If it ain't broke, don't try and fix it

It’s been over a month since my last bloggette, but I do have a doctor’s note to excuse me from doing my homework. Honest. Stuff has happened. A combination of Christmas, conventions, commitments and a collarbone has meant that I have been otherwise engaged.

First off, Happy New Year to all. New Year’s probably a distant memory now, and Christmas even more so. But just over a month a go it was all still in the offing, and I was headed to Bhubaneswar in the neighbouring State of Orissa for ‘The Blast in Bhuba’, better known as the VSO Programme Area Review.

Things start falling appart at Christmas

My only request before I left was for Pramod, our office assistant, to replace the tap that had been dripping my kitchen sink for the last month. The one that used to drip a bit before I decided to try and fix it. A little tightening here, and tweak there and it should be fine. Wrong. First rule in Indian plumbing: if it ain’t broke don’t try and fix it. Even if it is broken, still don’t try and fix it, you’ll only make it worse. Indians, on the other hand with their incredible ability for thrift and a huge reluctance to throw anything away, don’t really know the meaning of broken; there are really only degrees of working. Even if something that is mostly not working should be strapped, bound and gagged into submission for another term in service.

‘Please Pramod’, I pleaded, ‘here’s the money, it’s only 50 Rupees, just go and buy a new one’.

He would have none of it until he himself had properly inspected the offending item and was convinced that the death knell had truly sounded for the erstwhile faucet. It took a month before he finally admitted defeat, and I headed for Bhuba with a brand new lovely blue plastic tap fitted at a jaunty angle due to the fact that I got it to the point where it only dripped and bit and I’m now too scared to try and adjust it.

So a mere hop skip and a jump of a 16-hour train ride, and I was in town for what I thought was going to be some fine times to have a look back at ’07 and put some plans in place for the upcoming year. And it was also a rare treat for the VSO volunteers to all get together. So the cultural melting pot that is the India Volunteers came together, and I got a chance to put a face to the email address of some fine, fine people. To mention just a few, there was the infectious joyfulness of Julie Bee, the Ugandan smiling machine. Lis’ Dutch forthrightness kept us in order, even Carlos, who had brought with him from the Philippines an uncanny ability to remain quiet for hours, only to explode in a diatribic convulsion of enthusiasm once on a roll. Then there was Blanca and Enrique, who get my vote for quite possibly the nicest (Spanish) people on the planet. Ken, the Aussie turned (nearly) Brit was the Don of India volunteers – hugely experienced but with the positivity of a newbie whilst Laura and Michelle only two weeks in country, just seemed to fit right in. As ever, it was great to see the Delhi crew: Marlowe, who had done a great job of all the graphic design for the event and Freya were lovely as ever.

So we planned and participated and debated and discussed through the first two days. The third day, was set-aside for Volunteers alone to meet. And it was that afternoon, my collarbone and my shoulder has a slight falling out. As they say, if it ain’t broke, don’t rip it out of its socket snapping all the tendons in the process. Now, I wish that I could say that I took one for the team, and injured myself ‘in the line of fire’. In years to come it may come out like:

‘Well, there was this huge truck out of control and a kid just standing there in the road. I had no time to think. All I did was react, you know? It was just instinctive’, or ‘so it was just me and these three guys with knives and clubs…etc., etc…’

However, the much less impressive truth is that at 35 I probably shouldn’t be playing ‘tag’, but I was. And slipping over on the grass during an afternoon break from the meeting probably shouldn’t result in anything worse that a grazed elbow, but it did. I went from ‘ouch, that really hurt’, to ‘ouch that really hurts’, to a full on ‘white out’. Everything went extremely fuzzy, to the extent that I couldn’t hear anything but the ringing in my ears and feel the waves of nausea sweeping over me. Just above the crashing of my senses, I was vaguely aware of Geri instructing me to sit the hell down. ‘What for?’ I stupidly asked as my legs started to give way.

The other voices were discussing what to do. Joyce is a physiotherapist and whilst she had never actually popped a shoulder back into place before, she was more than up for giving it a go – that’s the volunteer spirit, but it’s kind of lucky she didn’t.

It was also lucky that we were only a few minutes drive away from the best hospital in town. Unfortunately that doesn’t say a lot in one of the poorest States in India. But thank the Lord I managed to get into to see a doctor within 15 minutes, and he calmly told me I hadn’t dislocated my shoulder at all – good news I thought. No, I had managed to dislocate my collarbone – not so good news. And it wasn’t a case of popping it back in place – worse news. I would have to be operated on – you can stop the news now, thanks. But there are no beds available, so you’ll have to wait to be admitted tomorrow – it was at that point I started to swear.

In the mean time, Geri and Danny who had come with me to the hospital were just awesome. Geri calmly talking me through what was going on, Danny running around the various departments buying sterile needles to give me the pain killing injections that were, by now, all I could think of. My heartfelt thanks to them, they were legendary.

Now, I’m usually not that bad with injections. But I was in shock and my blood had all diverted to the centre of my body, so as the nurse tried for the third time to get a vein whilst two orderlies literally knelt on my arm, I have to admit let out the faintest of yelps (and the rest). I have never been so happy when the nurse explained the next one could be injected into my bum!

By this time Geri had already contacted the VSO Programme Office, and they had swung into action. The bottom line was that they just couldn’t be sure about the hospital in Bhubaneswar. I should go back to Delhi. That thought didn’t fill me with joy, but it was the right decision. They had me on the last plane out of Bhuba about four hours later. Marlowe, looked after me and took me to the airport, where we hung around swatting mosquitoes and he kept me distracted enough to forget about the pain.

I landed in a very cold Delhi at 2 a.m. and Mousumi from the Programme Office was there waiting. We were at the hospital not long after. By 4 a.m. I had seen the emergency doctor the consultant orthopaedic doctor, the surgeon, and the X-ray that showed my collarbone had popped up like a rebounding springboard – beat that NHS! At 4.30 a.m. with Mousumi who had resolutely refused to leave me alone curled up on the sofa in my hospital room, I closed my eyes on a long day.

Various reactions came back to the news. My Boss, Natalie, was concerned but calm. My sister was slightly more on the histrionic side of concerned. However, once I’d convinced everybody that I was in a real hospital with real doctors who really knew what they were doing, it was fine. I was in one of the best private hospitals in Delhi, as good as any in the Western World. All through my little collarbone mishap I can’t say enough about just how good the VSO Programme Staff were. They were fantastic and I never felt I was anything but in good hands.

A few days later they had used the technology and they had rebuilt me. Not quite six-million-dollar-man-style, but the 10cm metal pin that was holding my collarbone in place whilst the tendons regained enough strength to keep it connected it to my shoulder must have cost at least a tenner – I still have it as a little souvenir.

So I was in Delhi a week earlier than planned. A little miffed that I had missed what was going to be a big week at work and the chance to get down to Bangalore again and meet for the second time with the AZ crew there. I did a little shopping and amused myself with trips to the local park to watch the local kids playing cricket. The idea being that I get a few good action shots of the next Sachin Tendulka swinging the bat. No chance. The minute my camera came into view swarms of kids came stampeding towards me jostling for prime position at the centre of the frame.

But, I took it easy enough in the run up to Christmas, with the help of some pretty powerful painkillers, to be able to join the South Delhi Massive for an Indian Christmas. We had a tree, presents, and bucks fizz on the balcony laid on by Freya and Ruth. And a good time was had by all. We rocked it Delhi-style to the huge amusement of the kids perched on the railings opposite.

I was back in Deoghar just before New Year. I hide at New Year for the sake of others. It’s generally not me that has the bad evening, but guaranteed each year someone I’m out with will have possibly the worst night of their life. I was all set to stay in – just me a bottle of red wine that a friend had given me as a get well soon present. Red wine, oh my gosh. Not a lot of red wine in Deoghar. None in fact. However, my date with Mr. Cabinet was not to be. My Boss from NEEDS had also recently returned from Christmas in Kolkata with his family. So Murari, Tanmoy, and myself saw in the New Year over some delicious Bengali-style fried fish and with a wee tot of rum. I’m happy to report there were no fatalities and I woke up for once on New Year’s Day with nothing worse than a still aching shoulder.

Work kicked in pretty hard after that. A week out when I was pushing a timeline with the project leaders had put me way behind. I was determined not to let things slip, so in the last few weeks we have produced organisational capabilities as part of the new performance management process, defined the organisations goals for the next two years, skilled up master trainers for the recruitment and performance coaching programmes and tomorrow, I’m training people on the assessment centre I finished designing today. We’re back on track.

I also started work with the kids group on my Sundays, which is a joy. I work with Ashok the Child Protection Programme Officer. Between us we manage to keep things relatively in order and he helps me bridge the language gap. We started by doing some stuff that helps them think about their lives: hopes, fears, dreams and the people who are important to them. There is a strange duality about these children. On the one had they have seen a lot for such young people – I had one eight-year-old describe how he wanted to learn about commerce so that he could maximise the profits from the street trading that he runs himself. On the other they still have the uninhibited boisterous charm of kids that love to play. It’s maybe just a little sad that they don’t get the chance to be like that much. The most common fear amongst the group was for their basic security. Fear of violence, fire, electrocution is what they live with everyday. It was lovely though to end the session with everyone smiling. I brought my guitar along and twelve kids singing along to the chorus of ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’ can’t help but make you smile.

In the middle of all that, I did a round trip to Delhi (22hours each way) for a 15-minute hospital appointment to have that pesky bit of wire removed. It made a world of difference. I have maybe a 80% functioning arm that works pretty well most of the time, but I have to be careful not too overstretch it. It should be back to normal in a month or so I reckon.

So that just left me with the annoying dripping sound coming from the bathroom that has recently got louder. The stop-valve looked like it wasn’t quite stopping, causing the water to keep on trickling into the bowl rather like someone’s bad attempt at an Indian in-house water feature. Problem was that I could here it quite clearly from where I sit in the dining room and it was not so much a water feature, as water torture. Just a little tightening of the value should fix that I thought. I had not learnt my lesson…when the only thing that’s holding your stop value together is the lime scale that’s accumulated around it, trying to fix it is a bad idea.

Time for a change in mindset…if it it’s only partly working, get something big and hit it – then it’ll either properly brake or give in to superior fire power. The big brick that now keeps the value in place is slightly ungainly as bathroom accessories go, but it does the job. I think I’m getting the hand of Indian DIY.