Delhi: Holy Family Hospital
First day in India

Oct. 4th

I arrived in Delhi early on the morning of the 3rd, and I have been staying with Eddie David, the Indian administrator of Holy Family Hospital of Delhi.  I'll be staying with Eddie for the next week before I fly to Jammu since I need time in Delhi to adjust to India and also to do errands before I go off into rural North India.

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The hospital campus is located on the edge of Okhla, which is a predominantly Moslem neighborhood that is located in the south suburbs of Delhi. (Indeed, it was strange and exotic to be woken this morning by the pre-dawn calls to prayers from the minarets of 3 local mosques--these mosques compete with each other for their congregations, and so the muezzins are boosted with sound systems that make every syllable audible from blocks and blocks around). 

As a Moslem neighborhood, Okhla is a lower- and middle-class neighborhood that has been historically underserved by the Indian government.  Indeed, the order of American sisters who founded Holy Family in '55 focused on the fact that Moslem women had often denied treatment by the men in their families because there were very few women medical doctors available to treat them in private. 

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In a move that eventually forced a change in the canon law of the Catholic Church, the sisters took up the practice of medicine and filled the service gap, but the hospital later expanded into general coverage of the populace, including the Hindu neighborhoods on the other 3 sides of the campus.  (Note that the sisters in the photo above are from the Sisters of Charity, which is Mother Teresa's organization.  Many of them are sent to Holy Family in Delhi for training before they are given much tougher assignments.  The sisters who founded Holy Family are from an American organization based in Philadephia, and they handed over the hospital in '91 to an exclusively Indian staff).

In the last 50 years, the hospital has advanced tremendously and now ranks above many government hospitals in Delhi in terms of the equipment available and the quality of care (they even have a CAT scanner, which is uncommon).  This evolving success had many fathers, but the most important factor is that the committed American nuns took a secular and practical approach to the hospital administration, and thus attracted Moslems and Hindus from Okhla into the hospital staff.  This is not common practice at Catholic and Protestant charitable hospitals in India, which are frequently parochial and discriminatory in their staffing.

For this reason, I cannot underemphasize to you that Holy Family is effectively a modern, self-supporting hospital with a charitable component that is exclusively run by Indians.  Although the hospital services are meager and chaotic by US standards, Holy Family is considered to be one of the best charitable hospitals by Indian standards, and is even preffered by the middle-class locals over the government hospitals because of the quality-of-care.  (Note, however, that upper-class Delhians go to a number of private and exclusive clinics that provide services equal to what you could get in the US).

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Because Holy Family is a sucessful, growing modern hospital, I would not wish to do volunteer work at this hospital, either now as an unskilled volunteer or later, as a licensed MD.  I also think that Holy Family is an exception, not a norm in terms of solvency and quality of care among charitable hospitals.

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Eddie David's residence is on the campus of Holy Family, and so I am effectively living at a hospital.  Although it may seem strange to live across from the hospital entrance, it is common practice at independent charitable hospitals in India for the key staff and doctors to live together in a campus community.  For this reason, there is an intimate sense of community at Holy Family, such that doctors from the Hospital have been coming to our residence in the evenings during dinnertime to discuss one matter or another (the room from which I'm writing is on the 2nd floor to the left).

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The photo above is from the street just outside Eddie's residence, where I'm staying.  The autorickshaws honk all through the day and through much of the night.