Another visit to the hospital

‘Do you need any help?’ I called out to Tabassum – not an unusual question for me to ask when someone else is preparing a meal. What was unusual about it this time was the fact that I had to crane my head over the edge of a bed to ask Tabassum, who was sitting underneath the bed chopping away at some onions, with a pot of rice boiling away by her side. Under the bed was the only available space in their tiny shack to cook – the whole width of the shack was taken up by their bed, and outside was a narrow alleyway; no space there either.

Such cooking conditions are fairly unusual in themselves. But Tabassum is also blind. She cooks by feeling and hearing. She feels whether the pot is in the correct position above the stove: how she does this without burning her hands is beyond me. She must hear when the water is boiling and it is time to add the rice, and feel how to take the lid off the saucepan. To witness such triumph over adversity; seeing how she continues to live her life even in the most difficult circumstances was emotional enough. But following from the day we had had it was almost too much.

I had met Tarranum, Tabassum’s sister earlier in the morning, and she walked back with me to their home. She introduced me to her five year old daughter, who was a cute little bundle of energy, and who hardly stayed still long enough for me to take a photo.

Tarranum is just nineteen years old. She lives with her husband’s family outside of Kolkata. Each morning at seven o’clock she leaves her house with her daughter and catches a train into the city. She drops off her daughter at nursery, and then makes her way to her family home where she helps Tabassum with household chores; this is necessary as her father and brother are also visually impaired. Her mother is currently visiting another married sister in Jaipur, whose newly born daughter is very ill. At ten o’clock every day Tarranum leads Tabassum out of their home and into the narrow streets, visiting other disabled girls in the area, helping them attend medical appointments and leading self help groups. It must be exhausting work, doing so much walking in the blistering heat, and with frequent power cuts. Work often doesn’t stop until 6 o’clock, when both girls return to their home and continue with household chores. Tarranum and her daughter do not reach their home until 10 o’clock at night.

When I arrived at their place on this particular morning Tabassum was sitting under the bed, eating her breakfast of rice. Breakfast over, our first stop was the home of a seven year old disabled girl. She is unable to sit or to stand, and is deaf and dumb. When we arrived she was lying on a piece of material on a cement floor. Her grandmother sat her up and supported her head, giving her a cuddle. Then she looked at me and said ‘what to do?’ I was utterly powerless to do anything to help or to say anything that would provide any comfort.

Our next stop was even worse. We walked into a tiny room, and at first I saw only two elderly people lying asleep on a bed. But then I noticed a teenager sitting on the floor, staring vacantly out into space, sweat standing out on her forehead, and dribbling. She clearly looked ill, and from what I gathered from the conversation she had been ill for some time. My limited Hindi was really a problem, as I could not understand why she was not in hospital. I think they said that it was expensive and that the government hospital was too far away. At this point the girl stretched out her hand to me, she seemed distantly aware that a stranger was in her home. She then put her head on Tabassum’s lap and started crying, clearly in a lot of distress. I rang up the Director, to see what she advised, and she said that we should go to hospital. Nighat could hardly walk, and in the blistering sun trying to get to a taxi was just awful.

I don’t really want to think about the emergency department at the government hospital, it makes me feel sick. There were crowds of people outside jostling with one another to get a ticket in order to be seen. When we did get a ticket we went into the emergency room where there were three beds. Well, not really beds, they were wooden planks with a rusty gas cylinder at one end. I tried not to look. We then jostled with crowds of other people to talk to a doctor. The doctor gave a cursory glance over the papers we had brought, took a look at Nighat, and said that she could not help. We should have brought her in 15 minutes earlier, as the correct department closed at two o’clock. It wasn't an acute case, so there was nothing I could say that would be any help. We had to bring her back the next day before 2 o’clock. Tarranum said ‘government hospital is a name only, no treatment, no nothing. We always go and are told to come back.’ So all we could do was to struggle with Nighat back out of the hospital; we decided to see if a private doctor could help. He referred us to another doctor, so with a girl who was in a lot of pain, we caught a bicycle rickshaw. This private doctor saw her fairly quickly and prescribed some medicine, but I didn’t really know whether this would help at all since it was clear she should be in hospital. When we came out of the private doctor Nighat could not walk – she had to be carried into the taxi. By this time I was feeling terrible, angry at the hospital for not being able to help, and at the same time feeling so guilty that I had dragged this sick girl out of her home on what turned out to be a wild goose chase. We got Nighat back home, and I just wanted to sit down and cry.

Although it was after 4.30 Tabassum still wanted to cook me lunch, so we made our way back to her home, where she sat under the bed and started chopping away. Although I was really not hungry after the terrible day, it was one of the most delicious meals I have ever had. She cooked rice with lady’s fingers, and a meat curry.

I heard a couple of days later that the family had taken Nighat back to the hospital, and she was going to be seen by a senior surgeon, so hopefully the visit to the hospital wasn’t such a wasted effort after all.

Sad news from Pakistan

Recently I have heard from some friends in Pakistan who all come from Hunza, in the Karakoram mountains in the Northern Areas (now Gilgit - Baltistan). A couple of months ago there was a big landslide which blocked the Hunza river and has formed a huge lake - 11 miles long and more than 100 metres deep in some places. This has destroyed part of the Karakoram Highway which has disrupted trade between China and Pakistan, and from what I understand some of the more northerly villages have been competely cut off. The water level is rising every day and is threatening to submerge the beautiful village of Gulmit, from where many of my friends come from. And if the lake breaches the dam, which is thought to be likely once the seasonal rains begin, 30,000 people downstream could be affected. The army are currently building spillways, so pray that this is successful. Hunza really was the most beautiful place I have ever visited, and the people among the most friendly and welcoming. It has stuck in my mind as a kind of shangri-la, not only because of the beauty of the place, but also because of the commitment of the people to tolerance and serving others. The village has an exceptionally good school and people have a real commitment to education. But in addition to this, many of those who worked in MIED came from this village and were committed to improving the education in other, more disadvantaged parts of Pakistan.

Photos of the area around Gulmit, I think much of this is under water now, and a Gulmiti house which we stayed in:

Link to the BBC website: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8685515.stm

A round up of the week's news

A cockroach in the kitchen and a rat in the drain are manifestly NOT what a girl needs when she comes home tired late from work. It is a mark of how immune I have got to my living conditions that I just muttered a brief ‘oh dear’ rather than running screaming down the street. Although I might have had the option to move to another place further away, I decided not to: balancing rats and cockroaches against a daily hour commute in Kolkata traffic, I decided to take the rats. Not sure if this was entirely sensible, but so far I haven’t lost my sanity. What has been more annoying recently have been the number of mosquitoes – what with their bites and a nice prickly heat rash it looks like I have a severe case of measles (but apart from these minor inconveniences, Kolkata is a wonderful place to live!)

Last weekend all the volunteers in Kolkata met up at someone’s home, which enabled me to have a snoop around someone else’s living conditions. I think I may have pulled the short straw – although her place was basic, she has tiles in the bathroom, glass in the windows and natural light, all of which I am without. But enough moaning, the volunteer cooked the most amazing dinner, so much so that I am going to describe it in loving detail to you (cooking is not one of my strong points, and at the moment I am surviving off fruit and toasted cheese sandwiches, which is now beginning to pall). So, she had cooked a total of three delicious dishes plus rice: dhal with banana, tomato paneer and chicken rogan josh.
And all this with just two gas rings. I am now slightly ashamed that I haven’t ventured beyond warming up a tin of baked beans….

Kolkata as a city

‘India’s cities house the entire historical compass of human labour, from the crudest stone breaking to the most sophisticated financial transactions. Success and failure, marble and mud, are intimately and abruptly pressed against one another, and this has made the cities vibrate with agitated experience. All the enticements of the modern world are stacked up here, but it is also here that many Indians discover the mirage-like quality of this modern world.’ Sunil Khilnani, in his book ‘The Idea of India’ has beautifully captured the contradictions, the sheer breadth of life, but also the all-pervasiveness of suffering and exclusion at the heart of life in Kolkata. Ambedkar said over 50 years ago: ‘in politics we will be recognising the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradiction?’ And now, 50 years on, India’s economy is one of the largest growing in the world, yet on my way to work I walk past children who aren’t going to school, men and women washing themselves in a muddy pond, and men straining against carts loaded with bags of cement, pushing it down a busy road.

A hospital is a place where the value a society places on a human life can unconsciously be evident. I had the misfortune to visit a government hospital in Kolkata the other day, as the lovely woman in charge of our office has been admitted. There were rows of people lined outside, some of them lying on sheets and obviously pretty well encamped there. I don’t know whether they were family members visiting or whether they were waiting for admittance. We made our way up to the third floor, and walked down the corridor – remove from your mind visions of white sparkling walls and floors smelling slightly of disinfectant. I saw stray cats wandering around, and the smell in the area around the toilets was foul. In the ward itself there were about 50 beds; the mattress was about 5cm thick on a wooden board and that was it. My friend had seen a doctor, and had been told the next time she would be seen would be in 6 days; in the meantime all she had to do was to lie on this paper thin mattress and struggle with her pain. But on the plus side she did say that the food was good.

Kolkata has several very high quality hospitals, but the elites that are able to afford these hospitals must live in and experience a different city to the vast majority in Kolkata. The air conditioned shopping malls and offices are a world apart from the bustees, and the two worlds are mutually exclusionary; I am sure that many of the elite have no wish to see first hand what life is like in the slums, and the poor are excluded by security guards from the shopping malls and cafes. It is almost as if there is an insurmountable glass barrier between the two worlds. Perhaps I am being too negative – I have met some people from the richer classes who are working in the NGO sector, but they have told me themselves that this sector is not a popular one in which to work; people want jobs in IT, finance or business.

But I am forgetting another part of the city: the old colonial area. I visited this with two other volunteers a couple of weeks ago. It was relatively peaceful with far fewer people around, but at the same time it was slightly strange seeing such physical evidence that the British were actually here. I visited the cemetery for the East India Company: India definitely got its own back on the British, there were so many graves for people who died very young, and many children. It was quintessentially British, but at the same time surrounded by lush tropical forest: very strange. I definitely would not want to visit at dusk…..

AWWD's field workers

AWWD’s field workers are women with disabilities who come from the slums, and who epitomise the challenges that disabled women face in Kolkata. Every time I meet with them my heart aches – they have faced difficulties in their lives that I can barely imagine, yet they are so brave and cheerful.

The other day I was sorting through some papers with a community worker – the papers were profiles of all the disabled girls and women in her slum. With an exclamation of delight she pulled out her profile, which was two years old, and she asked me to read it as it was in English. Two years ago all she wished for was to complete her education and to ‘learn a little stitching’. The idea that, two years ago the only opportunity open to this beautiful and capable individual was to learn a little stitching made me want to cry.

Imagine an alleyway between buildings so narrow that only one person can pass down it at once. Imagine that there are open drains, it is unpaved, and rubbish adorns the sides. Welcome to Park Circus slum, Kolkata, and the home of Tabassum, AWWD’s blind community worker.
Every day Tabassum is led by her sister through the alleyways of her slum to meet with other disabled girls, to take them to medical appointments, to encourage them to join the self help group, to disburse loans, support the women in their businesses and to help them receive mobility aids. I am following Tabassum and her sister through this slum and I find it difficult to negotiate the open drains and unpaved streets, but Tabassum deals with it all with an unwavering serenity and cheerfulness. I ask Tabassum whether she enjoys her job, and she gives me a big grin. I think that’s a yes then. I then ask why, wondering whether she would talk about having gained self confidence, or that she was doing something very worthwhile. No, she is much more practical than that - she frowns and says ‘money is a big problem’. The families in these slums have no security and are living from hand to mouth, literally. Her family make shoes: Park Circus seems to be the shoe making centre of Kolkata, and I walk past piles and piles of shoes at different stages of preparation: young boys were sanding down rubber for the soles, cutting out heels, or sticking on the last sparkly finish to brightly coloured sandals.

Tabassum was not always blind, and is well educated – but in the last years of her schooling her eyesight started to fail, and in the end she was prevented from finishing her education. Her dream of becoming a teacher collapsed. Just two years ago all that she could hope for was to get a lowly paid and menial job as a cleaner, and even then she was harassed by her employer due to her impairment.

But two years on from her job as a cleaner and not only does Tabassum work tirelessly with disabled women in her area, but she has also attended national leadership training, and is a leader within her community for disabled women. She said that: ‘I have now new hope to bring more light not only to my own life but also to others’

The Association of Women with Disabilities

The Association of Women with Disabilities was established in 2002 by its current Director, Kuhu Das, who herself suffered from polio as a child. She founded the organisation by herself in a small village outside Kolkata called Subhi, with no external funding, no electricity, a small hut, no nearby toilet and initially not even a bed (she used the table as her bed). She tells me that she has quite a few stories from this time, which I can well believe. (Some of them include rats and snakes so I won’t cover them at the moment.) The focus of the organisation was on supporting disabled women, particularly helping them to access the services that they needed. This project continued to expand and obtained foreign funding.

Three years ago she moved back to Kolkata to start a project for disabled women in the slums, and a project running national and international leadership training programmes for women with disabilities. Both projects have a rights based approach: as I mentioned in a previous article disabled women are among the most powerless people in India due to the discrimination they face for being female, disabled and poor. They and their families and communities are often completely unaware that they have rights and responsibilities; they are more often considered a drain on resources and incapable of an education, earning money, or being a wife and a mother. Nearly all the girls I have talked to so far on my trips to the slums have said that they suffer from teasing and harassment when they step outside the house. Because poor disabled women suffer from such prejudice and discrimination they have been almost invisible in both the development agenda and to government policy. Until disabled women join together with a unified voice to raise their profile and claim their rights there will be no substantive change. Therefore AWWD works at the local, national and international levels to address these issues and to provide disabled women with a voice.

At the local level AWWD identifies women with disabilities, and helps them understand their rights and fulfil their capabilities. For example AWWD field workers help take disabled women to get a disability card: this enables the women to travel on public transport for reduced cost. AWWD provides loans to enable the women to start up a business: this not only provides them with some extra income, but also builds their self confidence and self esteem. AWWD workers also form self help groups so that women can come together to talk about their problems and to recognise that they are not alone. This is a major step: the vast majority of women said unprompted during a survey that since the intervention of AWWD they feel more confident and happier mixing with new people and going to new places.

And from these women AWWD identifies those with leadership potential, and runs national level leadership training programmes, to enable women to come together to work towards a common cause, to explain their rights and to give them tools to claim their rights. These women then go back to their communities to advocate locally on behalf of disabled women, but also they are part of networks to influence policy on a larger scale. And also AWWD has run regional training programmes for disabled women from countries across South Asia. They have also participated in international conferences (concerning the Conference on the Elimination of Discrimination towards Women, and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities) to make sure that the needs of women with disabilities in South Asia are heard.

You may well be wondering what my role in AWWD is, as I am ashamed to admit that my job has hitherto not made an appearance on my blog. I am not relaxing and enjoying the general ambience of Kolkata, I am a Knowledge and Information Management Advisor. Yes, it is not the most exciting of job titles, but add the spice of working in India and there is never a dull moment. Take, for example, the relatively simple task of buying some hanging files to go into a filing cabinet. Given the fact that we already had a filing cabinet, I assumed that buying files for it would be a relatively simple task. Hah! After two weeks of searching for them from within the huge western style shopping malls, to the ramshackle old buildings piled high with books, notepaper and ring binders on College Street, to trawling through hundreds of internet sites, I finally admitted defeat. This painful occurrence took place after a couple of hours of wandering from ramshackle old building to ramshackle old building on College Street, hopelessly waving my picture of a file to a vendor surrounded by tottering piles of folders, waiting while he makes frantic phone calls to his stockist and then moving miserably on when he shakes his head. It seems that India has jumped across the stage of using cardboard files right onto plastic. Anyway, I compromised onto the next best thing, and fingers crossed that is currently working OK.

And language is also another, shall we say, entertaining challenge? AWWD routinely works in three (and sometimes four) languages. All written reports for donors are in English. Bengali (or Bangla) is the mother tongue of some of the community workers, and they cannot speak much English. But the mother tongue of the Muslim community workers is Hindi - they often studied in Urdu medium schools, cannot speak much English either, and to complicate matters further some of them seem not to be very confident in Bengali. And, to pile on the confusion, some of the Muslim girls are happiest writing in Urdu and not Hindi (they have different scripts). So before team meetings there have been intense discussions about what language the meeting will be conducted in. It is helpful for me that some of the girls are happiest speaking Hindi because it means I can communicate a little with them and practice my Hindi. But when it comes to talking about information management I am definitely in need of an interpreter. And my very limited language skills have proved problematic at times as the girls speak so fast I can’t understand what they are saying. Last week I was talking to one girl and I think she said that her father had died, but I couldn’t be sure – it was a horrible situation and I didn’t really know what to say (even in English, let alone in Hindi).

As to other news: there was a flying cockroach in my room the other day. I am sure it was a flying cockroach, I will have to google it to check that there are actually such things. Anyway, I sprayed it liberally with poison, which turned out to be a slight mistake, as the poison rendered my room uninhabitable for the next half an hour. And on stepping outside I spied a rat scampering its way down my drain, and at that precise moment the electricity cut out, due to a monumental thunderstorm. Not such a great combination of events really: no light, a rat on the loose, a room full of poison and heavy rain. I therefore shut and bolted my door closest to the rat, and sat on my bed with a torch at the ready, every so often stepping outside to breathe in deep refreshing breaths of fresh air. Thankfully the power cut didn’t last very long. Nerves were in a little bit of a frazzled state after that, and I lay for a while on my bed thinking happy thoughts about beaches and sunshine and flowers.