Dr.Paul and his Leopards

Dr. Paul has quite the sense of humor...

Did I forget to mention that our living area was caged in?! Oh and padlocked everynight?! This I thought initially was to keep out people trying to steal things and small animals getting into our food, but Dr. Paul really played it up.

Our first day there, Katie, my clinic partner and very close friend now, wanted to go for a run, Dr. Paul told her to stay on the road and not go very far because of leopards! Throughout the week he played it up, convincing everyone (especially myself) that the leopards were everywhere and going to attack, he even would tell the villagers to talk to us about the leopards and their attacks! There was one old man that was especially colorful in telling us about the leopards becuase he didn't speak English so he only used hand motions, I have a great video of it which I hope to post later so stay tuned!

One night we laid out in our courtyard and watched the stars, becuase one of my other friends in our group (Sarah) had never seen a shooting star! Well she saw one and we had a very relaxing night just relaxing under the Indian sky, but of course Dr. Paul had to do something... Just as we stopped talking about leopards and how they could jump down and eat us all in our little courtyard, Dr. Paul grabbed my leg and I jumped and screamed! That night I had a dream about a leopard with Dr. Paul's face on it!

The next night we went on a night walk down the road... of course Dr. Paul again lived it up by throwing rocks behind our backs into the bushed to make it seem like a leopard was there... well that just set me off and I became totally petrified... oh yes... and I'm a little afraid of the dark, and when there is talk of leopards... well I had a bit of a break down when we got back. Because Dr. Paul made me (cry) (I'm embarassed to say so, but it happened) he said he would buy us ice cream... well that funny man, he never got it for us, he's suck a jokester!

On the last day in Patti we went on a herbal medicine walk with Dr. Paul and he took us afterwards to a few of the villagers houses and we had chai and cookies (I could barely eat dinner after that I was so full of sugar). We had to walk through some tall corn points and Dr. Paul would hide in the corn and jump out at us! (He also did this one afternoon when we came back from meditation and jumped out of the shower... he really really really loved scaring us!) We stopped at the house of the villager who I told you about before that had the hand gestures telling us about leopard attacks and concluded with... there are no leopards in this area... Oh wonderful, I cried and got worked up about this over NOTHING!!!!!!

Dr. Paul you jokester you...