Today was our second day of placement here in SPASTN. They have the day divided up into little segments for us, so it really flew by. We started out observing in the PT department in the morning, then spent some time with Karthik in the sensory integration room. After lunch we had some independent study time to work on our project (more on that later) and then we spent another hour observing in the PT department.
So our project…. We’ve been asked to conduct a project while we’re here at SPASTN surrounding the use of a different outcome measurement (yet to be determined) than the one that is currently used here at SPASTN (which is the GMFM). This week they’ve asked us to collect different outcome measures, so that they can choose one for us to test on a subset of children, and then correlate those scores with the childrens’ current GMFM scores. The funny thing is that they seem to think we have magical access to all of these outcome measures simply by virtue of being Canadian. The problem is that most of them are copy writed and very expensive, so you can’t just find them online or in textbooks. Also, we still don’t have internet access, so we can’t even google the outcome measures to find out if there are any parts of them that we can find online. We tried to do some research in the library at SPASTN this afternoon, but their library is not only small, but very outdated, so it wasn’t exactly fruitful. I guess they are under the impression that we’ve been trained to use a variety of different outcome measures, which unfortunately isn’t the case, especially in a pediatric population.
After finishing up at placement, Priya, one of the PT’s showed us how to get to Basant Nagar, one of the “rich” areas of Chennai, that is frequented by foreigners. We went shopping for some clothing, and I got two nice, cotton (Indian) shirts for everyday wear. It was more expensive than other places we’d seen, but very good quality. We’re planning on going to a cheaper store tomorrow to stock up on more things to wear.
We are getting closer to getting our internet working also. We found a Reliance mobile store in Basant Nagar, and were able to purchase a mobile internet stick. They wouldn’t sell us the minutes for it without a proof of address (and the letter I have from SPASTN saying that we are interning there wasn’t good enough) so we called Karthik, and he agreed to help us with those details tomorrow. So, if all goes well, we will have internet by tomorrow evening. It will be so nice to be connected to the world again!
As we were coming out of the Reliance store, we were approached by a white guy wearing a “Philidelphia” t-shirt. He turned out to be a post-doc who arrived here in Chennai last week, and will be at the university for about a year. We started talking and the poor guy basically poured his heart out to us on the street corner (he was so happy to run into other Westerners). I guess he’s suffering from quite a bit of culture shock, and he’s feeling really isolated and lonely. We felt really badly for him, but at the same time it made Priyanka and I feel kind of good, because we are obviously dealing with the shock of living in India much better than he is. Granted, we know we are only here for 6 weeks, and we have each other, so that makes things much easier.
After chatting with the guy we hopped in an Auto Rickshaw back to the compound. The driver didn’t even try to rip us off! I think dressing in the Indian style really helps us get fair deals, because we don’t stick out as much as Westerners. We managed to get him to drive us all the way up to our door so that we could avoid trekking through the dark, snake-laden grass. All in all it was a very successful shopping adventure!
Tomorrow is new assessment day at SPASTN, so that should be interesting for us to watch. Aside from that, like I said, we are hoping to get our internet up and running, top up our phone minutes, and get a hold of some more clothing to wear to work.
Goodnight!
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