India: lifeline express, 1993

For many years, I dreamed of going to India and in 1992 finally set out on a six-month sojourn to the second most populated country in the world. I was 38 years old. One of my journal entries at the time states, “I still don’t have any money to go to India and my trip is five weeks away.” This has been the nature of my life. I tend to plan things, big things, with no money. Somehow, I almost always seem to find it. At the last minute, I managed getting one of my brother’s best friends, an eye surgeon in Nebraska, to lend me $10,000.

Besides the children’s book that I had been commissioned to create by Houghton Mifflin in a traditional village in India, I also researched other story possibilities. In the newspaper one day, I saw a 500-word story about a train in India that had been converted into a hospital which traveled throughout the country where doctors performed surgery on children with polio, people with cataract blindness and middle ear deafness. They called it the “Lifeline Express.” I managed getting in touch with the people behind this operation and was invited to join them along the way.

Nicknamed “God’s Chariot” the Lifeline Express was the world’s only hospital on rails at the time. Made up of three old first-class coaches donated by Indian Railways, decorated with rainbows and flowers and refurbished into a modern operating theater, its mission was to use the country’s extensive railways to take medical service to those in desperate need.

 Day after day, long into the night, a group of eminent (revolving) Indian surgeons donated their time to perform operations.

Imagine a person blinded by cataracts, able to see again when the bandages come off, someone afflicted with middle-ear deafness who hears his first sounds immediately after the operation, or a child whose twisted limbs are straightened.