A Day in Delhi

I stopped in Delhi on the way to Kathmandu and stayed with Santosh George and his family, servants, and another guest. The top picture here shows Santosh with the two girls, one from Nagaland (eastern India) and the other from Burma, with Rachel from England between them. The second picture shows Santosh's wife Attulah with their son. Seven people in a little apartment but it was quite comfortable. Rachel is a college graduate who won a scholarship to come to Delhi for three weeks to research social exclusion in terms of diseases that Santosh does work with—leprosy, HIV/AIDS, and clubfoot.

In Delhi there is lots of construction, lots of dust, congestion, jumble, lots of bicycle rickshaws, motorcycles, buses. I loved the beat-up diesel buses that said "clean energy" on the side. Lots of shanty towns, not many places that are very pretty. But the people are dressed in beautiful clothing and they are the city’s jewels.

Santosh called a taxi driver who drove Rachel and me all over Delhi seeing famous monuments--Indira Gandhi's rose garden where she died, the "India Gate" arch, the Bahai Lotus Temple, and an ancient Moslem tower called Qutab Minar. In all these places there were lots of tourists, but they were almost all Indian tourist families with their small children, because school was on holiday. It was fascinating. The driver spoke no English and we spoke no Hindi, so we just used a lot of hand signals and every once in awhile Santosh called and set him straight. It was a lot of fun. And not too hot--last week it was 118 degrees in Delhi but Tuesday it was only in the 80s.

The next morning we had Indian breakfast of bread stuffed with potatoes (aloo paratha) and eggs with peas and onions, mangoes and cantaloupe, and instant coffee with milk. Then we went to St. Stephen's hospital, where they run a clubfoot clinic on Wednesdays. About 60 or 70 children are treated in a day. Cure International, for which Santosh works, has a treatment to correct this problem involving several weeks of casts and then some foot braces to straighten young children's feet out. Each child's treatment costs about $200 all told and saves them from surgery or a lifetime of impaired walking, and the children get it for free, no matter who they are. The clinic is run at different hospitals every day, by Santosh, his wife Attulah, and three other women, who have trained both the parents and the doctors who do the treatment. The hope is that the hospitals will adopt this treatment themselves, so Cure can move on to other regions to start the program. I asked Santosh how the parents got off from work to come to the clinic for a day every week, so he asked a young couple who had come in. The man said that he worked in the vegetable market, and so when he came in he didn't get paid for that day. But it was worth it to see his child cured. It was quite amazing and I was glad I had the chance to go.