Time to pen the plethora of thoughts and sentiments we rode on in our road-trip to Ganiyari, Bliaspur. This is first in the series of blogs that will give an event by event account of our experiences at JSS.
Our sojourn started at the town of Bilaspur, where we stayed at the JSS guest house after arriving from Banglore(where we had an orientation cum workshop on road trip experiences and expectations, video shooting and documentary making and understanding team dynamics). This guest house is a couple of fully furnished apartments given to the doctors at JSS by their generous NRI friends, to be used as a guest house for people visiting JSS (this is one of the many resources JSS has managed to obtain and acquire in the pursuit of their organization’s fluid functioning). Charging camera laptops and cell phones were top priority here as we dint expect electricity in the ‘gaon’ that we were to visit.
After giving us a warm welcome, great food and arranging for our transport to Ganiari, Dr. Ravi and Ramani spared some time out of their busy schedules to have a lengthy discussion with us on life in general in the villages, the health situation there, our role as Grassroutes fellows and other implications of being an NGO.
The discussion took an awakening course for us when they told us that malnourishment in India is worse than Sub-Saharan Africa!! According to statistics, Africa has 20% malnourishment compared to 59% in India. People our age (20-25 yr olds) weigh 28-32 kgs. A lot of other statistics later we realized that we had come for a road-trip to another part of India, one which we never bothered about, one which is so oblivious to the bullish sensex, the India shining, the Chandrayan, the malls… In fact it is dying a slow death for lack of food and healthcare!!!
The doctors told us how people here would die of malaria, TB, leprosy, cholera, cancer, AIDS and a lot of other compounded problems. What set these doctors back and saddened them the most was when patients would die of curable diseases. But in its 8 yr history, JSS has never refused treatment to anybody. Even if they cannot do anything, they would redirect them to the right source of help.
The amount of subsidy they grant to their patients and low cost efforts that JSS has taken can only be admired. We shall detail more on these in later blogs.
Chattisgarh being Chattisgarh, we came down to discussing naxalites and related stories. You will be baffled to know that a pioneer of rural health, human rights activist, gold medalist doctor Binayak Sen is put behind bars on charges of being an accomplice to the naxalites. What a fitting honor to confer on a selfless messiah of the poor. My respect for the administration grew by leaps and bounds! You can google Binayak Sen to find out all about him and his good work. Tehelka, Outlook and hoards of other media have covered his story. They explained why a government intrinsically hates NGOs – NGOs work where the government fails thereby exposing its fallacies and shortcomings. We wound up our discussion with the screening of a 30 min CNN-IBN documentary on JSS and concluding with our tentative POA for the next week.
Have some discussion with my teammates now, so gtg. Will be right back with more…