Friday, June 3: The end is here

Our final day at Bethany! What a great 2 weeks it has been. The morning started off a little slow, since it was hard to get up, but morning prayers and breakfast happened as usual. Some nice idli and sambar and chai woke me up, then we were told we'd be going to visit a local school funded by the same base religious organization, Bethany.

We boarded the jeep headed over there, which was technically in Kerala, but was only a 10/15 minute drive. The school was for children with  broken homes aka drunk fathers/orphan children. It is a residential school, and it is  gorgeous. The work the teachers and staff do there is remarkable, and it totally mirrors the care seen at the medical center. The children were very cute, and they had a small assembly for "the students from America". There was a class of small 4 year olds who had just left their families to be at the school. The room was full of crying kids, and I don't think a bunch of foreign faces greeting them made it any better.

We only stayed there for a little while, then had to head back. Once back, I wrote some messages to the different people that made the experience so great, then packed up some stuff. I went down for a last outpatient clinic session, and Emily and I saw that there was a ultrasound specialist here to check out a bunch of patients. He was incredible. The man would go through each body part and section and just say yeah looks fine or no not fine so quickly! I had such a hard time keeping up. Emily, Sheniya, and I would trade off transcribing his words so that proper records could be kept. We saw a lot of pregnant women and mini fetuses which were cute. Also saw some gall stones, kidney stones, and lots of bladders. I don't know if this is completely true, but he said he has done quick ultrasounds of up to 1000 patients a day. That is unreal. He went on and on about ya not enough doctors for the population which was very true.

After an hour of frantic writing, we finished some packing and cleaned things up, then we went around saying our good byes. That was really hard. Everyone was so sad to see us leave, but we reasured to them how valuable they had been to us. Dr. Chakko even said, "don't think of me as a doctor, but more as a mother, or maybe for you a grandmother". Those were such nice words, and it made me think of my grandmas who are no longer here. She is truly an inspiration. Each person I met along this trip has given me motivation to be the best I can be, and whenever I think something's tough/sucks, I will always think about the daunting tasks they go through every day.

We marched up to Sheniya's place for lunch, where we saw an incredible lineup of food. It smelled delicious and tasted even better. Benny helped out too! We had some ice cream as well, then walked back out to finish handing out our cards. We saw Meena, who was super sad to see us go, and we had a little dance party in the in patient hallway haha. We saw the old man who'd been at the hospital the whole time (one of the first patients I saw) step out of his door to say bye. That was truly sweet. He was such a sweet old man and even though he couldn't speak English, we knew he was very genuine and nice. Finally, the nurse who had taken my survey print out ran into me, and handed me back survey responses from 6 women! I was in awe, since I just hadn't had the time or resources to get any responses at all. We strolled back to pack all our things then we said our final goodbyes, pictures, and left.  

We had the usual dosage of crazy Arun driving, and got to the airport. We paid Arun for our stay, then said our good-byes and went for security check. As we passed through I was stopped for having my reflex hammer in my backpack. He was confused about what it was for, and I tried telling him I was a "doctor"... It worked. Our group parted ways at this point, since Therese and Alex were headed to a different destination. This ended our educational vacation, and we were all so fortunate to have this opportunity to have this experience.

-Samir