I do believe the monsoon season is upon us

From what I hear, it has been raining pretty much nonstop in Mumbai for the past two days.

If you remember, I have not been in Mumbai for the past four. Instead, I was roughly 35 (give or take) km from there in a place called Panvel. They called this our "rural rotation" for some strange reason, but there wasn't much that was rural about it. In all actuality, Panvel is a developing city that isn't as large as Mumbai (20 million people is tough to beat) but is big and still growing. We arrived in Panvel via train and as soon as we got there, we were whisked away in an old Jeep to the place where we would be staying. My favorite part about this Jeep was that the speedometer never read the correct kmph, instead it would just bounce around from 15 km to 45 km and pretty much every speed in between. The place we stayed at is called Shantivan. It is a small community outside of Panvel where leprosy patients and their families live and work.

Upon arrival, we were shown our housing for the next three nights which consisted of a single room containing three beds, a ceiling fan to keep us cool, and an adjoining bathroom which did, in fact, have a western toilet but for baths we were going to have to adopt the bucket-shower technique. We were then left to our own devices for the rest of the evening along with the warning that power outages due to the monsoon season where common. As it turns out, they weren't kidding about that at all. The first outage occurred during dinner and the last around 5:30 this morning. They really weren't too terrible except for the fact that when the power went out so did the ceiling fan and our only means of keeping cool. Now before you get too worried about us, the longest outage lasted about 13 minutes, so it really wasn't all that bad.

The first night was long. We arrived at the Shantivan around three in the afternoon and it was up to us to provide our own entertainment for the rest of the night and every night after that. To be honest, Kristie and I both spent our free time reading. I finished two books in my time spent there and let me tell you, that book I bought last weekend based on the television series Angel was a lot better than I expected it to be. It was just like watching an episode. :D For dinner we went to the canteen and were given what I had expected to be fed when preparing to come to India. The food was spicy and we were to use our hands to eat. It was awesome!! I'll admit, using utensils to eat has been disappointing up until this point.

We visited different clinics and hospitals every day. Tuesday began with an all too short two hour visit to a dermatologist. He was very informative and interesting and his office was the nicest I have seen since my arrival in this country. Later, we were taken to a local hospital which is in charge of the LEAP (Leprosy Eradication Action Program which was started by the Lions Club International) in Panvel. We were given a brief tour of the facilities and then sent back to the Shantivan. We spent the rest of the afternoon getting a tour of this little community and all it has to offer. They have a nursing home, an assisted living facility, fields where patients can work and earn a living, daycare, living quarters, a library, a general store where they can also work, and the main office which also serves as working quarters for those residents who weave rugs, etc. of which they sell as well. We visited each one of these facilities as well as the school located nearby where children of the residents are sent for their education. The school was, by far, the highlight of the tour. The children were so excited to see us and their teachers even had them sing and perform for us.

Wednesday we were taken to an Orthopedic Surgeon where we watched him remove pins from a man's wrist of which he had previously broken his radius, take a biopsy from an enlargement of a lady's second metacarpal, and reset and put pins in the humerus of a rickshaw driver who had received a compound fracture the day before in a car accident.

Today we visited the Gune Hospital in Panvel, where they tried to put us in surgery yet again. After watching the removal of a woman's gallbladder, we asked if we could got with a doctor while he made his rounds. We were taken to the office of Dr. Vivek Singh, a rather young doctor who was very knowledgeable and a fantastic teacher. It really was too bad that we only got to spend two hours following him because I know that we could have learned a lot more than we did.

The highlight of Shantivan were the three little girls we met. Our initial meeting was on Tuesday morning when we were roused out of our books with the call of "Aunty, Aunty!" These three little girls spoke mainly Marathi (the local language) but did know a few phrases such as "good morning" but it still made conversation difficult. They shared in our ride into town each morning on our way to the clinics and their way into school, sitting in the back and giggling the entire way there. Yesterday, one of them tapped me on the shoulder and said "Aunty, apka nam kya hai?" which is one of the few phrases in Hindi that I actually know. She was asking me for my name so I gave it to her. I find it cute how when I tell people my name here they automatically think I say Maria. I guess they just don't get Lydia's here very often. I even got a Nadia at one point which made me feel like Sayid's love interest in Lost. We gave them Kristie's name as well and then they told us their names: Ashwini, Nikita, and Schubda (I have no idea if I'm spelling those right at all). Today, they told us that they were fourth graders and they wrote their names in Marathi for us. They were super cute and I miss them already.

Panvel was a good experience and I'm glad that I got to get out of Mumbai and out of the mess that they call public transportation for a little while but it's extremely nice to have air conditioning again. This weekend we will visit Delhi and Agra to see the Taj Mahal as well as other landmarks (Qutab Minar, anyone?). This should be interesting.

I'm sending my love to you all wrapped in a saree and smelling of chai. I'll see you sooner than you think. :D