Mon. Oct. 19: Running the Flu & Customs Gauntlet

3:00am. We stepped out of the plane into the hot, humid, languid Indian night air, and a bus transported us a short distance to a small arrivals building, which reminded me of a spartan 1960s-era civil facility. I could see hordes of mosquitoes swarming in the lights of the facility, and was glad I'd started my Malarone anti-malarial prescription the day before.

The mass of people from the plane squeezed into one line to get through the terminal door, and then we were funneled into an impossibly narrow, loud, chaotic space to wait for customs. We shuffled along slowly to make progress in the line, but by the time I got to the front of it, clutching my "flu survey" (a sheet of H1N1 symptom-related questions we had received on the plane: Are you sick? sneezing? feverish? no, no, no) I was told I needed to get out of the line and push my way over to visit the medical personnel lined up a few feet away, who were apparently clearing people before customs.

I made my way sideways to a Dr. with a mask on, and a stethoscope on his folding table. He eyed my form and then eyed me suspiciously: "Are you feeling well? Any symptoms?" I replied, "Yes, just fine. I'm completely healthy, no symptoms" and then he asked me to open my mouth so that he could shine a flashlight into it from two feet away (not sure how much that diagnostic would tell him). Only then would he sign off on my form.

Later, when I compared experiences with my Corporate Service Corps (CSC) team members, I don't think anyone else had had the flashlight experience. Our NGO coordinator suggested maybe the medical Dr. was just using the flashlight on the girls, but I had seen him ask an Indian gentleman for the same.

After getting the doctor's signoff on my H1N1 form, it was back to the other line, to wait for a bureaucrat to stamp my customs form. Then onto baggage claim, which took quite a while, and then out the other side of the building by 4am, where I was cheerfully met by Arjun, a very nice young man who is the coordinating NGO's local in-country logistics specialist. He had just met four other arriving members of our CSC team (Annamari, Rich, Soon, Per) and sent them off in a taxi to the hotel just 10 minutes before. He also procured a taxi for me, and instructed the on-English-speaking driver to take me to the Ginger Hotel in downtown Ahmedabad, about 30 minutes away.

As we drove the night streets of Ahmedabad's outskirts, I could see that vendors were already setting up various carts along the side of the road. There was still a bit of traffic at 4am, but I ever could have imagined the utter chaos that streets become during the day...

I met Gavin, our DC-based NGO coordinator, at the Hotel Ginger, and he set me up with my Indian mobile phone and wireless access info. When I got to my room (rather spartan, but very clean and comfortable), it must have been 95 Fahrenheit in there. I couldn't figure out how to work the A/C or the Internet, so I finally decided at 5am to try to sleep by the breeze of the ceiling fan.