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India, day 3, December 18, 2005
Traveling in India is a wonderful experience. This time I have been able to be more observant and reflective. Due to what I don’t know. It could be because I am traveling by myself or it could be because it is the first time I have been here when it is not raining 24/7. Or when its not raining, its threatening to rain. The weather during December is great. It’s a mix between summer and spring. Though the afternoons can become unbearably hot, an effect doubled by the lack of air conditioners for building interiors, the mornings and evenings are pleasant and the nights can become decently cold.
The drive up to the coffee estate took a different route than I had taken before with my grandmother. My grandmother loved it in the mountains. Ghattar is a mountainous land on par with the foothills of the Shenandoahs. The major difference being that the climate is equatorial, thus there is no snow. However, in comparison to the rest of India, the weather is cooler and generally much more agreeable. Every time I visited India, my grandmother would take my mother and us to her place in the mountains. Despite the surroundings being beautiful, we rarely were able to take advantage of the area due to the monsoons. Instead, our time was spent visiting various people on both the bequest of my mother and grandmother.
On the drive to the estate, we passed through a new national park based in Kudremakh. It is part of a growing effort of the Indian government to preserve untouched areas of the rainforest. But to call the area untouched would be a lie. In a country of well over 1 billion people, there is no land that is untouched and not populated to some extent. Within this park there are small villages there along with a large mining company and the town that has grown with its workers. These people and the mining company are being evicted from their land.
Now, the maximum speed that can be traveled on Indian roads is 60 km/hr. That equates to about 40 mph meaning, practically, that the same distance traveled in the US can traveled at ½ of the time. So our 4 hour drive to the mountains is similar to a 100 mile, 2 hour car trip. The roads are slightly larger one lane allowing for two way traffic. To pass requires going against oncoming traffic, and with the many buses and trucks (lorries in British English) on the road, passing is a necessity. Throw in the curves associated with elevation changes and there is a large element of danger involved. Despite this, I, personally, have not observed or passed any accidents on the roads. In my attempt to rationalize this, I attribute it not to experience of Indian drivers but to the low speeds in which they travel. Avoiding an accident is simply much easier at 25 mph than at 60 mph. That stated, if an accident doesn’t occur, the trauma system here is non existent. Trauma specialization and pre-hospital care (a direct interest of mine) are bare bones with minimal coverage. Realistically, if I came across an accident, despite my paramedic training, I could do little beyond first aid. Even something as fundamentally stressed in EMT training as cervical stabilization would be useless. In that sense, emergency medicine here could be very exciting. Much higher acuity in both trauma and medical with a lower level of technology and resources available would require a significant amount of diagnostic ability. The lack of an established malpractice system also increases the educational nature of a future residency that I envision doing in India by allowing for trial and error. Now, I am not speaking about experimenting on patients or something so crude, but without the ability to quickly or most likely ever during normal emergency medicine treatment times diagnosing spinal fractures using advanced technology, the criteria for such diagnosis would then result on clinical techniques. A better example may be the diagnosis of meningitis. A spinal tap and analysis of the withdrawn fluid is the gold standard for diagnosis, but without those capabilities or sterility, other techniques would have to be used.
The house on Kiran’s estate is bare bones. With some t-l-c, it could be very stylish. The view from the front of the house overlooks three descending courtyard like areas followed by a view of a small valley. The courtyard closest to the house is for parking cars, the next two are for collecting the various crops grown on the estate. Today, there were coffee beans drying before being shipped off to the producer. Kiran has 25-30 acres of land with mainly coffee plants with some areas triple planted with banana trees and some other fruit that I have not heard of before and that do not have easy English translations. His ‘cottage’ is at the bottom of the estate, and his plantation, for that is what it truly is, extends up into the mountain. Less than one kilometer away is the larger estate of Kiran’s father’s brother, Richie. He, like my grandmother, enjoys the mountains and has built a beautiful cottage at the peak of his land with overlooks the entire valley. The cottage, recently built, is well furnished and is practical only under the consideration that he spends every other week there. Similarly, my grandmother’s cottage was comfortable, though now with her passing, it rarely gets visitors.
The road to the estate is a mud road. It does not even have the gravel common of back roads in the US. Instead, it is a combination path constructed from some manual labor and a few years of vehicular traffic. Electricity reached this area only 5 years ago. There are few year round residents within the estate, but even with electricity, little has changed in their daily lives. Kiran has sought to make his estate somewhat self sufficient. A caretaking couple has a house on one of the drying courtyards, there is a small stable for the 4 cows, and 3 smaller housing units that are occupied by some of the workers. The estate requires about 15 people for maintenance with an increase during harvesting season.
One of my goals during this trip was to revisit the mountains. I mentioned previously that on every visit to India, I spend some time here. However, most of that time was spend indoors. Adding to my desire to visit were pictures my mother had from before her wedding of her with family and friends at the peaks of the mountains. Over the past four years, I have gone hiking on trips through Outdoor Action and seen views in the US. It was my desire to see what my native country had to offer. Unfortunately, for Kiran, December is a busy time of the year so he was only able to give me one day
