“When Dr. Swaiman Singh boarded a flight to India last December, he thought he would be there for a week, tops.
Back home in New Jersey, life for the 34-year-old was "literally perfect.”
His career was taking off, with just a few months left in a three-year cardiology fellowship at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center and another prestigious opportunity lined up after that. He was a husband to a similarly ambitious wife and a father to a two-year-old daughter. He had the support of his parents and sister, who lived just a short car ride away.
Then, Singh got word that a close family friend from his ancestral village in Punjab, India – someone like a grandfather to him – had suffered a stroke at one of the sites in New Delhi where farmers had been protesting for months.
Singh figured he would get to the Indian capital of New Delhi, set up a clinic and pay some local doctors to staff it through a nonprofit he ran there. But once he arrived on the scene, he saw cases of heart attacks and cardiac arrest, of diarrhea and vomiting, of depression and fear.
“It just seemed like this is what I had trained to do,” he says. “This was the reason that I became a doctor.”
Singh extended his stay to 10 days, then two weeks and then three.
Months later, he’s still there – and can’t imagine leaving.“
It’s been a year since the protests began at Delhi and he’s still there, fighting withe everyone and helping people in need.
Meet the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker (Sphyrapicus varius)! This woodpecker has a wide range across North America and is known for its appetite for sap.
The clever bird excavates spots in the surface of trees, known as “sap wells,” where liquid that drips from higher up in the tree gathers for convenient consumption. It doesn’t “set it and forget it” either; this bird works the wells to ensure their sap-collecting efficiency and also protects them from competitors, including fellow sapsuckers.
