Four weddings and a funeral...

...one wedding and two surgeries actually! Its been a long busy day...

At 5:30am we set off to a nearby village to the wedding of one of the hospital drivers. Who would actually want to get married at that time of day even if you actually knew and loved the man!!!!? Well I'm not sure the bride did, she looked quite miserable for the whole thing, and was also scarily young. Everybody else there was partying quite a lot though! They had a group of musicians blasting out music (especially the drummer!), flowers everywhere, wreaths, dangly things from the ceiling....They went through a really amazing set of rituals which involved throwing bits of leaves as offerings to a god I think, putting lots of powder on forehead, putting hands in the fire, exchanging wreaths, putting toe rings on, making a fire where the priest was sitting cross-legged and doing a kind of ring a ring of roses thing around it...!!!! Afterwards we all had a huge breakfast feast so I don't think I need to eat anything else for the rest of my trip!

The excitement of the day didn't end there, we got back to the hospital and observed Dr. Rajulan do a tonsillectomy which was quite straightforward (well he made it seem that way!) and squeamishness-free ....HOWEVER....(!!!).... this afternoon a man came in with crushed fingers from his job at the factory so we watched Dr. Sigith (the ortho specialist) operate on him. Its the most disgusting thing I've ever seen! I felt pretty dizzy and I'm never squeamish! His fingers just looked like chopped up meat though and there were bits of bone, dead flesh all over the place. And that's without mentioning the vast output of blood which was making a lovely puddle on the floor...it was incredible though, the doctor is attempting to save his fingers and put metal rods in and sewed them up, amazingly looking more or less cylindrical again! We'll have to wait 2 weeks or so, hopefully he won't need an amputation!