Bodli: The Rural Village in Words

On Friday (6/25) we attempted to go back to Bodli to visit the village health worker, Anjana, and observe her as she did an infant assessment and follow-up.

The post below shows some of the pictures I took on our trip. I had an amazing time. To begin with, Anjana was incredible! She reflects the dozens of women that SEARCH has trained to work as village health workers as part of the Home-Based Maternal, Newborn, and Child Care program. These women are usually uneducated or have only reached a certain level of schooling. Yet, they are given the responsibility to record and track all women of reproductive age in the village, all missed periods of all the women, and all pregnancies (four months without a period). Once a woman is designated as pregnant, she receives health education and antenatal care from the village health worker. The village health worker is also present at the majority of deliveries and is trained to react in trauma situations such as asphyxia , sepsis, and hypothermia of the newborn. At the same time, she is responsible for recording critical data such as the birth weight and the condition of the mother. She then follows up with the mother and newborn every day for an entire week and continues to make weekly and monthly visits during which she conducts interviews interwoven with health messages for the mother. This is a lot for one woman to take on!

I was overwhelmed with gratitude for being given the chance to observe the operations of the program. In a self-centered way, I have wanted to witness global public health in action for a very long time. At school I have seen hundreds of photos taken on study abroad and internship experiences, even being in charge of the global health exhibit at the UNC School of Global Public Health this past year. For many years I have desired to go on a trip like this, and to finally be sitting in a rural village, at the home of a community health worker, felt very genuine and fulfilling. Now I was able to take my own photos, and I was able to feel firsthand what it is like to be in the field.

One of my immediate reactions to the sights and sounds of the village was one of culture shock. It was hard for me to imagine that this wasn't just make pretend village, like one would see at Disney or Plymouth Plantation. This was an actual village, where people lived and worked. The conditions are quite different from the ones we are accustomed to. Here, it is normal for livestock to live outside your home, to walk barefoot down the streets, to collect water at one central location for all the homes. I wondered how people could live this way. Inside the homes, there is not wall-to-wall carpet, or dry wall, or fancy furniture, or electronics. The homes are made of mud, clay, cement, and tile. One is lucky if the walls have any color or paintings on them. There are minimal decorations. The only furniture is usually some cot-like beds, some plastic chairs, perhaps a stool, some woven mats on the floor, and maybe a table. The walls are carved out with shelves where you can see some items like a hair comb, a bottle of medication, some silverware. You can tell that these people care for the little material possessions that they have.

Since we were observing an infant assessment and talking a lot about babies, families, and children, I had a very "Western" thought, like "Why do these families keep having children, if these are the conditions they are raised in?" Immediately though I realized that I was trying to force my perceptions of happiness and life into the life of the village residents. For them, the village was community, family, home, pride, happiness, resiliency, etc. Although I may not be used to walking with bare feet on a cement and dirt floor in my home and sleeping on cots in one room with the rest of my family, this was the way of living that these people had always known. I kept wanting to view the lives of the villagers as being filled with hardships, but none of the villagers seemed to be upset or unhappy. And while what is considered a luxury here is very different from back home, these people have the right to have children and sustain their futures just like anybody else.

This cascade of thoughts made me realize how fortunate I was, not just to have the life I did back home, but to be in the presence of the villagers and learn from them. They have so little in the way of material possessions, and one bad storm that kills their crop or an illness in the family can mean the difference between food and hunger, but they are filled with strength and they carry on.

I have tried the best I can to describe my time in Bodli, although I fear I have come off sounding cliche. I am saying the things that anyone would say when visiting a third world country, a developing nation, a rural village in India. Beyond the words that I write here, I cannot fully express or explain the emotions I had during our rural village field trip. On the bus ride home, Miriam and I discussed these thoughts. At 19, Miriam has already lived in Africa and Israel, and she has had moments like this before. We talked about how it will be hard to describe our experience to others back home because as humans, we often describe through comparison, and put things in relative terms. We describe the rural village in reference to our own homes. But, it is not enough to compare and contrast our way of life with theirs. We share the desire to be part of a community, love, sustain our health, have a family, and feed, shelter, and take care of our loved ones. Beyond these commonalities, Bodli, and the many other rural villages like it, are separate and beautiful from our world.