THE RESILIENCE OF TIBETANS - 

A LOOK FROM MCLEOD GANJ

DHARAMSHALA

As I have travelled through India I have been intrigued with how resilient the Tibetan people are and have been through out history. I will leave the deep seeded historical details for academic historians, who have more knowledge that I, to write about.

My interest comes more from a social and community interest and peeked more as I have been staying in Dharamshala, McCloud Ganj, the location of the Dahli Lama and the Tibetan exiled government in India.

This is recent history, I was barely a toddler in Canada when this was going on. Following a decade of political turmoil which started with the invasion of China into Tibet, the Chinese overthrew the Tibetan government. The Dhali Lama, on a self imposed exile, took refuge in India, with his government and over 100000 Tibetan people following.

This year marks 60 years since the Tibetan government went to India in exile, and during these six decades over a million Tibetan people have been killed, and hundreds of thousands of women have been killed, sterilized or forced into abortion, by the Chinese government. Many Tibetan citizens have been murdered for speaking out, in their own country, which continues to be under Communist Chinese rule with no freedom of religion, speech, or press.
Somewhere in the neighbourhood of 6000 Tibetan monasteries have been since obliterated by the Chinese and they have harvested the Tibetan natural resources to near depletion. Over 80% of the Tibetan forests have been destroyed, and large amounts nuclear and toxic waste have been disposed of in Tibet, the starting point for all 10 major rivers that run through the rest of Asia.

The turmoil of the 50’s you would think would be insurmountable but the Tibetan people are not only physically resilient from living in such high mountains with such difficult conditions they appear to be mentally resilient too, to have survived such torture and loss in their country, invaded by China. But it has gotten worse, since that time. The Chinese government policies have almost completely destroyed the Tibetan culture in Tibet. Chinese is now the official language of Tibet and only one in seven people are Tibetan, with the number of Tibetan people continuing to plummet.

The Norbulingka Institute – textile learning.

In India, the Tibetan people face unreasonable economic and social circumstances. They have not been able to identify as refugees, which they are, but rather on paper, in India, Tibetan people are considered as foreigners. They are not allowed to hold government employment and in some cases Universities will not allow Tibetan refugees to enrol. Some say this is the Indian Government’s way of being sensitive to not try to assimilate the Tibetan people. Some Tibetan people living in India say not having citizenship in India causes extreme difficulties when trying to migrate as many countries are not open to refugees from Tibet, while others stay in India and strive to keep their culture alive. Even with unspoken pressure (from family and friends) to take refuge in other countries can be overwhelming to some Tibetan refugees in India.
I visited the Tibetan Cultural centre a few weeks ago and I was truly impressed with how that institute continues to teach Tibetan culture so that the younger generation can carry on. The young people attending that institution were amazing, not only with their craft but their philosophy of working toward a better future while continuing to highlight the Tibetan culture.

Norbulingka Institute – crafts painting room

The Dahli Lama, the spiritual and political leader of Tibetans, an icon, in this world, has and continues to carry the message of peace, supporting and blessing hundreds of initiatives to make life better for the people of this world. Locally, in India, he brings this message concentrated for Indians and Tibetans alike. In fact the Dahli Lama calls India his second home. The Dahli Lama’s foundation has contributed one half a million Indian Rupees to the Indian Medical Association’s facilities.
Recently the Women’s association of Dharamshala has worked with the Tibetan Nun’s on the issue of taxi safety by creating a Woman’s Taxi Service, Pink Wheels Taxi. This service should be available within the year in McLeod Ganj, where most of the Nun’s require taxi service. The Dahli Lama has blessed this initiative.

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  Inside the Tebetan temple located inside the Institute’s grounds.

I have spent the last few months travelling in Asia and have met and seen people in some very impoverished, overwhelming circumstances but the Tibetan people in India, also in some very impoverished circumstances, seem to have a way to make you feel like there is hope for all of the world. It seems through the belief and blessings of the Dahli Lama, they manage to carry on, in spite of the physical and emotional scares from the past.

I have enjoyed my time in India and will miss the cultural experiences and my new found friends when I leave. I would like to come back to India and take a more exploratory look at the Tibetan’s plight as refugees.

Leann, July 2019

A dreamer with the feet firmly on the ground.

It is a fact that when someone chooses voluntarily to work for an NGO does it for personal motives. Although for some reason, it is easy to forget that in our freedom of action, to work for an NGO in a foreign country requires adapting ourselves to certain rules and ways of acting.

Before enrolling myself within EduCARE India my personal and professional expectations were far away from where they are nowadays. I thought that in an already established relationship between the NGO and the community I was going to be able to create artistic and creative workshops for the community within my project for the NGO.

After my first week in Rait (Himachal Pradesh) in which I observed how other members of the team worked, I realised that there was almost no community engaged so consequently projects running with difficulties. This statement does not only reflect an issue but unrealistic expectations from my side and an incoherent action plan proposal.

Is it the lack of verbal communication the cause of the problem? Is the strategy for engaging community what it is failing? Is it that community does not want to work with people coming from Western countries? Lot of questions came into my mind since I arrived but none of them well enough formulated under EduCARE premises.

After uncountable number of productive meetings, brainstorming and informal conversations with the members of EduCARE for the past two months, I understood that expectations should be according to the context; otherwise they are not expectations but utopic dreams.

Meeting in Naddi

How good you know the NGO and how it operates?

In the daily living within the community we discovered that members of community do not really understand what EduCARE volunteers/interns are doing in the villages. It is known we work for an NGO but what does to work for an NGO really mean? EduCARE India works with concepts such as Sustainable Development, Social Entrepreneurship and Social Innovation, Systems and Design Thinking, Grass-roots level community engagement, Community empowerment. Prioritises learning over anything else; and promotes to project and act locally under a global approach (very roughly said).

Without knowing the meaning of these and more concepts the NGO work with, the way it operates and its scope it is difficult to get a complete understanding of what, where, when, why and how we and our projects should be managed for accomplishing positive outcomes as individuals, as part on an organization and as citizen of a global world.

How good you know the community?

Talking from my experience, I came to India as individual wishing to be able to make a difference on the quality of living of the village population, then I found that I did have almost no idea about Indian way of living, Indian culture, its languages, its religions, and so on. How possible is to create a successful socio-cultural project for an almost unknown culture? Now I am allowed to say that it is practically impossible.

To work for a community or even just for an individual a deep knowledge about its/ their needs and wants is required. Before creating a project proposal is needed to make an exercise for ourselves and ask to us what are the individual/ community needs? Do its/their needs match with the global needs? Then, and only then, the scope of the project will be better adapted for the change.

Women from the community

How good is a project to make the difference?

The goals and objectives of my initial project proposal are another incoherence to add to the list of false expectations. As Rome was not built in one day we cannot expect to change the vision of a whole community from one day to the next one.

If I have seen we have certain issues in the way we run some of the projects and the way they impact in community is because we pretend to make all changes at once. We are told from EduCARE ‘think big, do small’. My dreams and ambitions did not allow me to see that the sum of many small steps marks a path ahead where there was none existence before.

Taking all these things into account might help to create more realistic expectations and better outcomes of our experience and our projects; otherwise, frustration and demotivation might become part of the Indian experience, and as I always say and repeat to myself ‘there is no need to suffer’.

Emma Gutierrez - Spain

CCC project manager in Rait

Little Trip to Lajwanti Nursery: a beautiful place, a passionate owner, an amazing help for EduCARE!

January, the season for grafting has come! Back from the holidays, we remembered a visit in October to Lajwanti Nursery, a beautiful nursery in Dharamshala. The owner of the place, very friendly, had offered to show us grafting when the season would come.

We called and were immediately offered to come the day after. Near the police station in Dharamshala, nobody was able to guide us to the nursery. We were a bit lost! After a phone call to the nursery, someone came to pick us up. We arrived at the nursery by 11am.

How nice to see the place again! Lajwanti Nursery is a quiet place, owned by a passionate man who is always very keen to share and discuss about his passion. Plants are everywhere! From the ground to the walls, they are grown on every space available. Here is the ideal for anyone who wants to learn: nearly all the trees are labeled with the local and the Latin name.

It is also well suited if you just want to wander around. The nursery is very beautiful and full of flowers depending on the season. A member of the family is passionate about animals so you can also see some dogs, birds, etc., on your way.

The subject of the day was grafting. Naddi, the village we are working in, is surrounded by the forest. We are planting some trees on a steep slope and the inhabitants would be very interested in having fruit trees. But the fruits that we can find there are really tiny and not very good.

A solution: grafting!

What we could do is use the local trees as stem trees and graft a fruit tree branch on it.

The result: a tree adapted to the area because it is local to it, with branches and big fruits from another tree! To do this you need to pick up two trees of the same family (genius).So we learned how to do this properly and grafted pear on “Kanth”: a local wild pear tree. There is a lot of “Kanth” in Naddi so we can definitely reproduce this. We can also graft Cherry on “Paja”: another local tree.

We should be able to see the result of the grafts in about 2 weeks’ time. We will go there again to see if the graft went well and to buy some trees to be able to begin our grafting process by next year! We hope to be able to bring a community member with us so that she can meet the owner of the place.

The owner is very enthusiastic and will be a permanent help and contact for the organization!

Thank you Lajwanti Nursery and see you soon! 

Louise Brunier and Johnatan de Larminat - France

Forestry Project Managers, Naddi (Himachal Pradesh) 

Water or not water?

Water may seem secure and reliable for most of us back in our home countries. In here, it is much less of a given resource : we are surrounded by streams, it is raining almost everyday ; yet our taps remain empty for more than half of the week. As often in India, it is all about contrasts. The Naddi hotels show off with impressive number of tanks of water and the number of leaking pipes is ever increasing. On the other hand, families in Naddi don’t necessarily have running water in their houses.

Living with short supplies of water is challenging for sure and has actually led to lot of skills learning. For the first fews days without water, we were lucky enough to find water at the office, just 3 floors up. It was just a matter of carrying the buckets back down, under the intense scrutiny of the construction workers working next to our house. It’s when this back up option stopped that things became a lot more interesting.

How to do the dishes, flush, shower, or simply wash hands ? Luckily enough, there is a public tap nearby. By public tap, I mean a broken pipe that dispenses some water. This lead us to get to know Deepu, whose chai stalls is right next to the tap. Also, needless to say that foreigners waiting by a broken pipes with buckets at their feet is attracting much attention and we have offered entertainment to more than one person.

However this arrangement could not last forever and the ‘public tap’ – to our despair – got fixed… But in India there is always back up plans to the back up plan. Indeed, couple of meters after Deepu’s shop there is a temple. And the temple conveniently has a tank full of water. We need to share it with people who come in here to pray. At first they are surprised to find us there, but - after some starring - they are rather amused by our situation.

In addition to finding new supplies of water, we had to learn how to use our water as efficiently as possible. Baby wipes and 2 liters showers are part of our routine. Flushing is done only when necessary. Plate sharing and cup mingling has been adopted in the Dal Lake flat. And whenever water is back, we turn hysterical and run around filling our buckets and completing our collection of bottles, graphically lined up on our kitchen and bathrooms floors.

 Bottle Collection

As a result, even though water shortage is not fun everyday, we have learnt how to appreciate simple things. The sound of water running down our tap has become music to our ears and a bucket shower (or better: through the shower head) is assimilated to happiness. Simple things…

Harmonie Bucher - France
Women's Health Project Manager and Health Coordinator, Naddi

Sweet Dreams in Girls’ Club

As I look back to our first Girls’ Club meeting in March, career pathways other than teacher and doctor and the word “aspiration” appeared to be intangible concepts, too big for our girls group to grasp. Every week, we begin Girls’ Club with an icebreaker activity to get to know one another better. We also use these activities to assess their understanding of the abstract concepts that we try to present. Our first ever icebreaker activity involved sitting in a circle and asking each girl what they like about themselves. The range of 12 to 14 year olds struggled to understand the question, as their responses focused on the people and things they like instead. After noticing the difficulty the girls had with the activity, we tried to gauge which physical attributes they liked about themselves, thus, shifting the focus back onto them. When planning this activity, I anticipated responses, such as, “I like my creativity”, and “I like that I’m different.” This first Girls’ Club discussion, however, was met with “I like my hair”, “I like my eyes”, and “I like my cheeks.”

 

Since then, we have used crafts and games to encourage self-expression and to foster a sense of self and individuality among the group. Although on some Sundays, they can be quite restless, our attempts at building the girls’ confidence and showcasing women’s potential and achievements seldom fall short of meeting the objective.

Throughout May, the women’s empowerment interns experimented with introducing the girls to various female role models. We began this series with Savitribai Jyotirao Phule, who opened the first school for girls in India in 1848. The girls read the summarized biography of Phule, held onto every detail of her life, but they could not explain why she should be important to us all. They missed the fact that she is the reason they can get an education today. Evaluating this first role model discussion, we observed that not all of the girls were engaged, sidebar conversations took over, and in all, the interest was not there. Preparing to try again the following week, we thought, “maybe we should introduce someone more recent”, “maybe we should make the summary more concise”, “maybe this activity is too much like school”, “maybe we should highlight the points we want them to remember, by acknowledging one key detail each week.”

We began again with Mary Kom, a famous professional Indian boxer, who won a bronze medal in the 2012 Summer Olympics, and a gold medal in the 2014 Asian Games. Upon introducing Mary Kom, some girls were familiar with her story. Each week, we presented a new detail about her life: from being bullied as a child because she came from a poor family, to her father saying that boxing isn’t something a girl should do. The aim of this revised weekly conversation was to introduce the girls to influential Indian women, who faced challenges on heir path to making a difference. Unfortunately, emphasis on these different points didn’t generate the kind of conversation we hoped for. The girls were aware that Mary Kom was a successful boxer, but they were still missing why she was someone we could look up to. And when asked to elaborate on their thoughts of the way Mary’s father felt about girls boxing, not much was stated.

The next few weeks involved taking a break from the role model discussions. We facilitated more hands on activities: we talked about the environment, made bracelets, drew pictures, and we played games to practice our English. Our final Girls’ Club meeting for the month of May combined an abstract concept to a tangible activity. After our opening icebreaker, we asked the girls about their dreams. Two girls immediately expressed their dream of having long hair. Another girl said her dream is to be an IPS officer. After hearing this, the rest of the girls chimed in with more hopes and aspirations: doctor, teacher, and pilot were of those mentioned. In talking about our dreams, we introduced a brief cultural context on the dream catcher. We explained that according to Native American custom, when you hang a dream catcher above your bed, it catches your bad dreams in its net, and filters the good thoughts and dreams, which trickle down the feathers, onto you as you sleep. We shared pictures so that they could see what a dream catcher looked like. The girls greeted each photograph with a soft “wow!” We then pulled out some bangles and thread, and began making our own. Weaving the web was a challenge for some of the girls. As others caught the hang of it, they helped one another make their dream catchers. Because we couldn’t find feathers in any of the local shops, we embellished our dream catchers with beads instead. A photo session was soon in tow, as the girls showed off what they made.

Besides a cool ornament to hang in their rooms, I can’t really say how much was taken from the activity. But to see the progress these girls have shown from March to now is a reward in itself. The first time we ever talked about careers, their most immediate thoughts were teacher and doctor, but now, these girls are expressing dreams to fly, hopes to help others and make a difference.

Alanah Grant, USA

Women's Empowerment Project Manager - Rait

The First Girls Club in MJD

 Since March, the Naddi Young Women’s IDEA team have been running English Lessons for teenage girls from the MJD community. These lessons are not only educational, but provide a key platform for community engagement. After spending time getting to know some of the girls in MJD, building relationships and gaining their trust, we raised the idea of setting up a girls club.

Some of the girls had heard of the Shenni girls club and were really excited about the idea of having one (which they were clear they wanted to stay separate and just their own) as soon as possible! On the 23rd of May we held the first MJD girls club at the ECRC, which five girls attended.

We explained that the girls club in Shenni provided a safe space for the girls to discuss anything they wanted to with us, and we could talk about the things they felt were important. Then we asked what they thought girls club should be, allowing them to have some input into nature of their girls club and to make it their own. For the first session we wanted to start by discussing their dreams and aspirations. We thought that this topic would be interesting, allowing us to get to know the girls better and developing trust with them so that we can move on to covering more personal topics in the future, if they want to talk about these issues.

Their dream jobs ranged from singer to bank manager to police woman. In a society in which women’s primary duties tend to be domestic, even if they have received an education, we hoped to encourage these young women to pursue a rewarding professional life through talking about their plans for the future.

We brought along a map of the globe and everyone chose the place they would most like to visit in the world. Some were close, such as Delhi or Chandigar, while some of the girls wanted to travel far further away to Australia or Brazil. Sakshi then explained her dream of having a scooter, so she would have the freedom to go anywhere she chose to, which all of the girls agreed would be amazing.

While we carried on talking about how we would like our lives to be and listening to their favourite songs, we showed the girls how to make dream catchers. They were all really engaged in the activity, even though it is slightly complicated and some of them struggled to weave the web at the centre of the dream catcher. They all seemed to enjoy the session, so hopefully attendance will be high at the next girls club!

 

Lily Pollock, UK

Women's Empowerment Project Manager - Naddi

Cultivating Community Projects: What’s Really Involved

This blog is usually used to communicate, celebrate and reflect on EduCARE’s successes; be it a successful health project, a significant milestone in community relationship building, or the start of a village-wide environmental awareness campaign. We love to share the photos of smiling interns side by side with satisfied community members, and recount that special feeling of achieving something amazing together. This blog is usually a record of the fruits of our labour.

In this post I have no grand event to report, no milestone to reflect on and no photos of a crowd of community members with EduCARE staff snapped after a long but fruitful day. This post contains no fruit at all, only carefully prepared soil and the first suggestions of a fresh green shoot.

Every morning and afternoon, our landlord, a seventy-something year old man with a neat moustache and gravelly voice, helps us tend our garden at the Rait intern house. With one of our main centre goals being to maintain a sustainable house project, the veggie garden is very important to us interns. With years of agricultural experience, “Uncle” demonstrates how to prepare the soil, explains where and when to plant each crop, and diligently monitors the watering schedule. We are all very excited with the prospect of soon cooking and eating our own home-grown vegetables;perhaps, a little too excited and a little too quick to throw seeds into the unprepared soil of a new garden bed just in front of the veranda.

Our Uncle just shakes his head at this, patiently gets the shovel and instructs us to loosen the soil in the small plot of land. “Do we plant the seeds now”, we ask, Uncle shakes his head and smiles. The next day, he brings a bag of cow manure, directs us to scatter it across the small plot of land and then work the nutrient-rich goodness into the soil. “Do we plant the seeds now”, we ask, Uncleshakes his head and smiles. The next day, he brings three huge bags of dried leaves, scatters them over the plot of land and leaves them there. We don’t ask about seeds this time, we just watch and wait. The leaves stay there for days, weeks even, getting no attention other than the occasional watering. As I write, we still haven’t planted any seeds in that plot of land in front of the veranda. We realise now that there’s more to gardening than throwing seeds into the dirt and hoping for the best.

Similarly,there is more to community development than just throwing a project at the community and hoping it will take root. When the Rait centre first initiated its figure-head women’s empowerment project in March, the Young Women’s Association, it was assumed that a range of other projects would inevitably shoot off, including skills development and training programs, self-help groups and micro-enterprises. Things are never that simple.

The women’s empowerment team in Rait has learnt the importance of leg-work, liaising with stakeholders, comparing options, exploring new avenues and finding creative solutions to unexpected challenges. Take our mushroom farming project, for example. The project design involves training a group of women in the art of mushroom cultivation, providing a small interest-free loan to help with training and start-up costs, and helping the women source materials and equipment to start their own mushroom micro-enterprises at home. Sounds simple enough, right? Hold on, don’t throw those seeds in that hard, compacted dirt just yet.

We’ve spent the last two months travelling to agricultural research institutes and universities, communicating back and forth with professors and mushroom experts, learning about mushroom cultivation techniques, preparing cost analyses, and comparing training options. Only once all of this behind the scenes legwork was done could we go to the women, who expressed an interest in growing mushrooms, to tell them the good news. But wait, you may have broken your back turning that soil, but you haven’t introduced the manure yet!

The women of Rait live diverse and complicated lives. Their time is split between domestic duties, child care, social and community obligations, and a diverse range of income-generating activities. There is a diverse mix of living and housing situations, from large multi-roomed complexes, which house entire extended families, to simple two room structures, and single rented rooms that are shared by each family. The diversity of these women’s experiences poses some interesting challenges for designing a project suitable for each of their living situations, schedules and needs. From difficulties with finding two consecutive days to attend a training course,to identifying a suitable spot in the house to allow the sensitive young mushrooms to grow, communicating with each of the women requires multiple visits to their homes (and lots of cups of chai). The language barrier poses another problem and we often have to enlist the aid of a native-speaker. Every visit presents a new challenge and requires some creative problem solving. It may not be so glamourous, but this is what community development work really looks like.

It takes time and a lot of back-breaking labour to get the soil primed and ready for sowing.

We’d love for this blog post to be about the success of our first mushroom farming training workshop, or to include a photo of a smiling woman proudly presenting her crop of home-grown oyster mushrooms. In the future, we hope to bring you these things, but for now all I can share with you is the nitty-gritty of what community development really looks like. We’ve put a lot of effort into laying the foundation of this project, anticipating and solving challenges in creative ways, and tailoring solutions to meet the individual and the collective needs of the women of Rait. We are currently putting together individual contracts for each of the women, to ensure the micro-credit process is both transparent and specific to each woman’s needs. We plan to hold our first training workshop in early June; our first mushroom crop should be ready by late July or early August.

We might not have anything to show for our efforts just yet, but with such rich and carefully cultivated soil, we are bound to have a successful crop soon enough.

Katherine Woolnough - Australia

Women's Empowerment Project Manager, Rait

Good Encounters: English, Mushrooms, and Marriage

Though being invited over for chai may be custom, it isn't an everyday "thing" to be stopped on the road and asked for English lessons.

Enthused and eager, a local woman who works at a fabric shop, located on the main road, did just that. Calling Katherine over, this woman expressed great interest in wanting to learn English. Raadha Devi is a forty-two year old mother of two, and is certainly a woman unlike any other. Her husband is a bus driver; her daughter, a twenty year old nursing student, and her eighteen year old son is preparing to join the army.

Upon inviting Katherine into the fabric shop, she called her daughter, Shivani, to act as an interpreter between the two. Because they were excited to learn that there is more than just one foreigner living in Rait, they walked Katherine home, and spent some time with the rest of the interns. Within this brief visit, you could see Raadha's lively and jovial personality radiate throughout our back veranda. She made bracelets with us, taught us a few Hindi words in exchange for some English, and as a gift, she gave us two bags of mushrooms. It was then that we learned that Raadha grows and sells mushrooms and works at the fabric shop to help her husband bring money into their household. Before leaving, she invited us to her niece's wedding, which was just weeks away. Her laughter and warm presence was a reassurance, in lieu of our Young Women's Association's stagnancy.

We make frequent visits to the fabric shop where she works to say hello, look at the clothes, and practice English. Because Raadha was the first person to inquire about lessons, we used the lessons we prepared for our YWA members to introduce conversational English to her. This was helpful in assessing the quality of the lessons we've created. We spent about an hour going over salutations, introductions, and role play with miniature dialogues. Making small mistakes, Raadha caught on quite fast and can now introduce herself or someone else in English.

Early one Tuesday morning, we traveled to Lunj to attend her neice's wedding. We assume that because there were five foreigners on board, the bus driver mixed some pop music into his Himachali playlist, serenading us with the sounds of Akon and One Republic. Once there, we were fortunate to be part of all of the traditions taking place on the last day of the marriage. We met the bride, watched and participated in the haldi ceremony, and ate some incredibly delicious food. Raadha's relatives were excited to converse with us, asking about our work with EduCARE, as well as how we were enjoying our stay in India. Her family spoiled us with sincere Indian hospitality, reminding us that in Indian culture, "a guest is god." Supplied with endless sweets, one relative bought us chocolates and took us to the river, as another took us to the Masroor Rock Cut Temple.

Once the celebrating began, Raadha and her daughter proudly showed us off to everybody as their guests. We received about as much attention as the bride and groom-- so many people wanted to take pictures of us and with us! We laughed and danced the night away and were asleep no later than one in the morning. Unfortunately, we couldn't stay awake long enough to see the bride and groom off, but in all, our time with Raadha's family was an unforgettable experience.

You don't meet too many people, bold enough to stop you on the street and ask for English lessons; many will stare and some may respond to your "namaste." I find myself in awe of Raadha's bold personality. Though we've only known Raadha a month, I've taken so much from our time together: her charisma, her initiative, and her family's hospitality. Everytime I pass by the fabric shop, I anticipate her bright smile, warm laugh, her heavy-accented "hello," and her inviting "bato" (sit down). Learning of the microenterprise potential at-home mushroom cultivation has for women, mushroom farming is a project we plan to begin with a few of our YWA members in May.

Alanah Grant - USA

Women's Empowerment Project Manager, Rait

Naddi Health Camp

Last Sunday, April 26, marked a greatly successful event in Naddi center. Realizing the community’s needs for access to regular health care service, EduCARE India had organized a free health checkup for girls and women in Naddi with the participation of Fortis Hospital in Kangra.

Since the morning of the health camp, every team member was busy with a few last preparations for this big event. ReStore team was making juices to be served to doctors and patients. Another team was in the health clinic making sure everything was in place while others were running around handling logistics. Certainly we all hoped that the health camp would run smoothly.

A team of doctors and nurses from Fortis hospital arrived at around noon. We were honored to welcome Dr.Anu Namgyal, a gynecologist, and Dr.Sumeet Badhwar, a general practitioner, from Fortist Hospital.

In the waiting room

Women waiting to see the docor

The first group of women soon arrived and we all got to work right away. The women first were welcomed to a waiting room where free and health juices were served, their basic information collected, their weight measured, blood pressured and sugar level checked. Each woman then took their number and went to see the doctors.

While Naddi interns continued to assist with the whole operation, three girls from Shenny community also eagerly participated in this event. They were talking to women waiting, collecting information needed, talking to doctors, etc.

Dr.Anu Namgyal

Dr. Parveen Kumar

EduCARE team, Fortis team and Shenny community members

After nearly four hours of the event, fifty plus women had come to the health checkup. We received very positive responses from the communities and from Fortis Hospital. We were all so happy to see the event was a great success and our efforts had finally paid off.

For me, as a cluster coordinator, I could not be happier to see how much the communities were engaged and how much teamwork the Naddi interns showed. Moreover, not only did the health camp provide women with access to quality health care service, but it also raised awareness of health issues among community members.

At the end of the health camp, a young girl from the Shenny community said that she wanted to be a doctor. Dr.Anu Namgyal said: “If only one doctor comes out of this event, it will be already really successful.”

This reminds me of why I find my work so rewarding. It is not just about creating sustainable development within communities but also creating opportunities and exposures for women and young girls.

Hanh Lam, Vietnam

Cluster Coordinator - Dharamsala