First few days in India

Hey guys!

I made it here safely, and without any major incidence - the Air India flight was early!! I spent the first few days here, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday basically getting settled in, trying to adjust to the heat, and then going bored out of my mind! I did some reading and had some uninvited drop in visits from family, but other than that, it was pretty uneventful.

Interestingly, I spent some time with some of the women on the block. One woman has an 80-some year old father in law. He has diabetes, his blood sugar is always in the 300's, and he does not watch his diet. He started showing signs of an ulcer on his foot, which is a well known complication of diabetes. It wasn't until 3 doctors told him he would have to get hospitalized and then possibly amputate that he actually considered making any modifications to his diet. His foot is healing now that he has stopped eating sugar, but he plans on starting back on his usual diet as soon as his foot is healed. I tried to tell him that he should try to control his diabetes, and that this is a warning of the myriad of complications uncontrolled diabetes can lead to, but to no avail. He isn't the least bit bothered - he believes that the doctors will be able to give him medications to fix any complications that arise. I tried telling the same to his daughter-in-law who prepares all of his food, and got the same response. It was frustrating talking to an educated person and still having them disregard important medical advice.

This same woman then was talking about this girl in her extended family. She had just finished high school, went to sign up for classes at college and pay her fees. Things were going great, and she was really excited to start. She came home and wanted to watch TV. Her parents said she could not watch any. Later that night they found her dead in her room. She had slit her wrists and then proceeded to hang herself. The lady who was telling this story proceeded to turn to me and asked if kids in America get that upset when their parents discipline them. I very off hand said well obviously she had some other underlying issues that either her parents didn't recognize or that they aren't sharing. No one just gets upset and does that. I told them she likely had depression. They said someone would have noticed if she was depressed and that there is no way she was. They just think she just got mad and did that. I tried to explain that symptoms can often go unnoticed, especially if parents are not very involved in their child's life and don't communicate about more than grades and housework. But I quite literally got laughed at and they made some comment about westerners always trying to make things more complicated than they really are. I was speechless and realized that unlike what I'm used to back home, being educated as in going to school and being an intellectual person are very different.

On a personal note, I learned to cook shak (vegetables) and make roti (bread) in my time off...apparently it was edible too :)