Long trips, temples and a very different Australia Day

COUNTRY: India
PROGRAM: UniBreak
PROJECT: Community Health Work
WRITTEN BY: Jemma Ireland

This weekend saw the group hopping on a van and travelling to Amritsar; home of the Golden Temple and the changing of the guard ceremony at the Pakistan border. The trip is around 200 kilometres, so that’s about 2 hours, right? Wrong. In India, winding roads, traffic and minimal multi-lane highways ensure that a 200km trip on a van takes around 6 hours – when everything works in our favour that is. Unfortunately, we stopped for two trains, were stopped by police 3 times and stopped for a truck which had managed to get stuck in the middle of the road, blocking both lanes... On a bridge.

There really is no getting around that. So this meant our already lengthy 6 hour drive, was turned into a painful 8 hour one. With the promise of Maccas when we got to Amritsar hanging in the air, we were getting a little, well - insane, by the end of the trip. On a positive note – best tasting Maccas ever.


At the Pakistan border, we became very familiar with the phrase ‘can I get one snap?’ After some initial confusion about the meaning of this term, we were soon professionals at posing for photos. For some of us,this became very old, very quickly and several techniques for avoiding the said ‘snaps’ were quickly adopted. Eventually after probably having our white faces uploaded to Facebook by various Indians, we made it back to the van and traveled to the Golden Temple. To our shock, when we arrived at the Golden Temple (at night time in the freezing cold), we had to remove our shoes.

I must say there was a sense of dread when throwing our shoes into a sack, hoping they would end up back on our feet – I was having visions of walking the dirty streets of India back to our van barefoot. Needless to say our shoes did end up safelyback on our feet, but not before hitching up our jeans and walking through a pool of water, then over numerous unknown sticky things. That night we enjoyed sharing a meal together, sleeping in a beautiful king sized bed with a soft mattress (a rarity in India) and having a shower where the hot water lasted longer than 3 minutes – bliss.

With our health education week commencing next week, this was our last week at our regular placements. Some of our group members had the privilege of witnessing some surgeries in the operating theatre at the Karan Hospital. The surgery itself was like watching an episode of RPA – the practice however, was very different. The students were shocked, firstly with the fact that they were not required to scrub in (thankfully the surgeon and nurses did though!), a staff member answered their phone in the operating theatre and a patient was numb from the neck down, but awake during a hysterectomy. We are so thankful for the opportunity to witness these procedures, an opportunity which would usually not be offered until much later in our degree back in Australia.

Today we were faced with a very different Australia Day. We woke up and decided to try and brain storm Aussie things to do/eat to celebrate the day, even though we are on the other side of the world. As we somewhat jealously scrolled through our Facebook newsfeeds about sun, fun, BBQs, beach/pools, and food, we had the realisation that: It’s 5 degrees, cows and pigs are sacred, therefore a BBQ is out of the question, we are thousands of kilometres to the nearestbeach and the only Australian flag we can find, is an interesting mix of the American and Australian flag. However our day was brightened by playing some Aussie classics, using whiteboard markers as clap sticks and then figuring out how to stream the hottest 100 from our computer. Namaste, mates!