Lost in the Desert

This happened more than ten years ago, but it feels like only yesterday.

I was in northwest India with Relief Riders International, an organization that sent medical caravans around Rajasthan’s Thar Desert, offering basic medical care to people of the villages.

The caravans were funded by--let’s face it--rich American women, whose reward was riding across the desert on India’s unique Marwari horses.  RRI engaged the doctors and the horses, ran the clinics, and dispensed the limited medicine we had.

We stayed in palaces and old forts, pilgrim hostels and luxurious tents in the desert. The details run together in my memory, but I will remember one place forever.

It was a caravanserai in the desert, miles from any town, where traders with camel trains once stopped for water, food, and shelter. The traders and their camels are gone now, and the ancient stone building stands empty.

The front of the structure is a long verandah, bisected by shallow steps leading to the stone-paved courtyard below. Small rooms for travelers, cubicles, really, opened off the back of the verandah. Cooled by the surrounding stone, they were a welcome relief from the desert heat. 

It was a perfect place for our clinic. Its only drawback was the portable toilet set up in a dry riverbed about forty yards away.  It was a hike, convenient enough during the day, but at night?  Not so much.

The day I’m remembering was a tough one. Two of the three promised doctors hadn’t shown up. Neither had the dentist, who’d been a huge draw. We had one doctor and more than two hundred people waiting for treatment.

Everyone in our group had a part to play, from registering patients to filling prescriptions. My job was crowd control. Why me? Probably because I’d studied four foreign languages and wasn’t shy about communicating with people whose language I didn’t speak.

On arrival, every patient was given a numbered cardboard square and told to wait till their number was called. They were escorted to the doctor’s cubicle one at a time, in numerical order. My job was to keep the villagers calm and optimistic, believing that no matter how many people had come to the clinic, everyone would have their chance to see the doctor.

None of the adults spoke English; some didn’t even speak Hindi. Luckily, a few of the children had learned enough English in school to help as translators. Pantomime was useful, too, and a smile or sympathetic look could work wonders.

When the clinic finally ended, hours after sundown, the exhausted doctor had seen every villager.  We were tired, too, and looked forward to a hot dinner and bed.

After the meal we sat around a table in the courtyard, drinking bottled beer and sharing the triumphs and disasters of the day.

I’d run up and down the verandah steps many times that day. So often that I lost track of exactly where the stairs were and had to catch myself at the verandah’s edge. The drop was only about 3 feet, high enough to hurt, but probably not do too much damage. I didn’t want to find out how much damage was too much, and tried to keep the stairs’ location in my mind.

When dinner was over we took turns at the loo and went to bed. 

I woke up a few hours later with a desperate need to pee. I’d prepared for this by stashing an empty jar under my bed. I could pee in the jar and pour its contents down the toilet in the morning. Good plan, but I hadn’t realized how much urine a few beers could produce. My jar quickly filled to overflowing.

No problem.  I’d take myself and my jar to the loo, emptying the jar and my bladder at the same time.  I put on a robe, picked up the jar and set out for the river.

Remember the old Roadrunner cartoons where Wily Coyote chases Roadrunner?  She flies past a cliff, and he runs right over the cliff’s edge and falls to the ground below.  That’s what I did on my way to the loo. I missed the stairs and went straight over the verandah’s edge, landing in the courtyard covered with my own urine.

I’m sure it hurt, and it had to have been a huge shock, but I don’t remember any pain.  The next day I got on my horse and rode away, so obviously nothing was broken.  What I do remember is hooting with laughter so loud it woke up the whole camp.

I limped to the loo with my empty jar and emptied my bladder.  Then I returned to my room, changed into dry clothes, and went back into bed.  

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