honk if you heart curry

So we's in the country now!

After our time in Hyderabad, it was time to move onto the rural area somewhere outside of Warangal. Turns out, life in the country here is much like life in the country at home: very very quiet, and without internet.

So the pace of life has slowed somewhat, but not our bowel movements, as we continue to sample Andhra Pradesh's famously spicy daals and curries. It's curry and rice in the morning, noon and night! Mandy and I, in fact, decided the other night that curry is so ubiquitous, you could substitute it for any word in a sentence and it would somehow make sense. So we did. And it did. If there's one thing we've learned about country living: the best way to deal with being stir-crazy is just to embrace the crazy. There's a fair amount of hysterical laughter going around.

Anyway, our days are filled with going to the care & support centre for HIV/AIDS patients, and absorbing all we can about what work the nurses do there, how health care for these patients is organized in India, and also spending a fairly significant proportion of time being a human jungle gym and nursery rhyme teacher to the kids who stay there. The kids are kind of awesome. They live there, and go to school there, and they are all HIV+. And adorable. One of the smallest guys gets picked up by the others a lot, and I had to rescue him from what was shaping up to be a pretty serious brain injury by scooping him up... and then he hung out in my arms for a long time after that, and now he asks to be picked up a lot by grabbing my hand and stretching his arms up. I loooooove him.

I think some of the things that are hitting me most hard about HIV/AIDS in India are the issues of stigma surrounding it (many doctors won't treat people with the disease, and sometimes even nurses who do work with this population are shunned by their families), and also the struggle for gender equality. It seems like women are unable to protect themselves from the disease often, and then when they are infected (for example, by their husbands who have contracted HIV from outside the marriage), they are not allowed to leave the marriage, and are particularly marginalized, all the while being expected to care for their children.

Anyway, I think my time is running out in this very sweaty and dusty "internet cafe" (of sorts), so I will say goodbye for now. I am pretty homesick, and missing all of you, so keep the emails and phone calls coming.

xo