Day 2

View outside the balcony where I am staying. There's a rooster that cock-a-doodle-doos every morning. I did the sun salutation this morning on the balcony before sunrise.  

This is Buster, the pet dog that barks and scares me into submission.

This is the man with the painful lesions all over his body who I saw yesterday. He pedals his feet up and down so that he doesn't have to feel the pain. He said he hardly sleeps at all. 

This is his son, who stays with him at the hospital daily and watches over him. His son looks as distressed as his father. 

Pieter showed me the custom made shoes for the patients who have no sensation in their feet. The soles are made from recycled tire so that sharp objects cannot penetrate the shoe and harm the feet, preventing potentially infectious ulcers. 

Pieter is working with one of the inpatients who just received surgery on her hand. Her name is Ramanamma. She is 20 years old (which is crazy to think about considering I turn 20 in a few months) and has been married since she was 16. Her husband sells floor mats. She has no kids. She smiles frequently but is super shy and always tries to hide the fact that she wants to smile about everything. Super sweet and cute of her. 

These are my in-patient friends! They are like the Breakfast Club of physiotherapy. They recently had surgery and have to stay at the hospital for intensive physiotherapy for one month. I hung out with them for a while this morning and they helped correct my Telugu. They made me aware of how ridiculous some of my grammar mistakes sound that we all laughed super hard for a while and the hospital staff became angry that I was distracting them from their hand exercises. YOLO. I'm excited to hang out with them during my internship--they're a fun crowd. 

This is Narsaya, who came to the clinic for severe sweating. He has been cured of leprosy and this is some sort of bodily reaction that some people who have had leprosy get after some time. He told me he's never been outside of Nellore in his life. 

Narsaya is 30 years old, unmarried, and lives with his brother's family. He and his brother are both "coolies" (don't know how to spell that), or casual laborers. Pieter told him long ago when he was first receiving treatment for leprosy to change his profession, but he did not and lost his fingers and toes as a result.  He said the blisters from work are super painful, and he says he is able to continue working because he still has thumbs.

Here are some of the dudes from the Breakfast Club. The guy in the yellow shirt is Mahaboobasha. He's 22 and works as a security guard. He thinks everything is funny and always laughs. We have the same wavelength of humor (when i'm jet lagged at least). In the middle is Babu, who married at age 19, has 2 kids, and is a causal laborer. Babu likes to make a lot of quiet jokes to his friend on the right, Sanjay Sushil Joshi (married at 19, has 2 kids). He described the pain in his hand as "stars twinkling in the sky," and his hand splint as a giant cobra. Hehe. 

This is Kalyani, the unofficial leader of the Breakfast club (by virtue of her outgoing personality). She's 24, was married at age 15, and has three kids (you hear that Nupoo?). Her husband is an English teacher for little kids in her village. She spoke with me the most and knows the most English of everyone in the club. She is super sassy and sarcastic. She talks to me in Telugu super slowly and sarcastically like I'm 5 years old. She has so much personality she seems like a character in a movie, it's awesome. I am quite fond of her; I'll have to get a video of her at some point to document how she talks to me.