A Winter in India

We are moved in, and the holidays are mostly over, and so on Monday we went to the Dental College. Dr. Verma put us in the hands of Dr. Meera Chowdhury, Associate Professor of Paediatric Dentistry, a wonderfully gentle woman with a great sense of humor. Dave was able to start teasing her immediately.

We were shown into our office, a nice space on the second floor. We have a big desk, two plants, fresh gladiolas, four chairs, a sofa, a big thermos for drinking water, plates, coasters, and six glasses that look like dandy scotch glasses but are really so we can serve our guests water. (They apologized that the set-up for making tea wasn’t all there quite yet). We have office supplies, and a phone that calls other offices in the building but isn’t hooked up yet (will be in a few days). We are right next door to the dental school library and there is a computer there, and there will be internet connection on that soon. The whole building is designed to be a wireless network, but that won’t be up for a while. They have only been in the building themselves for four months, and the priority was definitely on getting the clinics up and running. Beautiful Adec equipment, made in Oregon.

At the Dean’s request, we had developed a list of topics we could lecture on, and a list of subjects we would like to learn about while we are here. We said that we would see a few lectures before we start ourselves. So, after settling in, we began talking with Dr. Meera about the lecture schedule for this week Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Dr. Meera asked which lectures we would like to take. We said, “All of them”. She said, “All of them on all of these topics?” We said, “Well, we can’t lecture on Indian Community Dentistry, so we want to take that one from the Community Dentistry professor.” She said, “I am sure he’d be happy for you to take that lecture. When do you want to take it, Thursday or Friday?” “Well, whenever he is giving it.” “No, he’s not giving it; you said you wanted to take it.” So, dear readers, you can probably see where this is going sooner than any of the three of us did. Turned out that when she said “take a lecture” she meant “deliver” a lecture, and when we said “take a lecture” we meant “attend” it. So, after we got that spiral untwisted, we all decided that Pam and Dave are attending lectures this week, and then will start delivering them next week.