I'm melting

Hi,

We arrived back in Delhi last night. It is so unbelievably hot here - 110 degrees right now and supposed to go up to 116 later this afternoon. There are people riding bicycles and doing work outside like everything is fine, but I feel like I'm going to keel over at any minute. Apparently the traditional way to prevent heat stroke is to eat raw onions and drink lassi (a cold milk drink), so we may have to try that later today.

The rest of our week in Chandigarh was really great. On Thursday we went to another small village and met with a dai (traditional birth attendant), a nurse/midwife, and several pregnant women from the village to talk about their approach to antenatal care, delivery, postpartum education, breast feeding, and childhood vaccinations. India is trying to phase out home deliveries, which obviously have much higher rates of complications and maternal/fetal mortality, in favor of "institutional deliveries" which occur at small birthing centers with a nurse or at the general hospital. Over the past several years, there has been amazing success here in decreasing delivery complications, increasing exclusive breast feeding rates, and increasing the number of babies receiving immunizations. Everything they are doing is pretty much by-the-book in terms of WHO recommendations, and it's great to see these models in place and actually working well. Each place that we went in the villages, we were given a traditional Indian welcome - the women would dot us with a bindi, throw some flower petals on our heads, and put a lei of orange flowers on us - so that is what the picture is.

On Friday we went to a drop-in center for MSMs (men who have sex with men), and talked with a group of guys who were hanging out at the center. India is a pretty horrible place to be if you are a gay man - they endure lots of harassment from the community, and violence and rape from the police; they do not come out to their families, have arranged marriages to women, and have to essentially lead a double life. The men at the center were involved in peer education about condom use and HIV testing, as this population has a much higher rate of HIV infection. I felt like they were incredibly brave for doing this kind of work, because even coming into the drop-in center puts them at risk of abuse from the neighbors. It was a really sad situation, which does not seem like it will change any time soon, until the traditional male-dominant values here start to shift.


While in Chandigarh, we got to do some sightseeing as well. We went to a fruit and vegetable market and bought some really delicious papaya and this brown fruit that kind of tasted like a pear and was also very good. We also went to a rose garden, and did some shopping at a bazaar. The bazaar was comlete sensory overload - it was packed full of people, fabrics for sarees and kalmeez salwaars (the pants/dress outfits that women wear), jewelry, and western-style clothes (t-shirts, jeans), and was so hot and noisy, with salespeople grabbing you from every direction to come look at their stuff. Luckily we were with Sanjay, our program coordinator, and Pooja, one of the Indian girls from our guest house, who helped us negotiate some good deals and keep from getting lost in the maze of shops.

This weekend we are just hanging around Delhi. We are doing a bicycle tour of Old Delhi very early tomorrow morning (before the traffic gets crazy), which is supposed to be great.

Later!