Paneer, BLS, and my return to middle school!

As you can tell by the title, it has been a busy few days!  Tuesday night we celebrated Dessa's birthday at Hotel Sangam, our go-to food joint, where I enjoyed in delicious paneer butter masala (yes, that is cheese, butter, and delicious masala, i.e., artery clogging goodness).  We were joined by Ramesh, Ravi (our co-instructor) and his beautiful family, as well as our house-mom Tendrall and her son.  After dinner, Tendrall and Mukesh helped us get home by taking us on our first bus ride in India!

Allison counting all the rupees for Dessa's birthday dinner!  (The birthday girl is sitting at the head of the table)

My Wednesday was spent entirely in lecture.  During the first few hours, we learned about cardiovascular disease in India and honed up on our sphygmomanometer skills (i.e., blood pressure taking).  Then, we were treated to Basic Life Support (BLS) training, provided by instructors from Chennai.  Oh, how ICTPH spoils us! :)  Anyway, during this training, we refreshed our CPR skills and learned how to use an Automated External Defibrillator (AED).  

Our BLS instructors, SVGs, and TPS students.

Practicing taking blood pressure

Today, we had another field visit to Ambalapattu, where our GI team (Sangeetha, Stephanie, Erin R., and myself) started gathering more information to help us develop an intervention to address diarrheal disease in children.  After we picked up our local SVG, Suda, we stopped by a local middle school to chat with the headmaster and some of the teachers about existing health education and current handwashing/sanitation practices.  Unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures of this beautiful school, but I'm sure we're going back sometime soon, so I will share then!

We also went to the homes of some villagers to talk about their water use practices, where we enjoyed some local delicacies: mangoes from a tree in their front yard and .... water.... from their local tap... In case Ramesh is reading this, we only had a sip, I promise!  We then visited the city's one working public bathroom (pictured below).  However, we learned that it apparently hasn't worked for at least a week.  

The public bathroom.  Apparently they fill that bin up with water once per day and villagers take water with their hands and use it to clean themselves after they use the bathroom. 

The GI team with the school librarian in her kitchen!

Today also marked our first attempt at geo-tagging!!  In other words, we use this awesome iPhone app (Theodolite, because I know the brothers will want to google it) to take pictures of things around the village (water sources, in our case) and send the latitude and longitude coordinates to a computer so it can be mapped and analyzed.  Super awesome!

Well, I'm off to find some Nutella and crackers before bed!  Looking forward to a long weekend of sleep, paper-writing, and errand-running!

Beautiful India.  :)