Things You Didn´t Learn in Training

The Peace Corps never warned us about the army of pathogens that were waiting to wage war against our defenseless immune systems. Many new volunteers packed their bags when they discovered that there were legions of viruses, bacteria, funguses and parasites laying in ambush for them. If we had reflected on all the prophylactic vaccination entries in our WHO health booklets, we would have realized what contagions we’d eventually be exposed to.

During the cultural training that was intended to prepare us for life as volunteers, it was never implied that India had no place for someone that had even a mild case of bacteria phobia, or was overly fastidious about their personal hygiene. A shower meant pulling up a bucket of water from a well, if you had access to one, and using a tin mug as a scoop, while you scrubbed and rinsed one body part at a time.

Deformities that were hidden away in hospital wards in the West were everyday sights and infectious diseases that in other places were long since eradicated or easily cured, were still common. Open defecation and urination were normal practices and the rule rather than the exception, as indoor plumbing was non-existent. People performed their bowel movements out of doors in any secluded place, or if one couldn’t be found, a wall or a beach would do. 

The women went out before dawn and after dark, the men when the need arose. You had to be careful when you walked in the fields and paths early in the morning before the sanitation crew, comprised of the village dogs and black, hairy snouted pigs, cleaned up. Toilet paper? What was that? You used your left hand and a scoop full of water to clean yourself after a bowel movement, and saved some of the water to rinse your hand, and the chances were there wasn’t a bar of soap available unless you happened to have one with you.

Given the lack of sanitation and hand hygiene, fecal- and oral transmitted infections and parasites were rampant, and most drinking water was likely to be contaminated by a brew of bacteria, especially during the monsoon season. Human excreta, night soil as it is euphemistically called, has been used as fertilizer in India for thousands of years and is a transmitter of all types of gastro intestinal illnesses and parasites.

Ascariasis, intestinal worms, was a common infestation, their eggs spread by the sludge and dung that is collected from the sewage ditches and streets and then spread on the small patches of garden where cash crops were grown. If you were unlucky enough to be afflicted, no amount of training could prepare you for the sight of round worms crawling around in your stool.

To decrease the chance of infection, we were taught to either peel our fruit and vegetables, boil them, or let them be. 

We came from a sheltered society where detergents and disinfectants promised to make our lives antiseptic and germ free, and where doctors treated illness with the help of the latest pharmaceuticals. Kolar seemed as though it had fallen through a crack in time and into an earlier age where illnesses were treated with traditional herbal medicines, puja offerings, prayers and mantras. 

Cannabis was regarded in the West as no more than just a mind altering drug, but ancient Indian physicians had been mixing it into medicines and herbal teas as a pain killer and anesthetic for thousands of years. Mani, our housekeeper, appeared in the kitchen one morning holding the palm of his hand against his swollen cheek. His shoulders were stooped and his ready smile was contorted into a grimace. 

“Mani what’s the matter,” I asked. 

“My tooth is hurting very much."

“Can I help", I asked in English. 

"I need to buy some medicine,” he replied, without removing his hand from his jaw. 

I gave him a few rupees and when he returned I was curious to see what he had bought. Naively, I expected him to show me a prescription bottle of pills or aspirin, something familiar that I could relate to, but instead he opened a neatly folded sheet of The Deccan Herald and showed me a heaping pile of marijuana. 

“Mani that’s ganja!” 

“No Francis, it is medicine for my bad tooth.”

Antibiotics are considered to be one of the most significant scientific discoveries of the twentieth century, but in a place where there was no drug store to fill a prescription, let alone a doctor to write it out, cow dung also an ancient all purpose cure, was considered a panacea for many ailments.

In as much as cows are revered and sacred among Hindus in India, their manure was considered by many a gift from the deities with supernatural healing properties and it is a staple ingredient in traditional folk medicine. 

Women trod in newly plopped cow droppings to soothe their cracked and calloused feet, and men in pressed white shirts scurried over to a cow as soon as it raised its tail and wet their fingers in the stream of warm urine, then rubbed it into their hair in the belief that it would strengthen it.

Dried dung was also used as fuel for cooking where wood was scarce, and you could see rows of round patties with a hand print in the middle, pressed on cottage walls to dry. Villagers mixed fresh droppings with water and spread it on the floors of their huts creating a plaster-like hard surface when it dried.

I became seriously ill one afternoon when Mike and I were repairing a compressor at a drill site in an outlying village, half a day’s journey from Kolar. The onslaught was sudden and violent. It wasn’t the normal case of “Delhi belly” because the last clear memory that I have of that day and the following one was staggering to the nearest bush, arching my back and vomiting, then bending over double while my bowels turned themselves inside out.

I vaguely recall lying in the back of the jeep among our tools and spares, wandering in and out of consciousness while we bounced over cart tracks and village roads. 

Cholera was endemic to Kolar District. During the short summer rainy season, there must have been a risk for an outbreak, because I saw that there were rows of people standing patiently in the market being mass vaccinated by government health workers. Nurses in white saris went down the line, dabbed alcohol on thin arms, and inoculated everyone with the same huge syringe that looked like it could have been borrowed from a medical museum. According to my WHO records I had been inoculated, but cholera serums were only fifty percent effective, and the protection lasted only about six months.

I woke up in the mission hospital with a tube in my arm and it might have been out of habit that Dr. Joshi didn’t tell me what it was that I had, maybe because he didn’t do a stool analysis, or he simply didn’t want to alarm me. His ordinary patients had no understanding of microbes and amoeba or coli bacteria. They believed illness was caused by the evil eye or bad karma from the present or a previous life, and that it could be accepted as a way to atone for past ill deeds, or to clean ones moral slate.

We didn’t have to go off to a field or forest when the call of nature came. We had an outhouse with a door. It was no more than a hole in a concrete floor without a flush (we drew up a bucket of water from the well and poured it in when we were finished) and with a pipe that ran out into an uncovered ditch, but still, a luxury that set us apart from our neighbors. 

“I will fetch the sweeper” Mani said, the first time the privy needed a good cleaning.

 I said that I’d clean it myself and asked him to buy a brush and try and locate some disinfectant. He said something like

“No it is not appropriate”, this time more emphatically, meaning that it was a real cultural blunder. 

“It’s okay,” I told him, “I can do it”. 

“No, no,” again, not realizing that cleaning the outhouse was a job for the casteless, or the untouchables as they were referred to, implying that it was beneath my station, and his also, to have an employer that cleaned a toilet. He explained that it was the sweeper’s job to take care of the carcasses of dead animals and all other types of ordure. 

Looking at the man people called the “Sweeper” didn’t do much for my belief in his knowledge of sanitation, especially when he took the filthy rag that was wrapped around his head and blew his nose in it. There wasn’t any perfume that could camouflage the stench that came from him. His clothes were tattered and his eyes jaundiced and watery. He was missing more teeth than he had and his few remaining fangs, randomly placed, were stained bright red from the beetle juice that seeped out of the corners of his mouth and that he regularly spit out in a crimson gob on the dusty ground. 

He drew up a bucket of water from the well, sloshed it around, asked for a few paise, and left the outhouse about like he found it. I cleaned it after that, despite Mani’s protests.

When a visitor not accustomed to putting their left hand between their cheeks and washing themselves clean, clogged it up with crumpled pieces of the International Herald Tribune, Mike, resourceful as always, started up one of the portable Atlas Copco compressors that we were repairing in the workshop and stuffed a one inch pneumatic hose into the blocked pipe. He opened the pressure valve and blasted it clear with a burst of compressed air that blew muck and paper all over Kolar’s new extension. 

Of all the personality traits that were necessary to be a successful Peace Corps volunteer, I’d have to say that besides a sense of adventure, a high tolerance for the unusual and unexpected were the most important.

Mike and I had rented a fisherman’s cottage in Goa, in the early 1970’s when Goa’s endless beaches were still one long expanse of unexploited paradise. It was a simple hut, unfurnished, with straw mats on the earthen floor and with shuttered, unglazed windows that presented a smorgasbord for the mosquito swarms that came to feast on us, but gave a magnificent view of the beach and the Arabian Sea. 

For some reason that I didn't understand at first, there was a sturdy stick like a staff that a wanderer or a pilgrim might carry, placed against the door post. At dawn on our first day I went out with my little pail of water and found a clearing in the jungle-like undergrowth where I could answer nature’s call.

Before I could turn to see what was rustling in the bushes behind me, I heard a deep throated snort and was knocked over by the bristly snout of a grumpy black pig that unceremoniously bumped me on the backside to get me out of the way of its breakfast. The reason for the stick standing by the door became self-explanatory, and the next morning I took it with me when I went to the clearing.