Mother's Day at LifeSpring

You hear them before you see them. The clank-clank-clanking of little bells and the uncertain flutter of tiny feet.

It is traditional for babies here to be adorned with anklets around both feet, decorated with little bells. Little princesses, they look like.

The hospital waiting room was filled with the jingle of dozens of these anklets, as families came to celebrate Mother's Day at our hospital. In honor of the occasion, we had a health camp and offered free antenatal care checkups by our doctors.

LifeSpring's Mother's Day health fair tradition stems back to three years ago, when we had our first health fair at Moula Ali Hospital. Spearheaded by our amazing intern Sarah, the event was an all-day affair where all of our friends were involved. Tyler was event photographer and helped out with decorations. John took family portraits, which we printed on the spot, branded with a LifeSpring sticker, and gave to our customers (for many of whom, this is their one printed baby photograph. In fact, when I went to one of our communities a week ago, a woman excitedly brought me to her living room to show me her photo prominently displayed from that Mother's Day!) Eleonora, Theresa, and Aparna all helped out too.

It was exhausting, but amazingly fun. Doctors provided free antenatal care checkups, and pharmacies provided free iron and calcium pills (and held a raffle for diapers). We had health stations set up to check blood pressure and weight, distribute educational material on women's health, and a kid's play station. For some pictures, see here (thanks John!)

This year's Mother's Day was just as festive. It focused on educating key decision-makers how best to decide where to go for delivery and involved tours of the hospital. I actually wrote a short piece about it in the Global Health Blog, a project of PubHealth.org and run by Sarah Arnquist (yes, the same intern who spearheaded the first Mother's Day event!): see here.

What's wrong with this picture?

Saturday afternoon, at the grocery check-out line. The cashier rings up my vegetables, juice... He gets to my oatmeal and looks perplexed. He enters the barcode, nothing. Tries to manually type the name of the product, nothing. However, this is because he continually misspells the item: marpel broun suger oaatmel.

After about five minutes of this, he simply looks up: "I'm sorry madam but this is not in our system. You cannot buy this."

"What?!" I am completely incredulous. I point to the price tag on top of the box. Rs 240.

"It's 240 rupees."

"It's not in our system."

"But it's 240 rupees."

"But it's not in our system."

I see we're not getting anywhere on this.

"Please ring up the total and I'll just add 240 rupees."

"Sorry, not possible."

Now I'm getting irritated.

"What do you mean it's not possible?! This is an item your store is selling, yet now you're refusing to sell it to me."

"It's not in the system."

"That's because you're not spelling it correctly."

I read out the spelling of maple brown sugar oatmeal. I even type it out for him. But he's right. It's not in the system.

Smiling smugly, he points to the blank screen.

"I know it is not in your system, but I will give you the 240 rupees."

"Hold on."

He leaves to presumably find his manager. By now the line has grown to ten customers, strangely none of whom are growing impatient by this now ten-minute transaction (or lack thereof). They all think I'm nuts.

Finally, the cashier comes back. He enters a code in the computer.

"That will be 240 rupees."

Unbelievable.

I know someday I might miss this. But hard to picture.

A lazy Saturday in Hyderabad

I love my mornings. One habit I brought back with me from the Himalayas is waking up early. I get up at 6:30am, turn my geezer on (hallelujah hot water!), and feel eternally grateful I can now take showers standing up, rather than squatting down under the faucet meant to fill up bath buckets.

Each morning, I do yoga outside, in my little garden (yes! -- a garden!!) and end the session with a meditation -- which now I look forward to instead of dreading. Then I cook myself some breakfast, and sit down to eat it outside on my porch swing, overlooking the flowers.

It's an amazing new apartment, really. I only have it for a couple of months, so I'm savoring every day. It was sad to leave Indira Heights, but I felt more than ready. I still love the location, overlooking Banjara Hills, with the sounds to prayer wafting through the windows. But two years had made it a little worse for wear, and continually being out of water was the last straw.

Cleaning 'ole Indira 202 out was like finding a time capsule of my first year in Hyderabad... back when I was in love with the apartment and everything was new and exciting. Cleaning out the drawers, I found tons of old relics from year 1, like the society page in the Hyderabad Times that friends were in, and malaria pills I thought I'd need.

In that same drawer was my The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe book, which I bought somewhere around month 4 when I just had to escape India one way or another... which had an exotic address hand-scrawled in the back: Shri Hari Yoga Ashram, Kanchianikoot Vashisht, Manali - in the Himalayas.

This was the ashram where John and I were determined to track down our yogi guru from Goa: Swami Yoganand (we just called him the living pretzel). When I asked the master yogi how we'd find this ashram in the Himalayas (where he teaches April through October when he's not in Goa), he simply said: "It is near the Petrol Pump." Hmm.

One of the best finds from memory lane was a stack of about 50 post-it notes, which were meant to be a video that John and I made for the next Hyderabad fellow. So what did we think was important to share to the new Hyderabadis? A few of my favorites:

• Locks are on both sides of the door. Develop a system so you don't get locked inside.
• www.makemytrip.com
• Anything is possible; "no" doesn't exist here
• Honking means joy
• Hotel Shadab by Charminar for delicious biryani
• On your birthday, bring a cake to work. Blow out the candles before the singing starts.
• When crossing the street, look LEFT. Then right. Then left again.
• 911 = 108

Nice to know at least some of these are still useful years later! ;)

Alma Mater

This semester, Columbia Business School students will be doing a case on LifeSpring Hospitals (which was published today on CaseWorks). The key question of the case is one we face daily: "In light of these ambitious plans to scale up, how should LifeSpring market its services to customers - many of whom had never before considered hospital maternity care?"

It was quite fun working with Professor Gita Johar on the case. There's even a video component of it (although seeing myself on video always makes me cringe!) Much of the footage is based on a trip here last here, so students of the case see a video of the communities where LifeSpring works, as well as interviews with our hospital staff and customers.

What a difference a few years makes. Social enterprise was still a small niche when I was in school. It's exciting that cases like this are now part of the overall curriculum!

Happy (almost) Mother's Day!

Got a pleasant surprise from Google this morning, who alerted me of a blog post titled "The best Mother's Day present EVER!!" I clicked on it, to find cheerful photographs of mothers who had delivered their babies at LifeSpring Hospital, along with a write-up on our hospital.

The blog's author, Betty Londergan, has an interesting story to tell. She saw the movie Julie and Julia, went home, and thought about what SHE would write about if she were to blog for a year. Her conclusion: give her money away and write about that!

Hence she set forth on her "What Gives" blog: "365 days of putting my money where my mouth is."

In her words: "Here's the plan: Every day for 365 days I'm going to give $100 to causes, people, and organizations that I believe are doing good work and are worthy of support. And every day, I'm going to write about why I chose to give - which hopefully will inspire other people to give a few bucks of their hard-earned money, too. Or not. Whatever the outcome, I'll at least have the deep pleasure of finding, supporting, and shining a light on 365 people, places and things that are making the world a better place."

She's quick to point out that she's not rich, and that she and her husband "managed to lose a nauseatingly high percentage of the dollars we painstakingly saved during our many long years on the planet" due to the financial crisis. Makes the project that much more interesting. After all, some things are worth more than money.

When I grow up...

Little boys love big machines, the world over. Tyler and I passed this little guy in Hyderabad a few weeks ago. His mother and her friends stood giggling nearby as we snapped the shot.

In Pursuit of Inner Peace

"All men should strive to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why." - James Thurber

During my 10-day yoga and meditation retreat in the Himalayas last month. These photos are at our camp in Maneri. There are worst things in the world than going to sleep listening to the rush of the river nearby. The week's agenda consisted of yoga, meditation, self-reflection, and facing our worst fears.