The Chaos Within - One bite at a time
Bleak.
This often sums up my weekly contribution to the Deep Griha blog.
This week I thought of writing about something that has lifted us and made us feel less bleak... but I cannot ignore the carnage that HIV/AIDS ignorance and stigma continues to wreak. In our field we say that ignorance and stigma kills you before the virus does, and Maya told me about two cases - a suicide and an attempted suicide - that brings this home to us.
A man hung himself with a sarong/lungi in Naidu hospital. He was HIV+. Last year there was a spate of HIV/AIDS related suicides at J J Hospital when people either hurled themselves off the balconies or defenestrated... jumped out of the windows. The attempted suicide was a man living in Yerwada who went into severe depression after he was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS and took a kitchen knife and cut his own throat. The reports as to his recovery were sketchy. At one point we heard that he had died at Sassoon General, but the last we heard he was still alive.
Doctors, especially the small practices in Pune, are often ignorant of how to deal with people who are HIV+... their patients often pick up on the fear, and sometimes the overt hostility or contempt that the doctors treat them with. Time after time in this last year we have heard of doctors who either refuse to treat HIV+ patients or doctors who actually further the fear of the patient by senetencing the already fearful and confused client to death.
"Finished! You got HIV!"
I am not suggesting that the doctor is responsible for the attempted suicide - self inflicted Scicilian necktie without the tongue - but the spate of suicides at JJ, the hanging at Naidu, and the information we continuously receive about 'fear' in the health sector does point to a problem.
DISHA, later this year, hopes to address the problem by beginning with a camp for the local doctors in the Tadiwala Road area. 2006 is our 'Share the Vision' year. The vision is to make Tadiwala Road a model community in the battle gainst HIV/AIDS. A Time Asia cover story last year on HIV/AIDS and denial in India had the top man at NACO say that the "the battle against HIV and AIDS will be won or lost in India." Yes, but the battle must be fought at the grassroots! Too much slips through the India wide net. This is why grassroots organisations have to step up.
Returning to the local doctors, to make Tadiwala Road a model community requires them on board, as much as and often more so than the local community leaders and politicians that will also be targeted by us. We have heard reports of a local doctor who refuses to inform his patients of their HIV+ status because he makes money off of their opportunistic infections. These are unconfirmed reports, and are in fact almost impossibe to verify, but we do feel that a beginning will be putting all these medical practitioners together and talking to them about how HIV+ people should be approached... and if we do it right, in deference to their status as 'doctor' then hopefully they will share our vision.
Since returning from Africa the enormity of the task ahead of us is ever befor me. And the team also realised this when we conducted an awareness programme on Valentine's Day at Wadia College, another leading college of the University of Pune. The team was astounded that so many college students were in the dark about the issues that we work with. Issues that directly affect them.
The morning before Valentine's day the team and I was talking about that long hard road that we have just stepped onto... and then asked them "how do you eat an elephant?" They were astounded. Elephant? Why would anyone want to eat an elephant? Discussions arose as to how tough and leathery the meat would be, and how big a knife would be required to cut through the bones. There was laughter at sawing motions and thoughts on what the tastiest part would be... trunk, flank, thigh (drumstick), deepfried ears... but in the end they understood. "In small pieces." At Wadia College, as the programme drew to a close, Meera asked Natasha and a few other volunteers the same question, because it was in that surrounding of ignorance and sprinklings of apathy that the enormity struck them again. "One bite at a time," said Paul. And Meera smiled. One bite at a time.
I love the DISHA team... the bites that we take out of the elephant are larger chunks because of them. Now that wasn't so bleak was it?
This often sums up my weekly contribution to the Deep Griha blog.
This week I thought of writing about something that has lifted us and made us feel less bleak... but I cannot ignore the carnage that HIV/AIDS ignorance and stigma continues to wreak. In our field we say that ignorance and stigma kills you before the virus does, and Maya told me about two cases - a suicide and an attempted suicide - that brings this home to us.
A man hung himself with a sarong/lungi in Naidu hospital. He was HIV+. Last year there was a spate of HIV/AIDS related suicides at J J Hospital when people either hurled themselves off the balconies or defenestrated... jumped out of the windows. The attempted suicide was a man living in Yerwada who went into severe depression after he was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS and took a kitchen knife and cut his own throat. The reports as to his recovery were sketchy. At one point we heard that he had died at Sassoon General, but the last we heard he was still alive.
Doctors, especially the small practices in Pune, are often ignorant of how to deal with people who are HIV+... their patients often pick up on the fear, and sometimes the overt hostility or contempt that the doctors treat them with. Time after time in this last year we have heard of doctors who either refuse to treat HIV+ patients or doctors who actually further the fear of the patient by senetencing the already fearful and confused client to death.
"Finished! You got HIV!"
I am not suggesting that the doctor is responsible for the attempted suicide - self inflicted Scicilian necktie without the tongue - but the spate of suicides at JJ, the hanging at Naidu, and the information we continuously receive about 'fear' in the health sector does point to a problem.
DISHA, later this year, hopes to address the problem by beginning with a camp for the local doctors in the Tadiwala Road area. 2006 is our 'Share the Vision' year. The vision is to make Tadiwala Road a model community in the battle gainst HIV/AIDS. A Time Asia cover story last year on HIV/AIDS and denial in India had the top man at NACO say that the "the battle against HIV and AIDS will be won or lost in India." Yes, but the battle must be fought at the grassroots! Too much slips through the India wide net. This is why grassroots organisations have to step up.
Returning to the local doctors, to make Tadiwala Road a model community requires them on board, as much as and often more so than the local community leaders and politicians that will also be targeted by us. We have heard reports of a local doctor who refuses to inform his patients of their HIV+ status because he makes money off of their opportunistic infections. These are unconfirmed reports, and are in fact almost impossibe to verify, but we do feel that a beginning will be putting all these medical practitioners together and talking to them about how HIV+ people should be approached... and if we do it right, in deference to their status as 'doctor' then hopefully they will share our vision.
Since returning from Africa the enormity of the task ahead of us is ever befor me. And the team also realised this when we conducted an awareness programme on Valentine's Day at Wadia College, another leading college of the University of Pune. The team was astounded that so many college students were in the dark about the issues that we work with. Issues that directly affect them.
The morning before Valentine's day the team and I was talking about that long hard road that we have just stepped onto... and then asked them "how do you eat an elephant?" They were astounded. Elephant? Why would anyone want to eat an elephant? Discussions arose as to how tough and leathery the meat would be, and how big a knife would be required to cut through the bones. There was laughter at sawing motions and thoughts on what the tastiest part would be... trunk, flank, thigh (drumstick), deepfried ears... but in the end they understood. "In small pieces." At Wadia College, as the programme drew to a close, Meera asked Natasha and a few other volunteers the same question, because it was in that surrounding of ignorance and sprinklings of apathy that the enormity struck them again. "One bite at a time," said Paul. And Meera smiled. One bite at a time.I love the DISHA team... the bites that we take out of the elephant are larger chunks because of them. Now that wasn't so bleak was it?
posted by Deep Griha at 11:16 pm
2 Comments:
you are doing such good work - keep it up and take encouragement from your successes
Good Job..u will succeed
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