Time....

Time....

Time has been a constant motif that I have identified throughout my brief stay here in Hubli, India. I had to adjust to the TIME change the first few days I was here, which had me a bit tired in the beginning. We are also reminded on a consistent basis about our short 2 month TIME limit for the implementation of our projects. "India TIME", however, is by far the most difficult concept to adjust to.

"India TIME" can be best explained by our experience yesterday when we attempted to meet a representative from the NGO that we will both be working with. We scheduled the meeting for 11. We left to go to Dharwad, the location of the NGO which is 45 minutes away, around 10 but we did not start our meeting until 2 pm! First, we attempted to have our contact pick us up from the bus stand when we arrived in Dharwad. He asked if we could meet at MG bank, so we took a 15 minute bus to get to the bank. After waiting at the bank for 45 minutes, we attempted to call our contact, but unfortunately his phone was turned off. We decided to look for the office ourselves using the address we had. We asked numerous people on the streets, all who were very responsive in attempting to help us.

We walked in circles for another 40 minutes until we came across someone who knew the location of the NGO, Bhoruka Charitable Trust. We follow the person, only to find out that the NGO was a 1.5 minute walk away from where we were the whole time! Of course, when we arrived, there were no issues about starting the meeting late. This is because there are certain events and factors that may occur here that one cannot pre-plan for. Therefore a 9 o clock meeting may start anywhere from 9 to 11!

Time has been a very positive concept today, however, in regards to our productivity in a number of important extensive meetings today. Our first meeting was at Karnataka Health Promotion Trust, which is a grant making organization for BCT. (The meeting was supposed to start at 1, but it didn't start until 2:15...) We brainstormed about changes that we could make to our program to use the existing health infrastructure in the Dharwad District. KHPT has begun to implement Village Health Committees, which consist of 10-15 villagers in each village that have been identified to establish a community based initiative to promote general health in the area. We can possibly utilize them as our village health directors. We were also informed of a government program that is also providing telemedicine in the area,but which is lacking on the community involvement side, something that we can provide in our pilot program. In addition, the NGO agreed to identify 10 villages that we can begin implementation with by this Monday.

Working in an environment with other innovators has really been beneficial to our project as well. Having discourses with like-minded thinkers has brought out some great ideas. One of which came from a meeting with a UC Berkeley Innovator, Anu, who is working on a Water Outsourcing project in urban areas of Hubli-Dharwad. She suggested restructuring our program to an experiment-type model. Since there are so many organizations that have attempted to implement projects similar to the one that we are implementing, what would really be beneficial to other innovators is which versions of telemedicine work and which ones dont. We can do this by trying 3 different versions of our project, keeping the same constants, but changing one factor so that be can better determine which factors are most conducive for productivity and sustainability. We were thinking about making one version a micro-enterprise, one version purely voluntary, and the other we are still researching.

We hope that this version will contribute more to the body of knowledge about telemedicine, and can help us better decide which is the best way to go about these types of programs. We hope to begin project implementation around week 3, so we are definitely working on a condensed time schedule.

Tomorrow we are going to meet with 2 government employees who work with the government version of telemedicine. They both said to come to the office at 10:30, but they both have staff meetings that start around those times, and one said "God only knows when those things end".... so we will see what time our meeting actually starts....

Until next TIME,

Breanna