THE WAY TO GUDALUR - PART 1

 

July 30^th

Yesterday’s entry was very, very long. I apologise! It won’t be that long again I don’t think, it was just because I had to cover a week in one entry. Also I had a lot of time on my hands last night as Mona and Duana went out clubbing whilst I hung out at the hotel – too tired from my day of laptop charger hunting!

Today is Saturday. It was lovely to catch up on much needed sleep last night but I still found it very difficult to pull myself out of bed this morning! However, we had a flight to catch so there was no time to waste. We packed up all our stuff and quickly headed out to catch a taxi to the airport.

We seriously underestimated the amount of traffic. It took about three times the time we had thought to get there and we dashed to the check-in for our flight to Kerala and made it just in time.

I write this from the plane. My ears are popping like balloons the air-conditioning is too cold and Duana is asleep on my shoulder so I hope writing this blog entry will distract me from how uncomfortable I am!

I guess now is a good time to quickly explain where we are going and what we plan to do when we get there!

Basically – we are going to work in a charity run hospital called the Gudalur Adivasi Hospital. It’s situated in the state of Tamil Nadu, South India. The hospital serves the Adivasi people, the tribal population residing in the region. In a nutshell, they have been treated very poorly over the years. They were previously forced to work as slaves for the British and until recently the Indian government refused to recognise them as members of society and they were not able to access Government healthcare. Although this situation has now thankfully changed, the majority of the Adivasi people are reluctant to seek healthcare from the government hospitals when they need to. Therefore the hospital was set up to provide them with the healthcare that they so desperately needed. It was originally run entirely on charitable donations, now the government reimburses the hospital for the care of each patient, but the remainder of the costs of running the hospital are funded by charity. We will be working there for a month, not just in the hospital, but also at the community centres and the mobile clinics that are run. The combination of hospital, community centres and mobile clinics serve about 20,000 Adivasi.

It’s almost time to put tray tables up so I need to quickly round up! We are flying to Calicut (Kerala) Airport and are supposed to be being picked up from there and be driven the 3 ½ hours to the hospital. I hope someone turns up! I will write again from Tamil Nadu!