After spending a very productive and insightful week at various clinical sites, our clinical immersion in Bihar, India came close to an end. Our team is very happy and gratified with the overall immersion experience in India, thanks to Jhpiego Bihar for making this possible. We decided to perform preliminary synthesis of our observations and insights from the trip over the weekend. Next week, a distinct panel of global health pundits will be present in Delhi for a 'call for action' meeting, hosted by Jhpiego India. Fortunately, we were given an exciting opportunity to present our clinical immersion findings to this panel on Tuesday (25 August) at Jhpiego Delhi office, sincere thanks to Mr. Tore Laerdal for bringing all these people to a single table. Hence, our agenda for the weekend was to prepare for this meeting.
On Saturday, after having breakfast, we met in one of our rooms, worked on compiling and organizing all the scribbled notes that we have taken during our discussions with various stakeholders. After working for 4 hours, we broke for lunch and went to a fancy restaurant nearby 'Bollywood treats', which was included in the Patna to-do list mentioned on some of the travel websites. We had a hard time reaching the restaurant on foot as a heavy downpour filled the roads with water. We reached this restaurant partially drenched and waited a couple of minutes to dry our clothes. We had had a variety of food from different cuisines (pictures can be found in previous blog post!!)which were very yummy and stomach filling. Later, we headed back and prepared for the meeting with Pushkar. In the meeting which lasted for 2 hours, we discussed about our insights obtained from observations and brief overview of potential project areas. Pushkar helped us with our initial problem validation and gave us valuable advice and guidance about the process of prioritizing the list of potential project areas we have identified during our immersions. After the meeting, we spent the next few hours incorporating Pushkar's inputs into our work. Later in the night, after having dinner, we watched the Hindi movie 'Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani' with English subtitles (subtitles are for our American friends, who are novice Hindi speakers!!). We watched if for an hour and went to bed early as we were very tired and have planned to start working early the next day.\
The next morning, we started by brainstorming on the prioritization criteria for project areas, after a prolonged discussion with heated arguments, we agreed on the criteria and their corresponding weights. We started ranking our project areas based on these criteria, to find out our winner and subsequent runner ups. We were surprised to see the prioritized needs order was way different from what we have expected. In the afternoon, we have presented our prioritized order to Pushkar, who advised us to include additional prioritization criteria to the existing list and observe the variations in the ranking order. The new order was some what consistent with our expectations, and after we got convinced with the order, we started working on our presentation. In the evening, we opted to visit the Gandhi ghat and experience the boat ride on the holy river Ganga. As Sakina wasn't feeling well, only the four of us were joined by Pushkar on our way to the Gandhi ghat. The roads leading to the ghat were very narrow and were crowded. We were anxious whether we would reach the ghat on time, but thanks to our driver who was very skillful in driving on the tightly packed streets of Patna. After reaching the ghat just in time, we were fascinated to see the speed and height of the flow, apparently this was due to heavy rains in the past few days. The boat was docked at the far end of the ghat, and we waited for couple of minutes to get on to it. The boat ride was promoted by Bihar tourism department, and the boat commonly called as 'Ganga Vihar' has a restaurant and a recreation room for the tourists.
The setting sun and the flowing water made a wonderful scenic view. Our photographers Kavya, Kendall and Ramji were already in the job of capturing those beautiful moments. Pushkar with his DSLR and GoPro was capturing pictures of the Laerdal penguin, which travels to different countries along with the employees of Laerdal Global Health (LGH) and has its own Twitter account!! There was a tour guide on the boat explaining us about the historical sites on the banks of the river Ganga as we slowly passed them. When we were going downstream eastwards, we were able to see a bridge across the river, Mahatma Gandhi Sethu bridge, which is the longest river bridge in India extending 5,575 m connecting North Bihar and South Bihar. When we were about to reach the banks and head out of the boat, an Aarti had started at Gandhi ghat, so we watched it from the boat while Kendall was filling the customer feedback register (Tour guide requested her to give her feedback!!). After completion of the Aarti, we went back to hotel and started working on our presentation. After making significant progress with the presentation and discussing about our tomorrow's meetings, we called it a night and went to beds.
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| LGH Penguin!!! |
