Home health visits

Today we joined a nurse and a community healthcare worker (see previous post about CHAD for more info about these) on their home visits. We hopped in a jeep with them and went to 4 small villages on the outskirts of vellore, and got to learn a great deal more about how their rural healthcare system works. A traveling nurse comes to see each of the patients both before and after the doctor sees them with the traveling clinic, to make sure that whatever changes were made in the patients medications have been working. The visits also serve to maintain a presence in the community, and build good will.

Moriah (left), the nurse (center), and the Health Aid (right)

And man what good will has been built. Moriah and I were warned that the trip would be long and hot, and we would need to bring our own food and water. The food was certainly unnecessary, as every house we came to was quick to offer us whatever they had. Our timid refusals were indeed no match for the powerful and at times even overwhelming Indian hospitality. I had one of the most delicious pieces of papaya I have ever had, and a luscious fruit I had never heard of called zapota (also called sapodilla in the caribbean) that looked like a potato from the outside. The fruit had a very sweet, malty flavor that tasted like candied pear. We were told zapota juice is exceptional.

This was a wonderful opportunity to see how the people around vellore live. Most of them are farmers, growing varieties of fruit and mainly rice. Almost all had at least one cow (one woman asked us to wait while she milked it in order to make us coffee). For the most part people lived in one to two room cement/brick houses surrounded by their small farms.

As I said above, a main part of this tour was to build good will among the people, and for that reason we spent a great deal of time sitting by their houses or in their living rooms chatting. The community healthcare worker's job is to know very intimate details about these families, ie when people get married, how many children they have, how much money they have, when and how people die, etc. It goes without saying that in order to do that they must build a great deal of trust among the villagers, very few of whom are Christian, mostly Hindus and muslims. It was amazing to see her weaving herself seamlessly into these families, sitting on the floor with them peeling banana flowers and shooting the breeze. Though neither Moriah nor I understood the language, by observing the body language it was clear that she was very, very skilled at her job.

It was very cool to get to see home health visits in India, considering my mom did this in Ridgecrest.

Dave