Wednesday, Day 9

Today for our medical rotation my group 3 of the students and 2 leprosy patients to the hospital in chennai. It took about 2 hours to get to the hospital. It is a hospital and a school about 10 minutes off the main road surround by beautiful grounds and a temple. Each child/patient was escorted by a few volunteers. Ivy, Vanillamary (a house mother) and I took Vijay to the dentist. Vijay is about 9 years old and a great kid. But he was very quiet today. I don't blame him, going to a dentist in the big city with unfamiliar people would be scary. We took him to the first dentist. They were all in a big room full of lots of dentist chairs and you have to take your shoes off before coming in. They told us to go to the pediatric dentist so we walked down the hall and went to him. He looked at his teeth and ordered an x-ray. We went and payed for it then went down the hall some more and waited for his x-ray. Then back to the dentist who looked at it and said that the pain he has been having is from an abscessed tooth. So he did a cleaning and a filling today. But Vijay has another tooth with a really big abscess and will need to come back again next week. Poor kid!

This is Vijay waiting for the dentist.

Me, Ivy, Vanillamary. (She is the sweetest lady. She knows Tamil, Hindi, and English but cannot read or write in any of them. Vijay had been working on one of the tile games where you move the tiles to arrange the numbers in order when Vanillamary took a turn. She finished in 10 minutes! I was so impressed and she was so excited!)

It was a very long day for everyone and we didn't get back to Rising Star until 5 pm. But we stopped at the grocery store and I got some cookies and a big bag of chips for 24 rupees. Yummy! On the van ride home I let the boys use my camera. They took some cool video of the streets that I will upload. But not right now because our ac is broken and it is so hot and sweaty :( But look for it in a future post. Hopefully I don't melt tonight :)

(I just checked, it has been about 100 F everyday I have been here! But it seems not as bad as the first day. Last night was almost cool, it got done to 82 ! I decided early on that I was just going to sweat all day everyday and since then I haven't minded it much.)