The mad rush back to Karigiri on day 1, then hurry up and wait. Brisk welcome. This pretty much sums up what was left of our day by the time we made it to Karigiri at 11:00 a.m. When we got there we were promptly asked why we were late and we replied in part truth, we got lost... cause we actually did, but it didn't account for 3 hours. After sitting down and filling out paperwork for 20 min. or so we got an olive branch in the form of chai tea. Then we waited for another half hour or so until the head Dr., Dr. Solomon, briskly asked one of the girls who, had just momentarily risen from her chair to look at a calaneder on the wall, to sit down. After that, he actually had a fairly warm welcome speech to deliver. After the formalities had been taken care of we wandered over to the canteen for lunch and to await the 2:00 p.m. afternoon start time for our tour of the Dept. of Laboratories. The tour was actually quite interesting. Mycobacterium leprae is actually quite hard to grow in a labratory setting. The only medium that has been found that can grow cultures, is made from the footpads of mice. Karigiri has it own mice factory and research center where they follow the resistant strains they find in patients. It was interesting to see this kind of research going on in the middle of the very arid, rural, countryside. With the tour completed we headed back to Vellore making plans for tomorrow and vowing not to be late two days in a row!
As a side note, Karigiri is of special interest to me even more now that I am reading a book by Dr. Paul Brand "The Gift of Pain". It chronicles his life experience of dealing with and treating pain. It takes a unique view point that without pain, we would destroy our bodies because we would have no warning system... and therefor pain should be looked at, to a degree, as a blessing and not a curse. He then expounds on this concept and how it applies to today. He actually worked at CMC in Vellore and then helped start Karigiri. So this week is of special interest, to see in person what i'm reading about in the book! This book came highly recommended to me, and I would highly recommend it as well! The link for it at amazon.com is below.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0310221447/ref=dp_olp_used?ie=UTF8&condition=used
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