Saturday 19 May 2012

The runner

India is an interesting place. The first days we spent checking things out, organizing our little world. Figuring out out local sources for things we need like the steam sterilizer (for baby bottles), papayas (good for breast milk production), cell phone sim card and battery...the list goes on. It was exhausting running around in the 115 degree heat like crazy people, until we learned about the runners. After all, labor is readily available in India. Our runner is named Dinesh. He came highly recommended by a friend in Mumbai. It works like this: we call him, he comes to us at our hotel. We tell him what we need, he gets it and brings it back. Sure he adds a little markup, but boy is it convenient. We had a cellphone in need of a battery and a SIM card. Dinesh appeared in our hotel lobby a few minutes after we rang him. A few hours later he was back, the phone fully functioning with a 70 rupee prepaid card. He charged us 100 rupees, which also included the battery and the running. That was the best 30 rupees I've spent this week....for all of your reference 30 rupees is roughly 60 cents in us dollars.


Our surrogate wanted some fruit. Dates, walnuts, cashews and papaya, and some coconut water (i guess the craze made it here too:) Now this brings up another point. Why is the doctor not providing the foods my surrogate wants to eat? It's not like she's asking for truffles and cheetos. Thus stuff is good for you and she's breastfeeding. Of course we'll buy it for her. After spending an hour searching all over the city for a papaya, we called in some help. Voila, magically Dinesh appears with all the goodies, sparing us again from the heat.

We need a hotel in mumbai. No use booking that online, we have a few people on the ground working on our behalf.
Everything here is done the way we used to do it. We talk to people. It's kind of refreshing.

3 comments:

  1. Hi Jennifer,

    I enjoyed reading your articles.

    Quick Question: May I get the contact info for the runner (Dinesh )from you? He seems like a very good resource that I might need later on this year. :)

    Thanks in advance.

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  2. hi Joe,
    Here is the cell phone for dinesh 962 4471 711. We also found the gentlemen manning the front desk at the RAMA to be quite helpful in finding resources as well.
    Best of luck. jennifer

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  3. Hi Jenn, thanks for the quick response. I appreciate it very much!

    My wife and I were staying at the RAMA Res. hotel too but we left on around end of April for the IVF cycle. Fingers crossed and hope everything goes well and we will be back to fetch our baby in around Nov/Dec. :)

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