A Number That Matters...
5.7 Million, 3 Million, 90, 28, 1…
Which of these numbers is the most shocking?
They are all numbers that are very significant to us.
5.7 Million is the 2006 estimate by UNAIDS regarding the suspected number of current HIV cases in India.
3 Million is a revised estimate by a different organization released to great publicity in the last month or so for India.
90 was the number of clients we have in our Tadiwala Rd. DISHA program; “was”, because on Tuesday it fell to 89.
28 is the number of clients we have in our Ramtekadi DISHA program.
1 is the number of DISHA clients who died on Tuesday.
I would have a hard time believing that his family cared at all for any of the other numbers.
Numbers are sexy and trendy, they rise and they fall, they changed hourly, daily, and yearly. Numbers get funding. They don’t properly tell the story of an epidemic however. If an epidemic is defined by numbers, or embodied by photographs, it is experienced only first hand. You don’t experience an epidemic reading a newspaper article or seeing a photograph. In fact, despite being in India for a year and involved in DISHA for nearly half that time, I can’t really say that I ever felt the individual and personal impact of an epidemic until last Tuesday. I’d been to Sahara and seen clients die there. But at Sahara a client is generally surrounded only by caring staff members and other ailing clients, not their families, not in a domestic setting, at the end of a lane in Tadiwala Rd.
Whether or not all the grief witnessed at the post-mortem ceremony on Tuesday was real or simply dictated by custom; it aroused the senses of the eyes, ears, and nose and caused prickles on the skin. Family members pounded the bed and sometimes the body itself, wailing about their grief at losing a husband, a brother, a son, or a friend. Some held his head in their hands, others drew away and asked our care-workers why they had not wrapped the body in plastic, or covered the mouth, lest the virus escape and infect all those present in the light, misty, monsoonal rain that scarcely dampened those assembled to pay their respects(?).
To those that lose a mother, daughter, brother, or uncle to this epidemic, I’m sure that the numbers above 1 do not matter. To the care workers here, it seems also that one is the number that truly matters. Each client gets the respect and care that they would want themselves. This is articulated particularly fluently by our HIV positive care-workers who take this thought quite literally. This total care towards single clients is also restoring in them a sense of dignity and social existence that i was reported in a newspaper last year that India leads the world in AIDS deaths is not a disputed number.
We try to say that HIV is a virus you can live with, and not one that you need to die from, yet here, in India, is that true?
How do you die from HIV? Do you literally wither away in the most painful way imaginable due to wasting disease, do you die from dehydration due to a long bought of bloody diahhrea, do you kill yourself, does society kill you?
When you wait until it is too late to seek help for HIV because you are worried of the stigma of your family and greater society do your AIDS related infections kill you or did society?
Care-workers don’t think twice of working with HIV positive clients, they know the facts related to transmission and they know the importance of what they do. Yet, despite this knowledge they do put themselves at slightly greater risk of infection by being around potentially infected blood. They do this to prolong their clients lives. What happens when the client no longer wants to live?
On Tuesday I carried a client in and out of several clients from a rickshaw to a bed and transferred him between vehicles. He couldn’t speak to say how badly everything hurt, but when a 30 year old man weighs less than a sack of flour, you know it is bad. His eyes rolled back in his head everytime I lifted him, and I knew that his pain was excruciating whenever I touched him. Did he want us to do this?
To get him jabbed with an IV and continue on with whatever pain was to come? Should I be asking myself such questions? Or, should we just try to preserve and prolong their lives without regard for clients’ possible wishes?
When faced with such a situation, all the education and thinking in the world doesn’t enter your head, it becomes an example of primeval humanity. The type that gave rise to communal civilizations, and a type that is often forgotten today. You just see the person who needs help, you don’t see the illness, you don’t see anything, you just act on impulse to help and preserve life. But with this illness, in India, today, can life be more miserable than death…am I a bad person for saying that, whether or not it is true? These thoughts don’t enter your head whether you help, but days after a client commits suicide, they do.
Which of these numbers is the most shocking?
They are all numbers that are very significant to us.
5.7 Million is the 2006 estimate by UNAIDS regarding the suspected number of current HIV cases in India.
3 Million is a revised estimate by a different organization released to great publicity in the last month or so for India.
90 was the number of clients we have in our Tadiwala Rd. DISHA program; “was”, because on Tuesday it fell to 89.
28 is the number of clients we have in our Ramtekadi DISHA program.
1 is the number of DISHA clients who died on Tuesday.
I would have a hard time believing that his family cared at all for any of the other numbers.
Numbers are sexy and trendy, they rise and they fall, they changed hourly, daily, and yearly. Numbers get funding. They don’t properly tell the story of an epidemic however. If an epidemic is defined by numbers, or embodied by photographs, it is experienced only first hand. You don’t experience an epidemic reading a newspaper article or seeing a photograph. In fact, despite being in India for a year and involved in DISHA for nearly half that time, I can’t really say that I ever felt the individual and personal impact of an epidemic until last Tuesday. I’d been to Sahara and seen clients die there. But at Sahara a client is generally surrounded only by caring staff members and other ailing clients, not their families, not in a domestic setting, at the end of a lane in Tadiwala Rd.
Whether or not all the grief witnessed at the post-mortem ceremony on Tuesday was real or simply dictated by custom; it aroused the senses of the eyes, ears, and nose and caused prickles on the skin. Family members pounded the bed and sometimes the body itself, wailing about their grief at losing a husband, a brother, a son, or a friend. Some held his head in their hands, others drew away and asked our care-workers why they had not wrapped the body in plastic, or covered the mouth, lest the virus escape and infect all those present in the light, misty, monsoonal rain that scarcely dampened those assembled to pay their respects(?).
To those that lose a mother, daughter, brother, or uncle to this epidemic, I’m sure that the numbers above 1 do not matter. To the care workers here, it seems also that one is the number that truly matters. Each client gets the respect and care that they would want themselves. This is articulated particularly fluently by our HIV positive care-workers who take this thought quite literally. This total care towards single clients is also restoring in them a sense of dignity and social existence that i was reported in a newspaper last year that India leads the world in AIDS deaths is not a disputed number.
We try to say that HIV is a virus you can live with, and not one that you need to die from, yet here, in India, is that true?
How do you die from HIV? Do you literally wither away in the most painful way imaginable due to wasting disease, do you die from dehydration due to a long bought of bloody diahhrea, do you kill yourself, does society kill you?
When you wait until it is too late to seek help for HIV because you are worried of the stigma of your family and greater society do your AIDS related infections kill you or did society?
Care-workers don’t think twice of working with HIV positive clients, they know the facts related to transmission and they know the importance of what they do. Yet, despite this knowledge they do put themselves at slightly greater risk of infection by being around potentially infected blood. They do this to prolong their clients lives. What happens when the client no longer wants to live?
On Tuesday I carried a client in and out of several clients from a rickshaw to a bed and transferred him between vehicles. He couldn’t speak to say how badly everything hurt, but when a 30 year old man weighs less than a sack of flour, you know it is bad. His eyes rolled back in his head everytime I lifted him, and I knew that his pain was excruciating whenever I touched him. Did he want us to do this?
To get him jabbed with an IV and continue on with whatever pain was to come? Should I be asking myself such questions? Or, should we just try to preserve and prolong their lives without regard for clients’ possible wishes?
When faced with such a situation, all the education and thinking in the world doesn’t enter your head, it becomes an example of primeval humanity. The type that gave rise to communal civilizations, and a type that is often forgotten today. You just see the person who needs help, you don’t see the illness, you don’t see anything, you just act on impulse to help and preserve life. But with this illness, in India, today, can life be more miserable than death…am I a bad person for saying that, whether or not it is true? These thoughts don’t enter your head whether you help, but days after a client commits suicide, they do.
posted by Deep Griha at 3:33 am
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