By David Strickland on
5/25/2007 3:17 PM
A couple posts back I referenced that I was planning on booking our airfare. Things got delayed for a variety of reasons but today I finally got it done. We leave the second week of August. I spent about 5 hours bouncing around the web trying to find the best deal. We talked to a travel agent out of Chicago that quoted us $900 per ticket.
If you do much research on travel to India one of the first companies you'll find is Air Indian. FLEE!! Run like the wind. Avoid Air India at all cost. We have had a variety of problems with Air India but we never seemed to learn our lesson. Most recently when my wife went to fly to India her flight was scheduled to leave at 1:00 pm. We checked in and everything said it was on time. So I left and started driving the 6 hours to get back home. Shortly before 2:00 my wife called and said they had been delayed. At 3 they were delayed again. Then again, then again finally about 10:00 pm they canceled the flight entirely and said that it wouldn't leave till the next day. 4 hours later around 2:00 a.m. I finally got a call that my wife had gotten to her accommodations for the evening. She had to fly out in about 6 hours. The next day as my wife was eating breakfast she got a chance to talk with one of the crew. The crew member acted surprised that the passengers hadn't been informed till 10:00 pm that the flight was canceled considering the crew knew the moment they touched down into Chicago. It seems an instrument had failed during the flight and a new one had to be ordered. They knew it wouldn't arrive until someone could bring one in and that wouldn’t be till the next day. The crew knew the flight was canceled 9 hours before they told the passengers. Needless to say we decided to NEVER fly Air India again.
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By David Strickland on
5/24/2007 10:36 AM
Don't have a lot of details as yet but one of the girls jaundice has relapsed. Lack of rest and lack of proper nutrition has relapsed her jaundice. She is headed for the hospital today. I'll update with more details as they become available.
From Wikipedia:
Jaundice, also known as icterus (attributive adjective: "icteric"), is a yellowing of the skin, conjunctiva (a clear covering over the sclera, or whites of the eyes) and mucous membranes caused by increased levels of bilirubin in red blooded animals. Usually the concentration of bilirubin in the blood must exceed 2–3 mg/dL for the colouration to be easily visible. Jaundice comes from the French word jaune, meaning yellow. Jaundice typically appears in a 'top to bottom' progression (starting with the face, progressing toward the feet), and resolves in a 'bottom to top' manner.
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By David Strickland on
5/23/2007 2:44 PM
Not long after the last blog post the world started to spin on me. I spent 4 years in the US Navy and I can remember that sick feeling you'd get after a night of drinking when the world would start to spin just before the ground would suddenly get ripped out from underneath you and you'd find yourself face down in the dirt. Well thats about how I felt come Monday evening. There is a lot going on at the moment with airfare and final plans, figuring out how well meet our budget since I haven't nailed down any work thier yet. Throw on top of that the fact that we are now expecting a new addition to the family in Dec and the world begins to spin.
Starting an orphange isn't always skipping through flowers on sunny days hand in hand with gratful children full of love. Sometimes it's just plain scary. Scary is what it was when I finally decided to sit down and relax a little Monday night. I popped in the final installment of the LOTR movie. Watching Frodo struggle with his own inner evils as he climbs to mount doom seemed like a good distraction to take my mind off my own concerns. As I watched I remembered something from a book I once read by John Eldrige. John was talking about these Epics and why they are so popular. He pointed out that down deep inside we all want to be part of something larger then ourselves that there is a desire to take on a giant evil and overcome it.
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By David Strickland on
5/21/2007 10:33 AM
Well this last week we got our boxes. 4 Large Gaylord boxes along with 8 international export pallets. Also got a quote for shipping the whole thing. As it sits at the moment the quote I got to ship from U.S. to India was $350 for the first Cubic Meter $150 for each additional meter. This is actually a lot less then we originally thought it would be. We have 3 pallets of items already packaged that we know we have to ship. Training materials books etc. We didn't think we'd be able to ship much else because we figured it would be cost prohibitive. In the end we found that we couldn't replace things as cheaply as we could ship them. We aren't exactly sure what customs is going to run us on all this. It's all used stuff that is going into the house or orphanage but we'll have to see.
It's going to take about a month to get our stuff to India so we'll have to ship it out in the begining of July. Another lesson I stumbled across in this process was wood. Originally I planned on building some boxes out...
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By David Strickland on
5/14/2007 7:41 PM
Well 79 days to go and things just got a little more complicated. It appears my wife is due Dec. 5th. So shortly after we arrive in India my wife will be in her final trimester. Another little note. It appears that India doesn't have the epidural so my wife will have to do this all natural. I guess here in the states there are some women that prefer it however all things considered I think Mercy would have preferred to be drugged. From the sounds of it the doctor will try to talk us into a C-Section anyway. Seems that Indian women are much more prone to complications then American women. At least thats what you'd have to assume from the reports since the majority of Indian women have one complication or another that requires the doctor to cut out the baby. This might have something to do with the fact that the doctor make more money if they have to operate then if the baby comes normally. Of course if you ask about that you are assured that things like that only happen at someone else's hospital and it's a life or death for either the baby or the mother and it must be removed surgically. What else can you do but take thier word and watch them hack away likely cutting something they shouldn't since they have no reguard for the patient to start with leaving behind a scar for life.
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By David Strickland on
5/10/2007 10:33 AM
At 81 days out my wife's family came over from India to see the U.S. They are surprised by a lot of things but one of the most obvious is our waste. As we drove back from the airport my mother and brother in-law wanted coffee. Now before I go to much father I need to point out that there is a fundamental difference in coffe world wide. It was one of those little surprises you never expected. I'm a coffee addict. Coffee to start the day coffee to end it. I drink my coffee black. No milk no sugar. In India however coffee ALWAYS has milk and sugar. To make coffee in India you take a sauce pan put milk into it. Bring it to a boil. Add a couple scoops of coffee grounds and let it boil. When it is dark enough you add several teaspoons of sugar until it's about as sweet as maple syrup. Once done you run the sticky brown milk through a strainer to get the grounds out of it and then put it into small cups about the size of a Texas shot glass. One of the things I missed the most while I worked in India was a simple cup of black coffee.
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By David Strickland on
5/2/2007 1:59 PM
91 Days to go. Not much new has developed over the last couple weeks. The girls are both back with thier caretaker and doing ok. We did get work that they are running around with some neighborhood boys and that thier language and manorisms are degrading badly The morality and standards thier parents had when they were alive are gradually being replaced by the morality of the slum they are living in. We hope we won't get thier to late.
Slums are never plesent but they aren't exactly what I expected. Sure the poverty is tough but it's not the only problem. The slums are full of people without hope slowly destroying thier lives with Alcohol or drugs. Any sense of morality or standards is lost in the hopelessness of thier situation. Men have little to do and often end up drunk and abusive. Thier is also little security for the wives who never know when the next meal will come or when thier husband will come home. Women are often left behind with the children as the husband can find work somewhere...
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By David Strickland on
4/21/2007 8:34 PM
For those of you keeping up with our battles over Jaundice or young friend went home yesterday. Low and behold once we started threating to put her into a different hospital sheget better in just days. Ok call me sinical but... Whatever the reason. She's on her way home. Well make that on her way to the temporary quarters we have arranged for her till we can get there and give her a home.
Our work here on the website has started to be more then I realized. It takes about 10 minutes per orphanage to setup the pages for reviewing. It won't be much work once we get the bulk of them loaded. But at the moment we have about 60 input and 500 more to go that we already know about. On the brighter side Google finally indexed the site. Of course since google will only add one page per day they should have it all indexed in about 2 years. \
Things are progressing. We are getting more and more neverous as we get closer to our departure date. One note not sure if I mentioned before. We had to move our...
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By David Strickland on
4/19/2007 1:38 AM
When we went to move our young friend to a new hospital the head physician of the hospital finally got envolved and said that they had started a 2 week regiment of drugs and that she was only half done. If we left now the new hospital would have to start all over. Not sure what is truth and what isn't but being 10000 miles away really puts us at the mercy of the feet on the ground. It seems that he was convincing enough to convince the lady we sent to move her so we decided to wait.
I did talk with a doctor friend here in the U.S. that tended to make me think it's either something she was born with or it is Hepititus B. I asked if they had done a hepititus test yet and haven't heard anything. Talk about a hard thing to tell a young teen. I would hate to have to tell her she's dying but then again after loosing one parent and watching the other slowly fade with Jaundice she could likely teach me, how to handle emotional distress. Hopefully I won't have to find out.
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By David Strickland on
4/17/2007 9:24 PM
Finally we got an update on the girls. One is fine she has recovered. The second girl however is getting worse. Her jaundice is deepening the yellow behind her eyes is getting darker. The social hospital doesn't seem to be doing much good. Our caretaker took a loan to cover some of the expenses about 10,000rs ($200). We told her to go ahead and transfer her to a better hospital. Definetely a down day. Mercy wishes she could be there as it is the doctors aren't paying any attention to her because they know she's an orphan and figure she can't pay her bill. If Mercy was there she could sit with her and as soon as the doctors knew there was going to be someone there until she got better they would take better care.
The poor rooms in the hospitals are just open halls with 20 or more patients on flat beds. It's almost sureal like a war time movie the cries of those in pain or dying can be heard at all hours of the day and night. It just feels like a place you go to die. The doctors come through on occasion...
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