Child Survival

I browsed the UNICEF’s „State of the World’s Children 2008″ report:

• On average, more than 26.000 children under the age of 5 die every day.
• In up to a half of these, an underlying cause is undernutrition.
• In the past 46 years, the number of child deaths has halved.
• Pneumonia kills more children than any other disease. Pneumonia fills the lung’s alveoli with fluid, keeping oxygen from reaching the bloodstream. Healthy children have natural defences that protect their lungs from the pathogens that cause pneumonia.
• Every year the births of around 51 million children go unregistered. These children are almost always from poor, marginalized or displaced families.

Sandeep 2

Now Sandeep has been in Hospital for 11 days. At the day of arrival the nurse said that he wouldn’t have lived for one more day at the ghat.

I’m afraid to call this improvement, but it seems that he is getting stronger. His skin was peeling off (because he was basically starving), and his hand and feet were swollen – which is a sign for „wet“ kwashiokor, the more dangerous version of this disease. We have visited him frequently (not as much as I would liked to have though) and now his skin stopped peeling completely and the swelling is gone.

Yesterday I could have cried for joy and fear at the same time: For the first time he was responding properly to me talking to him. He tried to find me with his eyes, and once they were settled on me, tried to keep the focus for a very long time. He was even smiling, or maybe just frowning, so difficult to tell. Now that the swelling has gone completly he just looks bones and skin, but I can tell he has gained some weight.

Although all this seems encouraging, now that he has improved so much I am so scared that he might die anyway. He has some kinds of fits sometimes and he cannot control his right arm, which is always shaking heavily on its own, as well as his head sometimes. When seeing him I can understand how people might feel when claiming someone obsessed. I would like everyone who reads this to know how horrible he looked (and still does) but somehow I feel this would humiliate him even more. Too voyeuristic maybe.

What if he dies? The doctor says, chances are there for complete recovery as well as for death. Nothing’s decided yet. During the day I try to not think about him for it makes me want to cry and be where he is. Which wouldn’t be helpful at all.

Just another Saturday.

Holidays are over and we did a lot of work. For one, we repainted the wall. I hated doing this because it had been done just about this time last year. But the foundation of the building is so bad that all the moisture get absorbed by the bricks. Then the minerals enclosed in the bricks come out and destroy the paint. Great. Let’s build a new school… This is one reason why I would like us to have our own land to build our own school. But now it’ll look nice for the next months and I try not to think about environmental damage.

We also have running water now in the bathroom!!! No pumping water with the handpump, no bad-smelling bathrooms anymore. That is so great. We are going to install two water basins (one for small children and one for the bigger) and there will be even a small place to take a shower. In the school area, there is also a big washing basin now for cleaning dishes after…Yeah, luxory. And maybe less diarrhea because of missing hygiene…

Another great thing we were able to afford with the help of great people: We bought a copy machine and are about to make our own workbooks in school. Actually, the machine has been with us some months already, but there was not enough voltage in the hostel so we had to shift it to a friend’s place. And as nice as she is, she volunteered to help with copying. There is so much work left.

Now I have to run for I am late, I promised the children to show them a movie, and Sundar accidentally dropped the dvd-player and its broken. Therefore, I’ll have to show it with my laptop. Tomorrow is yet another Sunday. We are going to bake chocolate cake (if we find the ingredients), have a big cricket match and I’ll have to fit in some planning work.

That’s that.

Exhausted.

it’s seven pm and all i can think about is: where are my holidays??? today sheelu and me sat and fixed the schedule for teachers during dusshera holidays. school is closed for one week, and every teacher gets three days holidays, on the other days we have to do some renovations, filing work, planning, trainings and so on. a lot of work has to be neglected while school is open, so we feel we have to utilize holidays as much as we can.

therefore, my holidays are canceled and i’ll stay in hostel and work. although i feel like i desperately need some time for me alone, i know that i’ll regret it if i really take them when the holidays are over. the amount of work is overwhelming and if we don’t do it, it’ll be not done and in the end the children will suffer. it always seems like being forced to make a decision: for privacy and against children, or for children and against privacy. and if i escape and take a day or afternoon off, the next day reminds me with a bigger amount of work that taking rest gets punished after all.

not that we never do recreational things with children…we take them for festivals (ramlila), some sundays i just take four or five and we roam around in the city, we play lego, just hang out toegther and talk… this is always great for me and i need these times when i am not working, but just together playing and talking with the children. in hostel, the best day of the week is sunday. in the morning, we wake up late, maybe 7 or 7.30 am and before getting up we’ll just lay around, cuddle up and watch some children wrestle, have cushion fights (very dangerous, because the cushions here are so hard). with 15 girls in a 15 m2 room inevitably there is also a little crying sunday morning – jyoti fell on barkha and she fell on anita and anita got hurt because she fell on the brick that is holding the door in its place…well, you can imagine. then we have breakfast and children start taking a shower outside or inside, i clean my room, some children are always present, playing, complaining, talking, asking, shouting … for lunch we have chicken in sauce with rice and salat, my week’s favourite and many times the children cook on their own. after lunch, we rest and then i start preparing classes for monday…

how could i miss these wonderful sundays? sadly, sunday is my only free day in the week, so that leaves me with a great dilemma. but anyway, everything we do here always seems to some kind of a compromise.

what i miss most is the absence of talking. i have to talk all day, in school, in shops, in hostel, i can only be silent when working on the computer or eating – and still then, always somebody comes and wants something and i have to talk. i miss being silent, i have so many things to think about and so many stories spinning around in my mind and no time to write them down. writing is so different from talking and although i am very tired now and my eyes are starting to close by themselves, i don’t feel like leaving the internet-cafe, because i know that in hostel 30 children are waiting… and they are going to TALK  well, i wouldn’t mind if i wouldn’t be required to answer, i guess … sometimes i’m just exhausted. but tomorrow is sunday… and next week no teaching, so i’ll be able to work silently in school. just another kind of holidays.

Timetable

For anyone who’s interested, this is our new timetable:

7.30-8.00: Yoga

8.00-8.20: Assembly (Meeting of all classes, discussion of issues concerning all children)

8.20-8.30: Teachers get ready for class and children drink lemon juice

8.30-9.20: First Period

9.20-9.40: Children have break and fruits outside the school, while teachers set up the area for the Free Period

9.40-10.30: Free Work Period (for Pre-Nursery: Free Play, Nursery children can decide wether to stay with Pre-Nursery or the bigger children)

10.30-10.40: Cleaning up the Free Work area, getting ready for the next class

10.40-11.30: Second Period

11.30-12.00: Sweeping the classroom, setting up the seating arrangement for lunch, washing hands

12.00-12.30: Lunch

Volunteering to help the poor

Obviously there is a trend of young people from industrialized countries towards volunteering some months in a „developing country“. One commonly ignored point concerns many small-scale NGOs who get most of their funding from Western countries: Highly motivated, creative and mostly young volunteers come to help the poor, without salary, of course. What sounds great at first glance, in practise is quite questionable.

In general, selection mechanisms based on formal qualifications are ignored when it comes to appointing volunteers. This results in getting additional non-trained staff that does not speak Hindi (sometimes not even fluent English) and usually has no pedagogical background at all; not to talk about desired work experience within precarious social environments. Since the children usually lack positive attention, they long for people who fulfill this need and cling on the caring and hard-trying volunteers. The volunteers are, on the other hand, delighted by the affectionate behaviour of the children. Hugging children and being close to them is seen as a sign of helping them.

What they usually forget is how their leaving will affect the children. The unstable emotional binding within their families find their continuation in the loss of the recently met caring person. This pattern is repeated again with every new volunteer. This happens in the Jeevan-School as well. From the viewpoint of the Samneghat children it might look like this: Rich, white people come from somewhere, wear strange clothes that accentuate the tits, are very friendly, give presents, take pictures, do exciting things with us, don’t understand a word we say – and they inevitably leave.

This experience definitely does not convey a message of supporting the feeling of global citizenship, or sustainability as a mindset. It rather widens the gap of perceptions that distinguishes between “us, the poor” and “them, the rich”. A more guarded and sensitive volunteer policy is needed in order to positively change these preconceptions.

Some vague ideas of how this might happen: At least 6-months commitment, minimum standards (experience with children, pedagogical background or specific qualifications in crafts), telephone interviews, only observation for the first two weeks on the ground and so on. This is nothing new for a lot of organisations, but still necessary in many NGOs in India (including the one I work in, I admit).