Mumbai, India - January 23, 2008

Day 2 with Uncle Vinay was kind of amusing, in the sense that we were able to display our ineptitude to it’s fullest extent. Uncle Vinay got caught up talking to students & forgot to let his henchmen know what we ought to do. So they gave us the job of writing down all the blood test patients. This all sounds very simple, and would’ve been, if Indian English weren’t so much a dialect in it’s own right rather than an accented version of the language we speak. We discovered very quickly that the names meant nothing to us – we needed them to be spelt out. Again, this would’ve been fine except for the fact that there is a strong prevalence of P’s, B’s, D’s & T’s in Indian names, and those letters all sound the same when enunciated with an Indian accent. After becoming semi-deaf (their method of trying to make us understand the letter they were saying was to simply yell it louder & louder, with precisely the same intonation), I wrote out the letters on a separate piece of paper - & would have them point at the letter they wanted. Sometimes if required to resort to this, they would point out the letters with exaggerated patience, to the point where I felt like a cross between being ESL & mentally ill. Fortunately for us things were really able to move along when we clued in to the fact that they often had student cards on them, from which we could copy their names directly. It was a little more tiring than expected, I guess because we really had to work to understand what they were saying.

In the end the clinic managed to get over 500 students tested (more than half the school) which was fantastic. What still surprised me though was when after a conversation with Uncle Vinay we realized that 30-40 of those girls we talked with will be diagnosed with Thalassaemia Minor. Somehow I’d forgot that behind our casual volunteer work was a much more serious premise.

The testing ended by about 1pm, at which point we had Masala Dosa (our latest favourite new food) in the school ‘Canteen’. Our companions consisted of Uncle Vinay, his driver, and two of his friends: Kake & Rajesh. Vinay’s friends were described at some point to us as having joined him in his cause purely for the free food, & then staying because they enjoyed it. My impression was that they’ve been helping him for years though, they were very nice. In the photos the driver is the one with the tight pants & flashy shirt (it was purple polyester on this day), Rajesh is the one who as self-described looks like a little thief (he wants me to get him into the acting industry!) and Kake is the one with the turban. When they found out that we’d yet to go to downtown Mumbai this hilarious foursome took us on a car trip downtown. They wanted to know if we had any deadlines to make, we said no, thinking we’d get home around 6 or so (it was about 1:30pm at the time). As it turned out, this excursion entailed over an hour long drive before arriving at our first destination, the gateway of India. We were then taken on a little walking tour of downtown before going out for drinks at a local bar, stopping off at the Hanging Gardens & various other sights on the way home. Our little detour took approximately 8 hours, and was highly amusing.