Sleepy Saturday

I have now been in Jamkhed for a week and I suppose it is time to talk a little bit about the things I'm learning. But no story is complete without a mise en scene, so before I go into the medical stuff, here's a bit of background... or first impressions, if you like. They will be brief, for I am sleepy, and in fact the only motivation I had to write this was the energy of the adolescent girls running up the stairs in the training centre. I am quickly falling into the slower pace of life here: walking leisurely, taking afternoon naps...it compels and frustrates me in turns, depending on my frame of mind.

While I have on the whole settled into life here, and feel blessed to be a part of such a loving community, I have found my response to life in the developing world quite interesting. For someone (and perhaps because I was) born in tropical Africa I am remarkably intolerant of some of the negative features of the landscape - stagnant water providing breeding grounds for mosquito larvae, ubiquitous flies perching anywhere and everywhere serving as vectors for all kinds of disease, wild sows and their piglets roaming among the rubbish, stray dogs exhibiting odd behaviour, pockets of mini landfill sites littering the place, and last but not least, non existent road safety for pedestrians. These are all threats to the health and sanity of the local population, and are ironically to be found in the town- the main economic nexus of this area.

I do not believe that these blights are inevitable; they are easily overcome with proper planning and foresight - municipal services like proper drainage and water run off, roads, waste disposal facilities, pavements and pedestrian crossings, animal safety and pest control, law enforcement - they all require local government, or at least local leadership, some form of collective action to institute order. The town is where we have to go to do most of our shopping (of which thankfully little needs to be done) and I have started to avoid it as far as is reasonably possible - it seems to bring out the worst in me. My inner Pol Pot is also being stirred, I foresee that I may soon be yelling at people to cover food - actually I'm doing a good job avoiding uncovered and other suspect food. I haven't even started drinking tea yet, which I was assured I would have to embrace in India to avoid causing offence despite surviving years in England and Ireland without taking up the habit. Or perhaps people here are just very polite (in fact I know that they are, which is a win-win situation). Thankfully, I have enough subcutaneous fat stores to last me a while...

The country, by comparison, is an oasis - and the CRHP where I am based in particular. The complex of the Comprehensive Rural Health Project houses a small hospital, a training centre, accommodation for resident staff, students and village health workers, a mess hall, some sports grounds, and my personal favourite - lots of beautiful gardens and even a fountain. It is a 10 minute drive from the town and surrounded by farms. When the CRHP was first set up 40 years ago, Jamkhed was not a town - it was a village in one of the most deprived areas of the state with poor health and economic indices. The improved health of the local community achieved through the service of the CRHP, largely through the work of the village health workers and the farmer's clubs, has contributed to its evolution into a market town. But I'm jumping the gun here, I'm supposed to be limiting myself to descriptions of first impressions in this post.

The most important first impression I have had so far is the spirituality of this place - and I don't mean spirituality as a theme to be confined to a section of a bookshop, I mean an organic way of viewing people as living beings, not just sources of material income or manual labour. People here really do seem to care about other people and there is a genuine sense of relationship in the way even strangers interact with each other - and with foreigners like me. I feel that this is desperately missing from the Western world, which, ironically, despite its much needed (and vaunted) social order and social welfare, has an immense social and spiritual poverty: we neglect the totality of our existence because we choose to measure ourselves only by defined parameters and limit what we are capable of in the name of convention. I think this sense of genuineness, of people being more important than ideas, of kindness being routine, is the best thing about being here. On which more later.