4 days. 3 nights. 0 showers taken. Lots of jackfruit eaten.
That pretty much sums up this past week our team spent visiting a tribal village hospital on the mountains near Biligiriranga Hills (or BR Hills). An NGO called Karuna Trust runs a school and medical clinic in this area, where many tribal people have lived a very simple lifestyle for generations, largely removed from the outside world. In these tribes, the children often do not get proper schooling, there is very sparse running water and electricity, and the people of the tribes, when they fall ill or get bitten by a snake for example, will often go to the temple and pray instead of to a hospital to get treated because of the general distrust of modern technologies and hospitals. Karuna Trust and a few other NGO’s have come into some of these tribal villages and built schools and medical facilities. We have decided to come spend four days at BR Hills to learn more about the medical practices and technologies being used in these rural settings.
When we arrived, we were shown around the settlement that was built by the NGO. The main campus consisted of a school and small medical clinic. There were also living quarters and a dining hall where the tribal kids, who attended the school and received room and board free of charge, lived. The ones who lived close by would walk or commute to the school, but others lived far away and to avoid having the kids walk up mountainous roads to school each day, many of the kids lived at the school. We were shown to one of the little bungalows in the yard where the kids all lived.
Outside our room:
Our room consisted of three beds, a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling that lit our room at night, a tiny bathroom with a toilet and a faucet coming out the side of the wall. We soon discovered that when we turned on the faucet, water didn’t always come out. After the first night, it became fairly clear that a shower was not going to happen. The first night was also freezing cold. We were given a small wool blanket, but I was woken up a few times throughout the night from sheer coldness. When water came out of the faucet in the morning, it was also freezing cold. Stella and I made up our mind right then that we weren’t going to shower for the rest of the time we were here.
Mealtime at the village was also such a spectacle. All the kids sit lined up on mats on the floor, girls on one side and boys on the other.
All the kids have their own metal plates that they bring to the dining hall each meal. We didn’t have plates, so we ate off of banana leaves that were dried and made into a make-shift plate. 
Servers come around with metal buckets of rice, vegetable curry, sauce and bread and the kids wait till everyone’s been served, then they all sing a prayer in unison and dig in with their hands!
The first day or so we were there, we visited all the facilities, the school, and the medical clinic.
In general, the fruit here has been delicious! I had jackfruit, this really delicious fruit that comes out of a huge spikey shell, but tastes really sweet like a combination of mangoes, pineapple and durian.
The mangoes were also delicious!
On the first day, we also visited a temple at the very top of the mountain. The surrounding area was so beautiful!
The second night, the kids put on a show for us. There was dancing, singing, and poems recited. We didn’t understand most of it, but it was very exciting to watch! Then at the end, they asked us to perform something too! So we sang the “if you’re happy and you know it” song with Stella, Richard, and Sarayu (a girl we met here who’s pre-med and from New Jersey and also visiting and observing at the medical facilities in preparation before medical school next year), and we taught the kids the clapping part so they could clap along.
The next few days, we visited the larger public health center (PHC) at the base of the mountain in Gumballi where they generally had more doctors and surgeons on call. I will write more about that in the next post.
