Tribes

"He who has health has hope, and he who has hope has everything."

- Arabic proverb

The hospital that I'm working in was set up primarily to provide access to healthcare for a previously rather neglected area of rural South India. One of the things that attracted me to this place was that it would be an opportunity to see and really get to know people in the tribe and see how they live. It's been absolutely fascinating. The people lived in quite a lot of isolation in this mountainous area and I have never seen a way of life that's had so little influence by "Western" culture. They live in the most splendid surroundings - covered in palm trees, endless tea plantations, eucalyptus trees grow so tall on the hilsides. Dark mountains frame the whole area.

So one of the things the hospital has organised are people, trained from the tribes themselves, to become health workers. It's not really a formal qualification or anything, but they go around the villages, weighing children to make sure they are not malnourished, taking blood pressures, testing for diabetes, following up on illnesses like TB, and one of the most important parts of their jobs - health education. Concentrating on areas that cause a lot of the health problems; for example, they might educate people about child nutrition (as many of the children here, for many reasons, are very underweight) , anenatal care and childbirth (as death in childbirth - of mother and baby - used to be a lot more common than it is now!), recognising the signs of an ill child (to make sure they get early treatment) and generally trying to help people understand the hospital and what happens there. So I have been out with them three times, "into the field" as we call it, with the health workers. It involves miles of walking in the sun, between all the villages. Last Wednesday we covered about 8 or 9 miles, seeing the most remote villages, many times that don't even have roads. I feel so lucky to be able to have seen these places - I get the impression that life hasn't changed much for thousands of years. Living off the stunning land, in the mountains that their family has lived on for countless generations.

The people organising the hospital have gone to great lengths to make it approachable - like almost all the staff there are people from the tribes. And they don't rely on written material for anything as most of the tribal people can't read at all. The health education is mostly word of mouth, and pictures. This is what I like most about this project - it's not just people from outside, say a Western country, that come in and put programs in place that just aren't understood or trusted by the local population. It has a real grassroots feel - like it's owned by the community. I really feel that the community trusts what goes on at the hospital and aren't scared of it any more.

I think I can tell this from how people treat me. They smile and are so happy when they learn I am staying there. (Sometimes they even know without me telling them, there aren't many white people around here for any other reason!) They tell me stories about how they were helped there. It makes me hapy to be part of something so special.

Oh and we rode an elephant yesterday at one of the nearby wildlife sanctuaries. Pretty awesome!