John Denver and Vaccinations

Today was the start of our second week of actual work here in India. We started the day out with general meetings with all of the staff. After staff devotions and lunch, we had some more meetings with the new staff getting us ready for life at Woodstock. The real fun began after those meetings were finished. We decided to head to the Health Centre to get our vaccinations up to speed. We knew that we needed some when we were getting ready to come here, but we decided to wait. The cost of the sort of thing is significantly less in India than it is in the states. Today, we went in for our tetanus, typhoid, and round one of rabies. We each got two in our left arm and one in the right. Our arms are a little sore tonight, but it might get worse. Tomorrow, we have our hepatitis A, with the second part of the rabies vaccine coming next Monday. The third and final rabies shot comes three weeks later. Though our arms may be sore, I imagine it's far better than getting rabies or typhoid. And the best part was that we got three pieces of candy each for our three shots.

This evening, we went out with the middle school core staff for dinner. We went to "The Tavern," which is a very nice restaurant in the middle of the bazaar. The food was excellent and included butter chicken, paneer, some spicy potatoes, rice, dall, and fresh-baked naan. To top off the evening, there was live entertainment. A nice balding Indian fellow sat in the corner and played his guitar. We heard such rousing selections as "Take Me Home, Country Roads" and "The Sounds of Silence." He was actually quite good and it was a nice chance to meet with most of the middle school staff outside of the school setting. When dinner was over, we walked back to our house rather than taking a taxi. There was a group of about six of us, and it was a very good choice. The night sky was clear and we could see thousands of stars in the sky above us. We could also see the lights of Dehradun in the valley to one side of us, and thousands of lightning bugs to the other side of us along thr road. Everything seemed to sparkle for us. As usual we did not bring our camera. But there is hope. Tomorrow, we have dinner again at The Tavern with the social studies department. Hopefully, the evening will be just as nice and we'll have the pictures to prove it.

Dave and Beth