Here's an e-mail we (and many of her friends) received from one of our Medicine volunteers in India, Claudia.

Medicine in India - Claudia Raperport

The most exciting thing just happened, about fifteen minutes ago I delivered a baby!!! I actually got to do the whole thing myself, pull it out, cut the cord, deliver the placenta, wash the baby etc. It was the most amazing thing I have ever done in my whole life, such an incredible experience! It was a boy, weighing 3.25 kilos! Not that you guys care about the details!

Anyway, I'm still having an amazing time in India, I've done such interesting things! Last week I went to a local AIDS awareness meeting and they got me to make a speech to the entire village which was about 80 people. My host translated it into Tamil because I'm not quite fluent yet!!! That was a bit scary but really fun. They had an amazing dance troupe who did a show about AIDS awareness, trying to make it accessible to all the people who are illiterate by making it less formal. It was a fantastic thing to take part in. They are working so hard here to improve their country so if we can help in any way it's brilliant. It sounds awful but we help just by being there because everyone is so excited to see Westerners that the whole thing gets put in the newspaper - my photo has been published 8 times now! Don't worry mum, I've kept the cuttings!!! On one hand I feel quite bad because we get the credit for all the hard work people do but we do increase the publicity very effectively!

After that, I spent 3 days in a leprosy mission hospital which was really eye-opening. They actually can cure leprosy now as long as it is caught early, and they are slowly managing to eradicate it from the country. It causes horrible deformities and we saw some really disgusting sights that no doctor in England will ever have to see. I seriously think I've seen worse stuff than I'll ever see again! The most amazing thing was going in the van to visit rehabilitated patients - they give them vocational training to be tailors and cycle repairers and set them up in their own businesses. It is so sad to see how they are treated by the village communities and even by their families, but the leprosy mission charity gives them generous pensions that encourage their families to move back in with them. It's sad that they need this bribery but it gives the patients such a better quality of life. By the way leprosy isn't contagious at all - its all a myth, but it can lay dormant for up to 15 years.

I then spent 2 days in a tuberculosis hospital - was initially a bit worried I'd catch it but my BCG kept me safe! We learnt so much about the science of the disease I'm not sure we need to go to medical school anymore!

This weekend I went to the kids in my family's school annual day. It was so cool to see all these small children doing classical Indian dance and also dancing to English pop songs! It was really cute and loads of the kids came to talk to us. Their English was so good, they all want to talk about cricket and laugh at me because India beat England!

Yesterday the villagers all invited us into their homes so I drank about 25 cups of tea and was fed all kinds of horrible Indian sweets, but they are so friendly here that it makes you feel quite ashamed because I'm sure we English people aren't nearly so welcoming or generous even though we have so much more money. The family I'm living with are starting to feel like my family, and the doctors are like a second set of parents to me so I'm going to be so sad to leave them all at the end of next week. I can't believe how quickly nine weeks working has passed!

That's the end of my news for the moment. Hope you are all ok and that those of you on gap years are having a wicked time.

loads of love, Claud.xxxxxxx


Claudia Raperport

Back to Volunteer Stories