Well, today is great. My daughter fences and yesterday we spent the entire day in Charlottesville at a tournament. Normally smaller tournaments do not take all day but fencing tournaments, like other events that include lots of kids and only a few organizers, vary wildly in execution. My conspiracy theorist side thinks that organizers like tournaments so much that they inflict these all day affairs on the rest of us…:)
Fencing tournaments are executed thusly: everyone fences everyone (“pool bouts”) to establish rankings and then you fence in single elimination matches to see who wins. Erin has normally fenced well in the pool bouts but when the pressure of single elimination came, she had a tough time. I don’t know if that particular monkey is off her back but she did very well in single elimination yesterday and came in 2nd place. Sarah and I are very proud of her.
On another subject: I happened to be flipping channels this morning and came accross a movie on HBO called “Smile Pinki”. I did not see the entire show but it takes place in India. I’ve never been to India but it appears to be a place of wild clashes of culture to the point that I think it’s difficult for people from the west to really understand it. Before I started my own company, I had several Indian colleagues at different places of employ, at least one of whom I considered a good friend. He was a brilliant software engineer who graduated from the Indian equivalent of MIT. One day we were at a Thai restaurant in Herndon and he relayed to me just how long it took him to get to his parent’s house in India: a flight across the Atlantic, a bus ride, a train ride and then ox cart. I remember thinking at the time that this all sounded very involved but that I understood it. I can tell you that after seeing this movie, I didn’t.
The central character in the movie is an adorable little girl from an extremely rural part of India (her village has at least several mud huts) who has a cleft palate. The film makers follow her on her trip to a hospital in an Indian city that specializes in fixing these kinds of birth defects. It’s a real eye opener. The difference between their hospitals and ours is stark. It seems so different that I wonder at the difference in outcomes for the patients.
The part of the movie that really summed it up for me is when Pinki and her father go to “check in” at the hospital. Check-in is held in an open-air mad house where you go to the desk, answer some questions and they give you a number. Then you go wait awhile for your number to be called. This ain’t a waiting room – it looks like it is just an outdoor area. Pinki’s father, when asked for a phone number at check-in, hands the clerk a small book and points to a number. The clerk looks at him and says “sir, this is an amount of money, not a phone number.”
After the successful operation, the father gets a clerk to call a phone number in his village to pass along the good news. The clerk dials the number and hands the phone to the father. The father holds the phone to his head but it’s immediately obvious that he’s just mimicking what he has seen other people do – he doesn’t know how to use the phone! The clerk, nonplussed, reaches across the desk and helps him get the earpiece in place……It’s a great and happy story as Pinki’s palate is repaired but the differences between here and there are just jarring.