CHAD history

I will write only a little about CHAD because I have tried to catch up on the weekend first.
I am sorry I don't have pictures- I wish I could upload more, but the internet place has not had a working drive for since last week.

A very nice man gave us a history lesson on CHAD and the CMC in general. His story was much embellished from the history provided on the CMC website which is already dramatic. Ida Scudder was an incredible woman. http://www.cmch-vellore.edu/pages/?id=scudder

Originally the CMC trained only women, but after independence in 1947 was required to train male drs. also. Ida Scudder's original philosophy was to train women to then head into the small tribal towns to treat people who did not know they were sick or did not know how to find help or could not afford care. She had never wanted to build a hospital, yet was compelled by wanting to provide specialized care. The first patients requiring hospitalization were housed in her home while she wrote specialists in the US to ask advice. The maximum the mail could take was 100 days so patients were hospitalized for exactly 100 days.
Dr. Scudder continued to travel by ox to villages daily during her entire life while simultaneously developing CHAD (comm health and development) and RUHSA hospitals. These hospitals were demanded by small tribes as a return for educating medical students on rural rotations about cultural practices.
The CMC main hospital currently has 2000 inpatients, 4000 outpatients, and 8000 staff present on any given day.

Most interesting was the discussion about Dais- or midwives and the integration of cultural healers into the expansion of the CMC medical mission. But I might need to leave this for tomorrow when I have more time.