Teaching the Children

Occasionally, in between work (there will be another work-related entry soon, honest), I do get to have a bit of fun and do something emotionally/mentally stimulating. Safe Water was one of those. Even better was one that happened just before that -- I got to teach some of the local schoolkids.

As I've mentioned before, my project office is actually embedded in a school. It's a K-12 campus, both boarders and day students (mostly day students transported by private bus network), with affiliated vocational campus. This means that I spend my day surrounded by students and teachers, and of course the teachers are aware that there's an American doctor who also happens to have an IT degree. I've mentioned before that "foreigner" carries a pretty high social standing around here, so it was only a matter of time before someone realized that they should have me teach a class or two in order to bump up the prestige.
(The school is English-language, so by 10th grade, the kids are pretty decent.)

In this case, it was the principal's wife, and I was asked to talk for an hour on how to become a doctor and why the kids should consider this as a career. (Apparently, just as in the US, they have a problem with potential docs opting to do IT or business because it's more money for less work. Of course, the US doesn't have a problem with its doctors fleeing to India.) My skill at this was limited by the fact that I had no clue about the Indian medical education system, but since nobody at the school does either, half an hour with Wikipedia and a good poker face was pretty much enough. We got some good shots of Dr. Alik expounding on the virtues of medicine, including this one:





I focused mainly on the theme that in order to be a successful doc, you have to have three things: love of other people, love of science, and love of learning. It's an arguable doctrine, but I do think it characterizes the physicians who I look up to as good role models. Plus, if you've got those three, the need to memorize piles of useless crap does tend to take care of itself. I definitely painted a rosier picture of medicine than is really justified, but the developing world does need more doctors, and especially more doctors who'll care about the villages.

Of course, I also got to talk about my project, and the process of doing that was remarkably therapeutic. You'll recall my prior post where I wondered if I was doing any good here. Over the course of prepping for this talk, I pulled up the example of one infant death in a neighboring village. I was able to trace back the cause of death (stillbirth/low birth weight) and the mother's status (no tetanus shot or supplemental nutrition), which gives me a pretty decent picture of what might have happened here. More importantly, I do know that if a mom like this happens in the coming year, there'll be someone watching who can at least try to get her that antenatal care. That's a pretty concrete example of a kid who could have been saved. Thinking about that and telling the story really renewed my faith in the meaning of the work I'm doing. Now, I'm mainly hoping it inspired some of those kids to do the same. They seemed more focused on my descriptions of mental illness (how do you explain schizophrenia to a fifteen-year-old from another culture?) than on my big-picture point. But, you never know what might stick in the back of someone's brain.

There's not much time left for me in Bhorugram, but at least now I can leave here with the feeling that my work made a difference. That's about the best anyone can hope for on a problem of this size.