What gives

I am yet to venture out from the four walls of the hospital.Being the lone doctor for the moment,I cannot really move out of the campus. While walking back from the hospital I unconciously walk past my quarters.I have no attatchment to the place whatsoever. Lakhnadon in many ways feels surreal to me. I look forward to an extra hand ,hopefully at the beginning of next month.I would like to move out into the villages more often. Late last night one of the bystanders of one of the patient walked up to my out-patient just to talk to me.She belonged to an Assembly of God background.She lives nearby.She was telling me how her family had single-handedly reached out to three hundred villages in town. This is a strange place where a lot of work has gone in ,people are surprisingly receptive but they still need to walk in through the gate. In the meantime we wait....and we pray.

Although the out-patient opens at eight in the morning, patients do not trickle in until well past ten thirty.It is a little frightening sitting around waiting for them to come through the door. The last four days I have been here I have not seen too many medicine cases but for a few hypertensives and diabetics who have come to repeat medicines and a single young boy in sickle cell crisis whose pain was so severe that because of the need for narcotics to control the pain we had to send him to Nagpur because we do not have the license. I had just discharged my last IP patient that morning a lady with normal delivary who had had a tubectomy and was occupying the private room and had dragged her feet about going home. I was a little discouraged so I called a colleague and sat behind closed doors to pray. We had not finished praying when an old lady in her sixties and an old man ,simple village folks walked into my clinic with chest pain.She had a MI.Even as we attended to her I was filled...

It is exactly three days since I started working here. Being a lone doctor amongst a staff of 40 in the hospital and another 60 in the field is nerve-wrecking.Everybody is watching,everybody is waiting. In the forty who are in the hospital almost twenty are support staffs. I wonder if it is the 'Big' ministry the Lord has kept at our doorstep. They have been in the hospital for more than twenty years.My assistant tells me she has seen the ED come in as a youngster,do his post-grad,and then now he is incharge of the organisation. I share tea with Meena bai,she is just too shy to sit with me and sits behind the curtain watching me .She does not forget to say,'thank you Dr jee'. Yesterday she suggested I use a pessary for a lady who had a grade 2 cystocoele and had a certain amount of discomfort due to it.She even ran all the way to the OT to get it. They are there everywhere,sitting around,chatting but they immediately get into an alert mode as soon as they see me,I wonde...

Here starts my last but one week in Herbertpur. The last of my packing handed over to the movers and packers I look forward to seeing the back of it on tuesday. I wanted to meet up with Alem but that does not look like it is going to happen.She has gone off to Nagaland on a family commitment. In the mean time I look forward to my new responsibility as formidable as it seems from a distance.It does not seem formidable at all when I look up to Jesus. I remember attending a meeting in Ranchi of the RNTCP .The secretary then of the state who incidentally was a friend of my late cousin and had visited my home, turned to me and asked 'what is your strategy?'.I remember replying -'We have no strategy but we will do what has been alloted to us sincerely'. For me looking at what is ahead of me at a distance my constant query to the Lord is ,'Why do you want me there?' ..and yet there is a certainity that 'He wants me there.' I rest deep in that assurance. May yo...

Molly suggested we start a reading club together towards the lattter part of the OPD since most of us are free just hanging around. We chose a book that encourages self introspection.Over the weeks Molly,Anu,I and Silus were the regular attenders.Reading the book around in circles has been a time of learning,bonding,letting down our gaurds and honest self introspection.I,for one am enjoying the experience throughly. We have been reading about the concept of being in the box, and self betrayal resulting in a whole lot of harmful wrong conclusions about situations and individuals. I, for one, suggest everyone try it. When we are willing to let our gaurds down and be willing to be vulnerable with each other, we edify and help each other grow as individuals.Isn't it what community is supposed to be all about?