilometers to the government hospital in Mysore that afternoon.

The neighborhood

I start my first day on my own in Mysore with breakfast in the hospital cafeteria down the road from PHRI. I have four options, I vaguely recognize one of them, masala dosa. I order it. It's a big crepe, filled with a spicy potato mixture. I'm sure it's exactly what they're feeding the hipsters at Dosa on Valencia Street on Friday nights. Here, it's breakfast. It's delicious, and I'm fairly certain I'll have another opportunity to order it tomorrow.



I then head out to explore the neighborhood. After two weeks of traveling in India, I've come to accept that urge to photograph everything is powerful. However, so much simply can't be captured on pixels; the fierceness of driving, the sheer density of billion people, the number of well-behaved children everywhere, the slightly hungover atmosphere that greets us in Mysore at the end of their Dussera festival. Everyone in town wants to know if we've seen "the procession." (We missed the procession, but still got to see the prized, decorated, elephants lazing around the palace grounds.)

A few blocks away I discover my local Hindu temple. It's full of people milling around, has it's own drum group, and background soundtrack playing to an entirely different beat, and a double dose of flashing neon. It's a little bit of Mysore meets a casino in Reno, Nevada.




Later, I wander to the alley next to the temple. Several stands are selling what I would have to best describe as Indian leis. I've seen these strands of flowers decorating boats, trucks, statues, and the best of the blinged-out auto-rickshaws. I'm sure they have a name, and a religious purpose, and a traditional way of being made. However, at the moment my grasp of Kannada (the local lingo) doesn't extend much beyond "hello" and "goodbye," So these are mysteries I'll have to solve another day. Today, they're bright, colorful, and smell fantastic. I buy one, take it back to my new home.

India, tomorrow.

Senator Obama, on a plane to Mississippi for the first presidential debate. Me, in the living room with 25 bottles of mebendazole and a small cache of vitamin A, thinking about getting on a plane to India.