Medical camp at Kodakerai on May 3, 2009

The visit to Gutheri last month lead to a discussion on conducting a medical camp for the village of Kodakerai and the neighbouring hamlets. Dr. Sudhakar, who came up with this idea, worked on getting the doctors and drugs to be distributed to the patients. Parallely, Sanjeev worked on getting the FD permission and for passing the message to the villagers. D-Day was decided for May 3rd 2009 and the team was supposed to jam up at the Aiyur FRH the previous evening.

Since it was a long weekend (due to May 1st - Labour day), some of us decided to head to Aiyur early. Karthik and Anand took off in Anand's trusty Shanthi. Guru, Sunil and I left a little later in our bikes and after breakfast at Attibele, we reached Aiyur FRH at noon. Karthik and Anand, who had gone towards Devarabetta to do some birding, had not yet reached Aiyur. So, the three of us decided to bike over to Kodakerai and find out if the villagers had got news of the medical camp as yet. Got to sight a black eagle and couple of Short toed snake eagles hovering over spider valley.



On reaching Kodakerai, we realised that the villagers had not received news of the camp and so we went about informing everyone we came across about it. Since we had time to kill, we trekked up to Gutheri, did some birding (sighted an Emerald dove for the first time) and returned to Kodakerai by 5 pm. Got news that Shanthi had visted Kodakerai in our absence. Headed back to Aiyur and bumped into the entire gang (Karthik, Anand, Sanjeev, Prasanna, Jayraman, Sudhakar and Balaji) by Sami Eri. as they made plans for the evening's revely, I headed back to Bangalore since there was no one at home and I had to feed my dog, Subbu.

Left early morning and zoomed to Aiyur to find that people were still getting ready. Bumped into Guru and Dr. Jasim at Namileri packing breakfast for the rest. After breakfast, we hauled few chairs on Arvind's Qualis and with Shanthi and Dave's Innvova, we left for Kodakerai.

On reaching there, we got the school opened, arranged the tables and chairs, made a make-shift covered area for the lady patients. The doctors were grouped as follows:
- Dr. Lavangi and Dr. Deepika: Gynecs
- Dr. Jasim: Pediatrics
- Dr. Balaji: General Physician
- Dr. Sudhakar: Overall in-charge of doling out medicines
With everything set, the rest of us set about getting the patients! One man came in hesitatingly, and then a lady with a child and gradually it became a deluge. Guru was handling the patient registations and he was soon surrounded by ladies, babies, old women etc. We had to soon resort to crowd control which Dave, Karthik and others ably handled. Sunil set about taking pics while Jay and Prasanna went about to the other hamlets to spread the news of the camp.






By around 12 pm, we ran out of drugs and then had to just issue prescriptions to the patients. The typical problems that people had were skin infections and respiratory problems (due to poor hygiene). After dealing with approx. 167 patients, we decided to close the camp and after thanking the locals we headed back to Aiyur where Karthik had organised a sumptous lunch.

With that we decided to call it a day and we headed back to our respective houses. The doctors and Sanjeev decided to pay a visit to a hospital at Bettamugilalam which is run by a retired doctor. There we donated the some of the stuff like surgical gloves etc. and they returned to Chennai.

All in all, a very satisfying experience. A big thanks to the doctors for thinking of the idea, organising the medicines and coming all the way from Chennai for this. And a big thanks to Karthik for co-ordinating the whole activity.

-
Laxmeesha Acharya
President
Kenneth Anderson Nature Society

Participants:
- Laxmeesha
- Sanjeev
- Prasanna
- Jayraman
- Karthik
- Anand Menon
- Dave Stocker
- Arvind Adhi
- Ravi
- Guru Timmapur
- Sunil Gaikwad
- Dr. Sudhakar
- Dr. Lavangi
- Dr. Jasim
- Dr. Balaji
- Dr. Deepika