Hello from the second member of the India team, Amy. I will be entering my 3rd year at the Atlantic Veterinary College in PEI this September, and grew up in Halifax, NS. I haven’t been more than half an hour from an ocean for any extended amount of time in my entire life, so spending the summer in the desert is a little bit of a change for me!
June 17th marked mine and Melissa’s first month in India (Carson arrived a little earlier) and it feels very much like home here in Jodhpur for all of us! We have been making sure to fit in many side trips through the huge state of Rajasthan on our days off from MAPT, and our guest house is always a welcome sight to return to. Travelling in the desert heat can be exhausting, and the constant “Where from?”, “Which country?” and plain out double takes we experience as tourists only adds to this.
We were very excited to spend a night in Bikaner last week, where Dr. Kalpat and Ishrats’ vet school is located. Kalpat accompanied us on the 6 hour bus ride there (the 4 of us were cramped into a double sleeper cot), and we were treated to some Indian hospitality while staying at his relatives house, including a late night supper sitting cross legged on the floor and of course, chai! We travelled to the vet school in the morning and explored the huge campus. The architecture in India is worlds apart from Canada, and we were surprised to see that most of the buildings look like palaces. We were taken through the library which we were told houses about 36000 books.
While walking across the campus we jokingly said we should have brought signs saying “Canadian vet students”, so we could have avoided answering the question every time a group of students noticed us. It is a requirement for veterinary students to learn English, and most have spoken strictly Hindi until their first day on campus. We were very impressed when we learned Kalpat and Ishrat have only been speaking English for about 5 years. It was nice to be able to actually converse with everyone around us, as we are usually completely surrounded by Hindi (Our Hindi vocabulary consists of about 10 words, including one we hear more than any other: Khutta (dog – pronounced coota)).
All of the usual departments could be found there: Anatomy, Histology, Microbiology, Nutrition, etc; and some we would not find at a Canadian vet school – ie, the camel operation theatre.
After reaching the surgery clinics, we were very excited to be introduced to the world famous camel surgeon, Dr. T.K. Gahlot. He walked us through the building showing us pictures on the walls of surgeries that he has performed (apparently he has performed over 1000 types of surgeries), most of which were familiar to us and some we had not heard of before. We ended in the camel operation theatre, which houses a huge area filled with dune sand for the camels to stand on comfortably during operations.
We felt very welcome on the campus, and were told by the other vet students we met that no matter where you are from, vets and vet students are always family!
We spent the rest of the day doing what any vet student in Bikaner would do – we headed to the Karni Mata temple (the rat temple – google it!) located just outside of the city. Basically just a big building filled with thousands of rats and of course, lots of rat feces. Like all temples in India, you must remove your shoes before entering. It is supposed to be good luck if a rat runs over your feet, but if you step on one you must pay its weight in gold. So needless to say, we were very careful when putting our feet down!
The next stop on our trip was Jaisalmer, where we joined a camel safari and spent a night in the Great Thar desert. We had lots of time to get up close and personal with the camels, which are very strange animals to look at up close! We were very impressed with the camels’ welfare; they were given lots of food, water and treats when we arrived and obviously had a strong bond with their drivers. Saying “Je, Je” makes the camels sit (going from 8 feet high to ground level in 3 seconds is an experience in itself), and after completely ignoring us saying it many times, it only takes once for them to listen to their drivers.
So, we made it back to Jodhpur safely, where we have been continuing our work at MAPT that Carson has described previously. We will keep you updated on our progress!
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Strap yourself in and hold on...
To enjoy a roller coaster, you have to sit back, take a deep breath, and place your trust in the machinery and the harness holding you down; because really, there isn’t much of anything you can do about it now. I get that same feeling every time I step into an automobile in India (the same except that vehicles here tend to lack seat belts...). Be it an air conditioned car, a bursting-at-the-seams bus, or a rickety auto rickshaw, every vehicle on the roads of India is driven with reckless abandon, and road rules are reduced to a simple few:
Lines on the road are more like suggestions than rules. Leaving more than two inches of space between vehicles is inviting another vehicle to cut in front of you. Side mirrors are expendable (and don’t last long). And finally, horns are actually a valid and verbose form of communication.
Of course, these rules stretched even further when avoiding the nonchalant cattle strolling across roads (including major highways and large city arteries), or if you’re one of the thousands motorbikes crawling the roadways like ants (rarely with less than 2 riders and often as many as 4). After a weekend of travelling Rajasthani roads to the local sightseeing destinations, we’ve come to have a new appreciation for just how insane traffic is on these narrow, busy Indian roads.
Our brief travels showed us a strange Indian tendency towards bringing the surreal into the everyday. We visited the holy lake town of Pushkar (where the ashes of Mahatma Ghandi were spread), a destination for Hindu pilgrimages and tourists alike, to find the lake bone dry. We climbed a steep and jagged hillside, and bravely avoided malicious monkeys, to see a famed Hindu temple, which housed only a nondescript idol framed by incongruous flashing Christmas lights. In Jaipur, we scaled yet another small mountain to Jaigargh Fort, visiting the home a 450 ton cannon (forged on site), which was only fired once, and took four elephants to rotate and aim. In the stately Amber Fort, we followed an over-the-top audio guide, which made every building, gate, courtyard, and water reservoir we saw into a character which talked at great length. We continued to be bombarded with head-tilt worthy sights as we descended on Jaipur city itself, visiting an ear-shattering, hyper-glitzy nightclub with all of about ten people inside, shuffling around to obscenely loud bad 90s music.
To end off the weekend in style (both the classy kind, and the surreal), we ascended the 14 story Om Tower (which receives my personal favourite Lonely Planet description as “a lonely cylindrical spaceship that crash landed in Jaipur many years ago, which has been rusting in the smog ever since.”) to soak up the night time view of the city from their revolving restaurant. Not to let this get mundane just as we ended our trip, India came through in great style by putting on a continuous fireworks display through the entire meal. With a steady spread of fireworks shooting into the sky from every section of the city, we enjoyed a spectacular impromptu light show as happy couples all across the city finished off the final day of their wedding celebrations.
After wrapping up our little side trip, we were able to relax on the long drive back to Jodhpur to the sounds of dozens of varieties of novelty horns on transport trucks, and the screeching Indian pop music from our driver’s stereo. All said and done, we are happy to be back in Jodhpur and excited to dive into work again, a kind of surreal that’s a little bit more familiar.
Lines on the road are more like suggestions than rules. Leaving more than two inches of space between vehicles is inviting another vehicle to cut in front of you. Side mirrors are expendable (and don’t last long). And finally, horns are actually a valid and verbose form of communication.
Of course, these rules stretched even further when avoiding the nonchalant cattle strolling across roads (including major highways and large city arteries), or if you’re one of the thousands motorbikes crawling the roadways like ants (rarely with less than 2 riders and often as many as 4). After a weekend of travelling Rajasthani roads to the local sightseeing destinations, we’ve come to have a new appreciation for just how insane traffic is on these narrow, busy Indian roads.
Our brief travels showed us a strange Indian tendency towards bringing the surreal into the everyday. We visited the holy lake town of Pushkar (where the ashes of Mahatma Ghandi were spread), a destination for Hindu pilgrimages and tourists alike, to find the lake bone dry. We climbed a steep and jagged hillside, and bravely avoided malicious monkeys, to see a famed Hindu temple, which housed only a nondescript idol framed by incongruous flashing Christmas lights. In Jaipur, we scaled yet another small mountain to Jaigargh Fort, visiting the home a 450 ton cannon (forged on site), which was only fired once, and took four elephants to rotate and aim. In the stately Amber Fort, we followed an over-the-top audio guide, which made every building, gate, courtyard, and water reservoir we saw into a character which talked at great length. We continued to be bombarded with head-tilt worthy sights as we descended on Jaipur city itself, visiting an ear-shattering, hyper-glitzy nightclub with all of about ten people inside, shuffling around to obscenely loud bad 90s music.
To end off the weekend in style (both the classy kind, and the surreal), we ascended the 14 story Om Tower (which receives my personal favourite Lonely Planet description as “a lonely cylindrical spaceship that crash landed in Jaipur many years ago, which has been rusting in the smog ever since.”) to soak up the night time view of the city from their revolving restaurant. Not to let this get mundane just as we ended our trip, India came through in great style by putting on a continuous fireworks display through the entire meal. With a steady spread of fireworks shooting into the sky from every section of the city, we enjoyed a spectacular impromptu light show as happy couples all across the city finished off the final day of their wedding celebrations.
After wrapping up our little side trip, we were able to relax on the long drive back to Jodhpur to the sounds of dozens of varieties of novelty horns on transport trucks, and the screeching Indian pop music from our driver’s stereo. All said and done, we are happy to be back in Jodhpur and excited to dive into work again, a kind of surreal that’s a little bit more familiar.
Sandstorms in the Land of Death!
Well we’ve left behind the paltry 45 degree heat in Delhi for somewhere that’s really hot: Jodhpur. Where, in our first few days, it reached upwards of a blistering 50 degrees each day. This brutal desert heat was the backdrop as we had our first introduction to the Marwar Trust and their base of operations, the large shelter complex on the outskirts of the city of Jodhpur. We’ve learned that term “Marwar” is the name given to this region of Rajasthani desert, and means “Land of Death”. Early in our stay here, this is shown to be far from an idle moniker, as the only respite from the searing heat came in the form of an all out desert sandstorm (they call them “dust storms” locally). First the wind starts to gust, occasionally getting grit in your eyes, but this eventually gives way to all out gales, which pick up the desert and smear it across the entire sky, reducing the sun to dull yellow disc overhead. It isn’t a sudden thing, it seeps in, starting off as a day that just looks hazy, indistinguishable from a bad day of smog. Except that this “smog” just keeps getting worse, the sky continues to darken, and the hot desert wind leaves you with a layer of grimy sand and sweat on your face. Everything takes on a red/brown color as desert sand fills the sky, blending the horizon with the stubborn sand still clinging to the ground. It covers people and buildings, and any open spaces (including your mouth). Even leaving a door or window ajar will cause every surface in that room to be covered in a layer of sand. And anyone who wears contact lenses will be able to sympathize with just how much fun they become in a sandstorm. Through all the beige murk of these eerie desert storms, there is a silver lining as temperatures finally drop from around 50 down to a manageable 35-40. Despite all of this, people here don’t seem to miss a beat, and all work goes on just the same, even for our crew at the Marwar shelter.
Marwar may appropriately mean “The Land of Death”, but the Marwar Animal Protection Trust has made a lie of this definition, through acting as a caretaker for street dog health for over five years. To date, an astounding 50 000 dogs have passed through the shelter as part of their Animal Birth Control (ABC) program.
We get tossed into the mix immediately. Arriving while the daily routine is in full swing, this large complex seems strangely empty as we arrive, the only greeting we receive is a rush of a dozen or so dogs adopted by the shelter workers. It’s a strange location at first, as it looks like rows of houses line the sides of a courtyard filled haphazardly with other buildings. We later learn that these are houses, and the dog catchers live at the shelter in order to look after the animals throughout the evening. While the handful of other buildings are where the whole operation is managed. As we shyly make our way around the compound, we find the two young vets, Ishrat and Kalpat, overseeing the start of an assembly line for dog operations. It’s a flurry of activity as dog handlers deftly move around in large kennels with twenty or so tramp-like street dogs lying around, meanwhile technicians anaesthetize animals before they are carried away to a preparation room for surgery. As the process gets underway, we follow the vets into the high throughput operating rooms at the shelter. In this operating building, about a dozen support staff work, washing, shaving and applying antiseptics to prepare the dogs for surgery. They also clipping and cauterize a notch out of each dog’s ear for easy identification on the street, give each a tattoo and a rabies vaccination, all before they are whisked onto an operating table.
The operating room itself is by far the coolest room in the shelter complex, with air conditioners straining to dent the intense desert heat. Even still, for us Canadians it feels downright balmy. Here there is a different set of challenges, as the patchy power network of India occasionally cuts out; causing lights to blink out, and temperatures to skyrocket in record time as the vets just continue working. Even still, as the coolest area around, technicians when setting up animals on operating tables have a tendency to linger and take in some of the cool air before the vets chase them out again.
As a fun side story, Indian surgeons prefer doing spay procedures through the flank (as opposed to spays on the midline done in North America), but this was stopped here in Jodhpur. The much more visible incision site on the flank of the animal, and the area shaved for surgery led many members in the community to become concerned that something dire was happening to the animals at the shelter; one vet joked that the community thought they were “stealing the dogs’ kidneys”. In order to keep their positive relationship with the community, they fell back to the more discreet midline method, and the complaints from the community stopped.
Surgeries wrap up in the early afternoon, and all this hard work is rewarded with the much anticipated “Chai Time,” where everyone just chills out for a while and drinks a demitasse of what must be the Indian national drink: masala chai (tea made by boiling tea leaves in a pot with water, milk, spices and enough sugar to make a dentist shudder). This is often accompanied by a few minutes of absolutely bizarre Indian television, before lounging is disbanded and post op surveys and treatment is given. In five 50m long wings of kennels, dogs are housed individually for several days after surgery. In these kennels they have their own space, out of the heat, where they have access to food and water. This allows the veterinarians and support staff to monitor the post-operation health of the dogs, allowing the animals to recover from the surgery, or any potential complications that may arise, while in a controlled environment with good food and plenty of water. After several days, and once the staff at the shelter are convinced that the animals are healthy, the animals are returned to the areas where they were first captured, and are released.
As we slowly learn all the “ins and outs” of this daily routine, we are picking up the details of how this mammoth operation runs, and learning our way around these strange, not-quite-tame street dogs. Soon, we’ll be able to dive in with more of our own objectives here in Jodhpur, and get our hands a bit more dirty.
Marwar may appropriately mean “The Land of Death”, but the Marwar Animal Protection Trust has made a lie of this definition, through acting as a caretaker for street dog health for over five years. To date, an astounding 50 000 dogs have passed through the shelter as part of their Animal Birth Control (ABC) program.
We get tossed into the mix immediately. Arriving while the daily routine is in full swing, this large complex seems strangely empty as we arrive, the only greeting we receive is a rush of a dozen or so dogs adopted by the shelter workers. It’s a strange location at first, as it looks like rows of houses line the sides of a courtyard filled haphazardly with other buildings. We later learn that these are houses, and the dog catchers live at the shelter in order to look after the animals throughout the evening. While the handful of other buildings are where the whole operation is managed. As we shyly make our way around the compound, we find the two young vets, Ishrat and Kalpat, overseeing the start of an assembly line for dog operations. It’s a flurry of activity as dog handlers deftly move around in large kennels with twenty or so tramp-like street dogs lying around, meanwhile technicians anaesthetize animals before they are carried away to a preparation room for surgery. As the process gets underway, we follow the vets into the high throughput operating rooms at the shelter. In this operating building, about a dozen support staff work, washing, shaving and applying antiseptics to prepare the dogs for surgery. They also clipping and cauterize a notch out of each dog’s ear for easy identification on the street, give each a tattoo and a rabies vaccination, all before they are whisked onto an operating table.
The operating room itself is by far the coolest room in the shelter complex, with air conditioners straining to dent the intense desert heat. Even still, for us Canadians it feels downright balmy. Here there is a different set of challenges, as the patchy power network of India occasionally cuts out; causing lights to blink out, and temperatures to skyrocket in record time as the vets just continue working. Even still, as the coolest area around, technicians when setting up animals on operating tables have a tendency to linger and take in some of the cool air before the vets chase them out again.
As a fun side story, Indian surgeons prefer doing spay procedures through the flank (as opposed to spays on the midline done in North America), but this was stopped here in Jodhpur. The much more visible incision site on the flank of the animal, and the area shaved for surgery led many members in the community to become concerned that something dire was happening to the animals at the shelter; one vet joked that the community thought they were “stealing the dogs’ kidneys”. In order to keep their positive relationship with the community, they fell back to the more discreet midline method, and the complaints from the community stopped.
Surgeries wrap up in the early afternoon, and all this hard work is rewarded with the much anticipated “Chai Time,” where everyone just chills out for a while and drinks a demitasse of what must be the Indian national drink: masala chai (tea made by boiling tea leaves in a pot with water, milk, spices and enough sugar to make a dentist shudder). This is often accompanied by a few minutes of absolutely bizarre Indian television, before lounging is disbanded and post op surveys and treatment is given. In five 50m long wings of kennels, dogs are housed individually for several days after surgery. In these kennels they have their own space, out of the heat, where they have access to food and water. This allows the veterinarians and support staff to monitor the post-operation health of the dogs, allowing the animals to recover from the surgery, or any potential complications that may arise, while in a controlled environment with good food and plenty of water. After several days, and once the staff at the shelter are convinced that the animals are healthy, the animals are returned to the areas where they were first captured, and are released.
As we slowly learn all the “ins and outs” of this daily routine, we are picking up the details of how this mammoth operation runs, and learning our way around these strange, not-quite-tame street dogs. Soon, we’ll be able to dive in with more of our own objectives here in Jodhpur, and get our hands a bit more dirty.
Monday, May 24, 2010
Arrival!
Hot. Just stepping off the plane onto the tarmac in Delhi, you are greeted by a blast of hot air that you weren’t quite anticipating. Even in the middle of the night when we arrive, its still startling; and throw in the ever-present Delhi smog, it becomes like walking into a poorly ventilated furnace room. It is clear, right from the first few tentative steps in this country, that the word ‘hot’ will take on a new meaning. This is a first impression that has proved true, and a change that has been our first obstacle to overcome
So far, India has been a steep learning curve as we’ve run a gauntlet of rip-offs and scam artists in dusty and beyond crowded bazaars, while dripping sweat in the daily 45 degree heat. Delhi is a huge and sprawling city, and we try and acclimatize to this alien environment for a short while, as we prepare to head for our real destination, Jodhpur city in the Rajasthan state. A not-so-gentle primer to the hustle and bustle of India at any time, Delhi’s scarcely contained chaos has been brought to new heights in the complete upheaval of city upgrades for the upcoming Commonwealth Games. Roads are narrowed, electricity becomes “finicky” and dust abounds, which all succeeds in funnelling the vast crowds of this city into yet a smaller space. Trying to take this all in and keeping our eyes continually peeled for whatever animals might be afoot, the three of us were reduced to single file marching through a crowed mixed from liberal amounts of the following (all of which can be seen in the space of about 30 seconds): gaggles of women (dressed in exquisite saris) shopping, young men scrutinizing goods, urchins running errands, shopkeepers, touts, beggars, vending stands for everything from watches to shoes to fresh mango juice, men on bicycles, motorbikes, scooters, cycle-rickshaws, auto-rickshaws, taxis with horns blaring, barking dogs, meandering cattle with two foot horns, and to finish things off the occasional ox driven cart loaded down beyond belief with a load covered in burlap. ‘Sensory overload’ is a term that comes to mind when I attempt to describe it, as even still this doesn’t begin to tackle the unimaginable din that all this dense humanity produces, or the equally fast paced barrage of scents between the shops, streets and restaurants. There is simply nothing like it that I have experienced before.
Trying to find a rhythm here, and trying to make sense of this place is a challenge with these wide eyed first impressions. India has been filled with contradictions and confusing 180s: you can step from filth and poverty on an unpaved street into an air conditioned building with gleaming marble floors, one stranger will try and swindle you and the next invite you into his home to meet his family. We’re left off balance in this whirlwind of new experience, but more than anything else it remains exhilarating.
We’re up to the challenge of this surprising country, and now we’re looking forward to tackling our project in Jodhpur.
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