The last couple of weeks, I’ve been posted to Hosakote Rural Health Training Center as a part of my community medicine internship. My job here is to visit the 28 Anganawadis in this sub-center and do health checkup on the kids (and pregnant women, if any).

When I first visited Hosakote, even the Rural Health Training Center was not on the map. (On the other hand, Google Maps did not even show where Hosakote was). Ever since Maps.me on my iPhone got the update to add places, I’ve been hungry to find new places. And I started by mapping the RHTC hospital.

There is one nurse at the hospital who is (or was till this week) the go-to source for geographic information about the Anganawadis. We found out the rough location of the 28 Anganawadis from her. She gave us village names and the number of Anganawadis at each place, along with possible itineraries we can take. I could already spot most of the villages on OSM but that was it.

So, the four of us went around, asking people for directions (every few feet, at times) exploring the villages, and finding Anganawadis. We were on two-wheelers one day, on car another day, and so on.

One nice thing about these villages is that they have straight roads in between beautiful farmlands. Also, there’s always a road parallel to the Kabini canal. And these are all interconnected.

My modus operandi here was to find out the Anganawadi by asking locals, and immediately add it to the map, tagged kindergarten, using Maps.me once I reach there. And then smile at the staring kids. Once I have scared them enough, checking each kid’s oral hygiene, lungs, heart, growth, etc., I would ask the Anganawadi worker directions to the next Anganawadi.

Maps.me doesn’t yet include any way to edit roads. Although it does have an option to “record GPS traces” I haven’t explored this yet and do not know what it does. I think this feature can be used to trace roads.

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