This is just a first few comments. Lots of pictures and stories to come.
Yesterday Mia, a woman I met when we were both eating at a restaurant in Goa, took me to Elephanta Island. We traveled for 40? minutes on a boat from the Gate of India in the southern part of Mumbai. Mia is a 23 year old nurse. She has been traveling for over a year from her family home in Winsor? Canada. She did work as a nurse for 7 months in Melbourne? Australia. She was staying with a young friend’s family in Mumbai. Mehul is a venture Capitalist and was our host on the trip.
My idea is to include two stories about people meeting each other from yesterday. The first is how did Mia meet Mehul? I will leave out the ? marks. A lot of the details here may be wrong. Hopefully Mia will read it in a week or a month and correct it! Mia and another nursing friend were flying on a country to country leg in Southeast Asia. The announcement came over the intercom: “Are there any medical staff on board?”. Mia said to her friend “That is us” and they went back to be involved in the care of a young man who was feeling terrible and basically in collapse. Mia reports that there was nothing on the plane, not even a first aid kit. The crew was untrained. All she could do was give water and take a medical history, keep the patient talking. Of course the patient turned out to be Mehul, he recovered during the flight and, as I have said, Mia stayed with him in Mumbai on her way through India to Dubi.
On the way over to Elephanta Island, we got talking to a 50+ year old man who lives in Seattle Washington. When I said I lived in Boston, as we always do until we know the listener knows enough about New Hampshire to make sharing that information relevant, he shared that he had lived in Sommerville, back in the day. He had quite an accent and said he was Brazilian. Turns out he is a Neurologist and did meet Johnathan Sacks once and got him to sign a Sack’s book. We passed an island that probably was once a military installation and our neurologist shared that his grandfather had been a Captain in the Brazilian military, ended up on the wrong side of coup and was imprisoned on an island in a Brazilian harbor. He was eventually released and returned to the Military. And the reason for this story about meetings. The grandfather met his future wife while in the prison. She was the superintendents daughter.
It will be interesting to see which I forget first, the stories or the Elephanta Island touring,