AMERICA CALLING

Dr Awtar Singh, Mrs Singh’s eldest brother, had moved to the USA some years ago, and was a professor at the UCLA. He asked her to come over as well. By now Mrs Singh was head examiner and had extra income in the summers. Mr Inder Singh also had a very good career as a manager in the finance department of the Government of Punjab. Once her brother sponsored her, the decision to seek a new life became easier for Mrs Singh. In 1967, she joined a Masters course in public health and nutritional sciences at the UCLA. Her husband and son joined her six months down the line. The initial years were one of struggle. From settled jobs back in Punjab, they were now working odd ones to survive—once again Mrs Deepi Singh decided that she would not borrow money, this time from her fairly well-to-do brother. “Here I was a few months before in India heading the Foods and Nutrition Department at the Home Science College in Chandigarh, and suddenly in the USA I was baby-sitting for 50 cents an hour. We need the extra money to pay for student loans, and meet our expenses,” she recalls.

LIFE IN A HOSPITAL

While she had refused to become a doctor, and not wanted to be inside a hospital in her earlier years, in the USA her father’s words came back to push Mrs Singh to give a hospital job a shot. When she joined Kaiser Permanente as an assistant director after her master’s degree, she had 6 dieticians reporting to her at the 300-bed hospital. She was planning 3-4 meals per patient on a daily basis and handling hundreds of patients every year. Four years down the line the retiring director proposed her name as a successor. As director, her team grew to 60.

RETURN TO TEACHING

But teaching was her real calling in life, something she had started doing at Delhi’s Lady Irwin School, and later at Kapurthala. Seven years into her directorship of one of the largest hospitals in the west coast of the USA, Mrs Singh decided she wanted to teach, and no longer wanted to be the paper-pushing administrator she had turned into. From hiring nutritionists, she would become one of them. She would have to take a cut in her salary. But she displayed the determination of old, and her mind was made up. The management, though, would not want her to go away, and even decided not to reduce her salary. For everyone at the hospital, “she was the little Indian lady that limps.” A special job profile was created for her. Now she was required to teach patient classes and provide consultation to patients on diet on a one-on-one basis. In all she worked 40 years at Kaiser, and another 8 years in India.