The Lack of Hindi becomes Increasingly a Problem...

In the hospital, everybody speaks English. And by everybody I don't really mean everybody but rather the doctors and most of the patients. For example, the attendants and the staff around the hospital don't speak English. However, even though most of the doctors speak English, they prefer speaking Hindi. This is the same for all the students and interns. They do speak English when they have to but obviously they prefer speaking their language, Hindi.

We have case presentations every Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday. Every doctor or senior intern is either presenting a patient and their symptoms, diagnosis etc or simply a topic assigned to them. They also usually have pretty good discussions after the presentations. But even though the presentations are in English, a lot of the doctors are asking questions in Hindi. And since I don't understand Hindi, I am totally kicked out of the discussion. I understand that it's the language that they feel more comfortable with and that there are things that cannot be said in English as well as they can in Hindi but what I would suggest is to keep the amount of Hindi to a reasonable amount. For example, today the whole entire discussion was in Hindi, nobody ever said anything in English and I was lost.

Today, I also had my first day at the IPD, which is the In Patient Ward. We were assigned patients and obviously my patient didn't speak English at all. I think that is unnecessary because there are a lot of patients who in fact speak English why not assign me those. We are divided into groups of two or three so I know that the other interns can translate but there is such so much that gets lost. And I would really like to get the whole gist of the patient and not only some translation. 

Later in the day we also had two lectures by two resident doctors and I have to admit that I barely understand them. In particular one of them had a pretty heavy accent and he also didn't put a lot of emphasis into what he said. As a whole, it was really hard to understand. So I think I got only about 25% out of the lectures. I tried to copy the notes from the other interns but it was too stressful to keep up with the paste.

I know that this sounds as if I am whining but I just have to express my frustration. At the end, it is not as bad. I still like being there and simply experiencing even though I don't understand everything.