i woke up the morning of our first clinic at 4am for two reasons: one because i didn’t want to meet the team late, and two because I was so nervously excited for the week’s upcoming events. I got ready super early and waited for Saranga to wake up, and then we left to go meet them team. I met the team members, got my scrubs, and we loaded onto the bus to go to breakfast before driving to the Lambadi village for our first day of clinic. This is the first picture we got of some of the team before leaving the apartments.

Our group is was comprised of one doctor (Kara), one nurse practitioner (Kelly), eight nursing students from Denver School of Nursing and their two instructors (Anne, Colleen, Cecily, Maggie, Jenn, Susan, Leela, Dori, Tara, and Diane), our two dentists (Manish and Javed), our seven medical staff members (Ridhi, Rohan, Sai, Chandu, Alyssa, James, and myself), our two hosts (Sudha Aunty and Vish Uncle), and our fearless leader, the method behind the madness Amy!

That first morning, they took us to a restaurant that served us a traditional South Indian breakfast. We had a selection of vada, idlis, dosas, upma, pooris, and pesaratu, all with an assortment of patchidis, podis, and sambar. We were also offered coffee and tea, which was a huge hit with most of our team. After we stuffed our faces, we drove about an hour outside of Hyderabad to the Lambadi village. There, we were greeted by a huge parade, a band, and garlands. The villagers greeted us each individually, then led us inside to the temple to do a small prayer before we headed to our clinical site. Inside the temple, they first gave Amy a pot to place on her head and then they made her do pradakshanam (walk around the main idols) before walking into the inner part of the temple. They asked for our names so they could do a puja for us (I wasn’t sure what they were asking for at first so I gave my family’s name and gothram to do the puja) and then they gave us prasadam. A common theme that happened to me throughout the mission was as soon as the villagers realized I could speak Telugu well, that too without an accent, they immediately began to interview me; “What’s your name? Where are your parents from? Were you born here?”When I told them that I was born and raised in the states, they were really caught off guard that someone from so far away knew the language that well. I immediately gave credit to my parents, and to dance and music for giving me a majority of my basis of the language. From the moment they realized that I could communicate effectively with both them and the medical team, most of the villagers felt a bit more comfortable with me. On this first day, one man particular came up to me and said “Oh good thing we have you. None of us speak English so we’ll need you to tell everyone else what we’re trying to convey” to which I said I’d happily oblige. Following the puja, we were paraded through the village for about 20 minutes until we reached the location of our first clinic.

While we were on the bus, we all got our place assignments for the day. Because of where we were serving, Ridhi, Rohan, Sai, Chandu, and I were told that we would be doubling as medical staff and translators, as we weren’t really sure what the translator situation would be like, and all of us could communicate fluently in Telugu and English. I’ve seen pictures of medical camps conducted in different parts of the world before but to see it in person is a completely different experience. When they led us to the tents, I thought it was where they were going to do a small ceremony before we started. After I realized that nope this is where we’re having clinic for the day, in the sun, I didn’t know what to think. I helped unload the bus and started helping out in any way I could. Now, I’ve never been one to jump too head first into things I don’t know anything about. This clinic was a little different because we were so short handed so that wasn’t really an option. I didn’t do anything major but I helped set up the pharmacy and the clinic tables. A little back story into how our clinics were set up. The villagers who were seeking care first had to go through a registration process where they were given a sheet of paper with their name, date of birth, and a registration number. After they registered, they would wait until their number was called to then attend community education classes, where we taught the villagers about numerous things from how to brush their teeth properly, how to maintain good hygiene, to how to reduce the number of mosquitos in your home, the importance of drinking clean water, and everything in between. Upon completing their community education, they were then directed to triage where some of our nursing students were waiting to take their vitals and hear their chief complaints. After this, the nursing students would asses the state of the patient. If they were well enough, they would get our wellness providers (more of the nursing students) to asses them and if they were quite sick, they were directed to our sick care providers (our doctor Kara and nurse practitioner Kelly) to be assessed. Following their care checks, if the patients needed any medication they would be directed to the pharmacy. Also, the patients had the opportunity to request to see the dentists or if they wanted to see if they were eligible for eye glasses (these glasses were reading glasses that were donated).

My original assignment was to shadow the care providers but since I could speak both English and Telugu, I was being pulled in a lot of different directions. Plus, each of our care providers needed translators and since I am not interested in becoming a doctor, it made more sense for one of the pre-med kids to translate for the care providers so they could learn more, and for me to stay with the nursing students and learn from them. One of the funny moments from this day was when some of the nurses at wellness care needed more chairs. There was a large stack of chairs at the back of the tent but every time I tried to do something, some volunteer would step in and tell me not to worry about it and that they’d take care of it. I must have asked for more chairs maybe 5 or 6 times with no results and we really needed the chairs. So I got up, walked to the stack, picked them all up, and brought them towards the wellness care station. The looks and comments I got from the villagers (particularly the men) were priceless. They looked at me in shocked and were commenting in Telugu saying how can such a small girl lift such a big thing? It made me smile and when I brought the chairs around, the nurses were also pretty shocked, saying “wow look at Anna, getting things done!” I was pretty proud of myself.

I spent some time helping to translate for a few of the providers, and then was asked to help pack pills which I actually really enjoyed. It was also fun because a lot of the school kids kept coming by and when they realized I could speak Telugu, they kept asking questions about what we were doing. Most of the time, kids just wanted toothbrushes. The scary part of that was there were monkeys playing and fighting in the trees above us and eventually started playing on the tent right above where I was standing which made me nervous. After lunch, Amy came over to me and said “Anna, you need to take over glasses for Ridhi so she can eat lunch and come out here and help with community education!”. I froze in my tracks mortified. I have this problem where I doubt myself a lot and immediately I felt super overwhelmed. I went over to Ridhi where she gave me a crash course in how to give people glasses, and then she went on her way. I think I was in that room for almost 5 hours. At first, there wasn’t much of a line so I was able to get through to people but then it started getting really chaotic. I was inside a tiny room and people were crowding the doorways and not giving me any space. Also, despite them wanting to help, the other translators that were native to the village were not always that helpful; they would either contradict what I was saying or not explain what I was saying to the villagers properly. There was also the fact that most of these people were uneducated, so if I tried to explain that we didn’t have glasses in the power they needed or that they needed to go get prescription glasses, that we were cheating them of care. Not to mention a big problem with Indians is they won’t listen to younger Indian people. They think we don’t know what we’re talking about which is the farthest thing from the truth. So I really had to put my foot down and be firm with some of these people, despite their tempers so that I could do my job. At one point, I had to call Amy to do some crowd control because people were pushing and shoving and it was crazy. She basically threatened them that if they couldn’t stand quietly in a single file line, she would shut down glasses. She was my guardian angel that day. She would send people in one by one, I would give them their glasses, and then send them on there way. And somehow someway, we managed to see almost everyone and after an almost 14 hour work day, we were finally done. After clinic officially closed, we did aarti, packed up all our things, and loaded onto the bus. One thing I forgot to say. In the morning, I saw these two girls who were translating for us and they were GORGEOUS. Beautiful dresses, beautiful hair and smiles, and they had such sweet dispositions. So as we were leaving, I went to tell them thanks for all their help and both of them stopped me. They said, “Akka, we wanted to tell you, you’re so pretty but you havethe most beautiful smile we’ve ever seen. Especially when you’re laughing it’s mesmerizing”. I was floored. I told them thanks and I really admired them too and then we went on our way. On the bus ride home, we were told we saw about 292 patients that day. Everyone was exhausted and even Amy said that the other days of clinic wouldn’t be as hard as the first, but that also the crowd we saw that day was very aggressive, which made things a bit more complicated. The unfortunate thing about these clinic days was that because they were so long, we didn’t have much time to do any of the sight seeing things we had planned because everyone was so exhausted.

Instead, we went to really fancy rooftop restaurant in Hyderabad for dinner. Amy gave us instructions to sit with people we didn’t know well so we could all get to know each other a little better. I had the pleasure of sharing a table with Kelly, Colleen, and Leela, and we had  lovely conversations about our day, our careers, weddings, culture, songs, and a bunch of other things. The food was great but I was most looking forward to dessert. We had vanilla ice cream with blueberry cheesecake and a piece of chocolate cake. To say I was in heaven was an understatement. After stuffing our faces yet again, we made it back to the apartment. The nursing students went back to the guest house while the rest of us went back to our apartment, where we met up with our last team member James! He had some issues with his flights, and ended up being stuck in the Dubai airport for 15 hours or something. But he ended up making it to us in one piece so we were happy to see him. We all then stayed up until almost 2 in the morning packing pills so we wouldn’t have to struggle with doing it during clinical hours the next day. We all went to bed exhausted, but super excited for what the next day of clinic would hold.