Not All White People Speak the Same Language

By saying "Not All White People Speak the Same Language," I am being totally sarcastic. I know that people in India don't really think that. However, a few days ago there was a White French guy admitted to VIMHANS. A lot of people told me about him and asked me to go talk to him even though I don't speak French. Because I am positioned in the day care and the French guy is in the inpatient department, I figured I would just wait until I move there next week. This morning though the French guy came to the day care to do yoga. And I became more interested in him. Later that day, we did not have too much to do at the day care so we decided to talk to some doctors, maybe sit in during a few consultations. But the doctors were unavailable. Then, we thought we would find out more about the French guy but we also couldn't do that because we couldn't find his doctor. Before speaking to any doctors, the nurse responsible for the French guy told us that we could talk to the French guy anyway. At first, I didn't really want to. After the disastrous experience from yesterday I was dramatized. In general, I just don't think interns should be roaming around like this. Especially not if they don't know what they are doing. I don't know what I can't say, what I can, what I should and what I shouldn't.

But then two other interns went in before to check out how he is. It turned out that he spoke German (which is my Native language) and that he was totally fine with talking to people. When I went in, it was totally amazing. We stayed there for two and a half hours just talking. The french guy is a painter from France and he is very openly talking about his life, his illness (he suffers from schizophrenia) and his history. He showed us pictures of his paintings at home and told us about his family and life story. On the 19th of May he was found on a railway station where he has been lying around for a week. He said he stopped taking his medication and lost control. Very very very interesting guy.

And the most interesting thing is that he came to India to find an alternative healing approach to fight his illness. I don't really know what exactly he meant by it and I don't know if he even knows himself but he said that he doesn't want to take his medication anymore and find another way to cope with his problem. He said he read online that in India alternative ways are being used to treat mental illness and that he wanted to explore those ways. Let's see what will happen.