April 23, 8:30 pm, Vellore
Yeah sorry about that short entry yesterday. I actually fell asleep while I was writing. My bad. Where was I again? Oh yeah, the temple inside the fort. It was pretty sweet. They even worship there and so as I walked by this one area, these guys were doing all this chanting and there was incense going and stuff. Pretty interesting.
After the fort, I headed to CHAD. We were supposed to be doing outpatient again, and it was child and maternal health day (which they do every wednesday). It was crazy how busy it was! There were so many women there with their babies, I couldn't believe it. We were going to go and observe with the pediatricians, but they told us that they were understaffed and so they "would not be able to translate even one single word" for us. But we were welcome to sit and observe if we wanted. haha. No thanks. So we went with Sam. He is the PT/OT guy and he does developmental screenings on the kids under 5 years old before they go in to see the pediatricians and get their immunizations. So we watched him do developmental screening for a while... checking reflexes and that kind of stuff. Nothing too super interesting, but there were a lot of really cute babies and kids, so that was fun. They were pretty efficient and managed to screen like 140 or something in a couple of hours.
After we finished there Aurora and I decided to head out to the golden temple that is nearby. It is this place that was just built a couple of years ago, in 2007. Pretty interesting story. The guy that built it is supposed to be some embodiment of this goddess Narayani. So he had this temple built and he offers puja there every day and people go and watch him pray and he blesses them and stuff. It's interesting. They have this big star shaped path that goes around the temple and you walk along (barefoot) and read all of these signs that have quotes from Amma (the guy that is the goddess) about different spiritual things. And then in the center is this golden temple that is really impressive. It was so intricate and ornate. We got to walk up around the temple and stuff. The grounds there are really nice too. Lots of statues and it is well manicured and stuff. It is supposed to be "a spiritual oasis". At the end, you go through this little building and there all little stations. At the first there is some sort of holy water that people would either drink or put on their heads. We just walked past this one. At the next one, there was this metal helmet looking thing that this lady would put on your head for a second, I guess as some sort of blessing. Then after that there was another lady that marked our foreheads with red. And then after that they gave us a free little bowl of some food. We didn't know what it was but ate it and it was quite tasty.
Okay, darn it. I have to go. I'll have to write more later. Today was a slow day. There was a strike and so we didn't get to work. We just sat around all day pretty much. Now we're leaving for Kerala. Our train leaves in an hour, overnight train. So we are leaving now. Later.
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