Day 1

We arrived into Vellore only a mere 3 days ago but it seems much longer as we have been immersed in a whirlwind of bustling activity. Vellore is a small city in the state of Tamil Nadu in the southern part of India. It is most well known for its hospital, the Christian Medical College, which has been called the best in southern India and it is the reason we are here.

Why are we here? Why would medical students from US be interested in coming to a third world country? I cannot speak for everyone else in our group but I was looking to forward to seeing medicine stripped to its basics--I feel like we so often get caught up in the technology of medicine that we sometimes forget that we are here to treat people.

I have lived in San Antonio, TX for the greater part of my life but I have been fortunate enough to have some travelling under my belt. And of course I did some research before coming to here but I do not think that anything could have prepared me for the cultural differences.

Our first day here was very hectic. The hotel we planned to stay at was completely booked, as there is a conference in town. We tried meeting the staff at the CMC hospital but could not find anyone. We were stressed to our limits when Collin came to our rescue. He is the pastor at the Meditation Center here. He was able to find us a hotel to stay at so that we could at least get settled in (we hadn't showered in like 2 days--our flight here was ridiculously long).

Once we had the hotel booked, we went to the main campus to meet the coordinator and receive our schedules. We took an autorickshaw as we were much too tired to try to figure out the bus system or walk. At the time we thought our driver was great as he waited the entire time for us, however we later realized that he only did this to charge us the waiting time (we paid $200 rupees for a $100 ride) . But we got our schedules and were ready to begin.

We had dinner at a nearby hotel restaurant (we're sticking to safe food for now) and made it back to our room by 8pm. We were exhausted. After my cold shower (warm water only from 6-10am) I fell asleep as my head hit the pillow...