It’s a joke now that any veterinary volunteer who comes to
help the SARAH (Sikkim Anti Rabies & Animal Health) Programme in Gangtok
will also have to volunteer to piggyback me around. Since rupturing my achilles
tendon playing cricket 6 weeks ago & deciding it was a good plan to do my
rehab in the mountainous state of Sikkim
(where every path seems to be a slippery hill), I have been carried,
piggybacked & dragged up stairs, driveways & hills. I’ve also taken a
couple of tumbles down the same stairs in the most unglorified manner with my
1940’s style wooden crutches clattering to the stairwell.
Quite amusingly I have been photographed by a multitude of
Bengali tourists in MG Marg in Gangtok. A novelty to see a foreigner with a
lower limb plaster cast & natural curiousity means that I am
bombarded with questions. I delight in telling all that cricket was my down
fall.
Cricket is synonymous with being Australian given the large number of
pensioned aussie cricketers who are now playing in India
with the IPL. Even so most locals are a little surprised that aussie women too play
cricket, even if badly in my case.
My orthopaedic surgeon too confessed that he had never seen a ruptured
achilles in a female or actually known of any women to play cricket.
