UPDATE MAY/JUNE 2007

[ See also recent photos - May/June 2007 ]

Dear friends, namaskar.

After the many weeks of preparations for the start of our new series of village

education programs in April (video projection of our drama about malnutrition – please see April update for details), in May and June we were able to give some attention again to improving the clinic facilities:

• We had previously constructed two patient urinals near the outside waiting area several months ago, with taps and running water. To minimize the cost, we used inexpensive bamboo walls. This was sufficient for the time being, but now that the monsoon with its heavy rains and storms is beginning, we decided to replace the less sturdy bamboo walls with mud and brick walls. This way we have stronger walls but were still able save money by substituting mud for cement. These urinals are for temporary use until we can construct a permanent toilet block later on.

• In order to protect our pump from rain and theft, we constructed a brick compartment around it with an iron door at the top.

• After many months of being able to access the roof of the new clinic building only by climbing a large but shaky bamboo ladder made for construction work, we’ve now had a simple iron staircase made and attached to the outside wall.

• As we have to work with the often less skilled and efficient local village masons and labourers, various parts of the building sometimes need correcting. Some time after the veranda behind the kitchen was cemented, we noticed that during heavy rains water accumulated on it and started flowing into the kitchen. As the monsoon rains are already beginning, we recently broke and re-cemented the veranda to avoid this problem. Another corrective work was to take away excess plastering from some of the protective sills outside and above the windows, which was preventing the full opening of the windows.

Some indoor improvements were also made, such as the installation of ceiling fans in the guest rooms (old clinic building) and staff kitchen. We’ve also had 4 new patient cots made for the acupuncture hall, increasing the total number of cots from 8 to 12, so that we can better meet the rising number of acupuncture patients. At the same time we’ve installed a long curtain screen along the middle of the hall, to provide more privacy for the treatment of women on one side and men on the other.

Besides expanding our acupuncture treatments, since long we’ve been planning to introduce physiotherapy treatments, to benefit especially the many children who come to us disabled by various kinds of paralysis and muscle contractures. These are due to cerebral palsy, polio and other diseases, which are common here as a result of the widespread chronic malnutrition amongst the villagers. Acupuncture is very effective in many of these cases, but the end result is even better if physiotherapy can be added as an accompanying and follow-up treatment for rehabilitation. Recently we were able to make contact with a skilled and service-minded physiotherapist in nearby Bokaro city, who has agreed to come to our more remote clinic location for giving treatments. Due to our financial limitations, we have begun by hiring him for treatments one day a week. This is the beginning of our rehabilitation centre esp. for children, which we hope to expand in its services as soon as possible. We’ve purchased approx. 10 physiotherapy instruments which will be installed by the physiotherapist within a week so that he can begin treatments the following week.

Since our herbal garden has been expanding with more plant varieties, we re-examined the location of the plots and concluded that the new section, which shows many nutritional herbs and which is presently at the far side of the clinic building, should best be shifted to an area in the front, so that all the patients and visitors can see it more easily and closely. The rainy season is the best time for planting and re-planting, so we’ve just completed the ground preparation and boundaries of the new plots and are now in the process of relocating the plants. The first and original section of our garden, containing our many medicinal herbs, is now directly to the left of the patient waiting area, while the new section containing the nutritional herbs is just opposite, to the right of the waiting area.

For better protection of several sections of the garden, higher bamboo fences have been constructed and painted. Since we’ve been able to start better irrigation after the installation of our tube well and pump, the herbal garden has become more green and healthy looking. At the rear of the clinic building we’ve renewed the plots and laid new seeds in our vegetable garden, which had dried out before the rains started recently.

The video screenings of our nutritional education drama have been continuing on a nearly weekly basis since we started more than two months ago. Technical problems have also been continuing, such as software problems when editing and burning our video onto a DVD, and a malfunctioned component in our projector. Another problem is that the govt. electricity supply in our rural area becomes much less during the rainy season, so that we’re presently getting only a few hours of supply over a period of several days. Fortunately our solar panels provide enough energy for our lights and fans, but in the rainy weather it’s not enough to fully charge our lead-acid batteries, so that they can power the video projector and sound system long enough for the whole program. Once the rainy season is over this situation should improve again, but we hope to acquire more solar panels in the future to have a stronger back-up system.

Despite the various technical obstacles, the video programs have been very well received, with attendance until now varying between 130 and 230. In every village we’ve gone to, we’ve been requested to show the video again the following week, as not all the villagers could attend the first time. During the first days after the screening one of our local staff has interviewed up to 20 persons from the audience with the help of our contact person from that village. All the interviewed villagers said that they could fully understand all the points conveyed in the video regarding vitamins and minerals, their natural food sources, vitamin deficiency diseases, etc.

They all enjoyed the comedy style throughout the drama, and they all said they would try to add more green leafy vegetables to their daily diet from now on.

This month we’ve just begun with our second round of evaluations, which is even more important than the first immediate audience feedback. After at least one month since the screening, we are going back to some of the audience to ask whether they’ve been able to maintain an improved diet. Of the approx. 10 people interviewed so far, almost all are taking more regularly greens in their diet than they were before they saw the video more than a month ago.

Though we were able to successfully film the live drama performance in April, we noticed when viewing the video a few mistakes in the acting and also some weaknesses in the stage setup as well as the sound and video quality. Finally we decided that we should try to re-film the drama to remove these defects. Fortunately the local drama group, with actors from different villages of the region, was available again in May and agreed to perform one more time for us. This time we didn’t do non-stop filming of a live performance for a village, but instead scene by scene filming without inviting the public, so that we could cut and repeat scenes as soon as we saw some technical or acting problems. This way we were able to improve on the first filmed version.

An additional improvement of the video is that we added after the end of the drama several minutes of close-up views of 14 nutritional herbs in our garden, which the villagers can also find in their surroundings. The footage is accompanied by a narration, again in the local dialect, of the plant names and the specific benefits of the most important ones. This add-on is to give the villagers specific and practical information about the locally available plants which they can use to supplement their diet with, after they’ve learned from the drama the general points about healthy nutrition.

As it will take us many months to adequately cover all the villages of our area with the video program (as sometimes a repeated screening is needed for a village), we decided to also show the video every Sunday morning at our clinic, for the time being in our larger guest room. This way many of our patients, who are of course the ones most urgently needing to learn about proper nutrition, can see the video while waiting for their treatment. Sunday morning is when we have our largest number of patients, often more than 100, as on that day all 3 doctors (acupuncture, homoeopathy and allopathy) are giving consultations at the same time. When showing the video the room is sometimes very crowded with patients and relatives, so far up to around 60 at a time, but they don’t mind squeezing and they enjoy the entertaining program while waiting for their turn with the doctor.

The video project is being sponsored by volunteer Anton Szilasi of Australia, who was recently able to get the Australian section of the international NGO Engineers Without Borders (EWB) interested in supporting the project, as well as expanding it to other clinics and rural locations throughout India. If our local project here continues successfully, their plan is to dub the video in the local language of areas where other NGOs in India are interested to use it for educating the rural population. In that case another filming of our drama might be done to further improve the DVD for wider distribution, and eventually we may direct and film further dramas, like sequels, on related health topics such as water hygiene. Already a first request for our DVD was received from a group near Calcutta.

Once again thanks to all of you for your ongoing interest and support.

Yours
Dada Devashuddhananda

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