Vinayaka Hospital - Karaikal, India: Thursday, January 29

“2 Elephants Electrocuted” says the page five headline in The Hindu, the local English language daily slipped underneath our doors each morning at the Paris hotel. It seems a couple of pilfering pachyderms from the Sirumugai Reserve, reaching across a farmer’s electrified fence for a bunch of bananas, met a shocking fate. The fences are supposed to be battery-powered but an illegal direct current hook-up is suspected. Authorities are investigating.

The sad news has nothing at all to do with Rotaplast’s medical mission here in Karaikal or the more than one hundred patients that the Rotaplast surgical team has treated over the past week for cleft lips, palates and other facial deformities. The real story is that the clock is ticking. Only two days of surgery left, and many on the waiting list may not make the schedule.

The shy girl who never left her home but did manage to make it to the hospital on screening day is due up for surgery today. But where is she? There are other no-shows, pulled away by family emergencies, or whatever. They’ll miss what may be their only chance to get this kind of repair. Other patients are moved up the schedule and into the OR. Maybe the shy girl is on her way.

In any case, the Rotaplast team has accomplished a lot so far:

SCORECARD TO DATE
(donated medical services, excluding hospital costs and supplies valued at US rates)

Doctors Al Goldberg and David Rosenberg traipsed from ward to ward, making the morning rounds. Friends since they were four years old back in Vineland, New Jersey, their fathers made clothes in the same factory. After going through school together, both became pediatricians.

For Rosenberg, still living in New Jersey, this is his third mission. Goldberg, who moved to the West Coast, is one of Rotaplast’s earliest members. When they met up a few years ago at Vineland High’s 50th Class Reunion, Goldberg challenged his longtime friend to come along on a mission. “It’s now or never,” he said. Both are in their early seventies.

Now here they are, a long way from Vineland, New Jersey, asking questions, shining flashlights down throats, asking for a cough, prescribing things (Tylenol here, a soft diet there), and leaving behind a trail of little plush bunnies, “Get Well” cards, patients on the mend – marks of an unusual friendship that has grown to include the world.

Karaikal’s Vinayaka college and hospital where the Rotaplast team has been working side by side with staff and interns for the past week is also unusual in many ways, especially for the young future doctors’ “commitment and enthusiasm,” says Rotaplast vet Sunil Dogra during a coffee break between operations.

“I’m very impressed,” he says of the interns and local surgeons, and he should know. Dogra is based at the Chapel Hill School of Medicine, where he is an associate professor in the field of anesthesia and pain. Dogra is India-born, but from the north. He visited his family in New Delhi on the way to Karaikal.

You would think being Indian makes communication easier for him on this mission than on his other trips to Latin America, but that’s not the case in Karaikal. “They speak English here about as well as they speak Hindi.” Dogra points out that Indians speak fourteen nationally recognized languages, twenty-eight regional languages, and a babble of dialects that changes every ten miles.

The interns themselves speak many languages. They’re aware of their school’s unique nature. It is one of the few medical colleges where nearly 100% of the students are living on campus. Thrown together from all over India to live and study, these students transcend differences in faith, caste, and ethnic origin on a daily basis. For a country that has seen ethnic violence and upheaval for thousands of years, the interns present a vision of India’s ideal.

“History is still alive here,” says Dogra on his way back to the OR, gesturing through the open window at the sunny landscape shared by farmers harvesting rice, Hindu temples, and the bleached white edifice of the college that is playing a part in India’s enormously promising, but very challenging future.

The Rotaplast team, all of whom donate their time and efforts, is contributing its part, not only in fixing up the kids, but sharing professional knowledge. Nurse Paula Fillari and surgeon Ron Gemberling both delivered lectures today on their specialties, in between operations.

Gemberling’s lecture was bumped forward an hour, however, to make way for a press conference conducted by Vinayaka’s Medical Director Dr. Susheela Rajendaran and the college’s principal Dr. Gandhi. All of Karaikal’s press corps – about 15 strong – got an earful about the Rotaplast mission, followed by what journos all over the world appreciate most – free food.

Before leaving the hospital at day’s end, we go searching for the shy girl. It seems she’s gone missing. But in one of the wards we find our twenty-eight year old orphan Ganthimithy Kodamathy (see Tuesday’s report). sitting on her bed with a cousin keeping her company. Through Dr. Safiullah, our excellent intern/translator, she says it’s okay if we want to take her picture now.

We’re going to show her new face to the world, but I’m wondering: has she seen it herself? Safiullah poses the question in Tamil. She hesitates. Another patient volunteers a small mirror. Under the halo of window light, the girl gazes at her face, the lip a bit puffy and the stitches still showing, but closed up nicely now where a ragged gap used to be. Her world and her experience are so far from our own, yet the reflection we see in the mirror is universal… a woman getting ready to step out.

Maybe after today’s press conference, that’s tomorrow’s headline in The Hindu.

Rex Weiner
Wayne Schoenfeld