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They call him the volcano
He wears thick rimmed red glasses, white hair, and a small peppered mustache to fit. In less than five minutes of meeting him, he’s singing. He bolts out the lyrics to a poem he has written, harking on the importance of taking Iron and Folic Acid tablets, additional rest, having nutritious foods, and other advised practices for safe pregnancies and maternal health. We have been working with this material here in rural India now for a couple weeks, but this is the first time I hear it presented in a way this fun and engaging.
Health volunteers in rural India have plenty of challenges. Their clientele are uneducated and poor and the volunteers themselves are often uneducated and poor. They all live far from the health centers that can help them, and the only way to get there is over a bumpy dirt road on the back of a bike, a rickshaw if they can find one, or on foot… not exactly ideal for a woman in labor. And one of their toughest challenges, as noted by ASHAs, other health volunteers, and doctors is that the pregnant mother just doesn’t believe that medicine, additional nutrition, and other recommended practices for a safe pregnancy could potentially save her or her child’s life or at least save them some trouble in the immediate or distant future.
Reportedly, the main instigator in this arena is the mother-in-law. She keeps a watchful eye on her grandchild to be and instructs the mother on what to do and often times perpetuates old wives tales like getting a tetanus vaccine will make the mother sterile and is also very wary of newer practices like taking Iron and Folic Acid tablets, which she may not understand help prevent anemia and painful swelling. Other traditions are upheld, like the men of the household eating first and if there isn’t much food left afterward then the women, pregnant or not, simply don’t eat as much as they should.
It’s not hard to see why it’s so difficult to change old habits. The ASHA program is very new in India (only about four years old) and recruits ASHAs on the criteria that they are a woman not originally from the village where they now live, but have come to live there through marriage. This ensures that the ASHA will most likely stay in that village for the rest of her life, as she is already married and won’t be running off somewhere else to find a man. This also means that she has no credibility in the village where she works. She is young and has come from somewhere else, so who will listen to her?
Trying to promote the same safe practices through means of a mobile phone as an engineer from the west is a much further stretch. So what do you do? Take the same messages that the ASHAs are already saying, the same messages that are listed on wall paintings in the villages, the same messages that are still being ignored, and put them line by line on a mobile phone and hope that will work better? No… you build a volcano.
This is the ground reality. Conditioning creates deep rooted prejudice against the girl child. It is common to find female embryo in garbage piles. As soon as the bride steps across the threshold, indirect pressure with words ‘ in our family a woman bears sons or the firstborn should be a son’ keep her submissive and in fear. Even educated and financially independent women take this oppression, something to do with conditioning. I my little way I am trying to break this chain by never making any discrimination and by never letting biased comments that say-girls do these things and boys don’t do these things, I do it for my daughter and have vowed that I will make her financially, emotionally and mentally very strong. That I owe to her, I try to reach out, many times I back of out of fear. I saw this young girl in a tea stall and this man who visited the stall was pushing her on his lap, the girl was 12-13, I started walking towards them to stop it and then the girl managed to release herself and I turned my steps towards office. I plan to make her mother aware of molestation though. In traditional Indian households, boys are put on a pedestal, if there is food it is first offered to the male members and then the left overs are given to girls and women. My Doctor friend observed her during her visit to the slums, she told me that the female child was always 4-5 Kg lighter than the male sibling. It is something that you see every where, in rural India, there are cruel practices of drowning the baby girl in milk or snuffing the life out with a cloth. Long time back when I had to decide on researching for this Penguin book, I passed a window in the Himalayan town, I heard a male voice mouthing abuses, a torrent of cutting hurting words that described his wife in meanest possible way flowed unchecked, there was complete silence at the other end. The absence of any struggle against this filthy language and the clatter of things as this impotent man showed his rage and advertised it to the passerby was heartbreaking.
When I researched for the book, I realized how deep these conditionings penetrate. Our Goddesses are shown to undergo trial by fire to prove their chastity, Sita( the book was on the most revered Goddess), was asked by his very righteous husband to prove her chastity twice, once she did after she was rescued from the daemon who had captured her, she was asked as the husband asserted that the very fact that she had stayed under another man’s roof had tainted her. Even when he fought a battle to win her back, once he won he humiliated her by asking her to wed any one she chose as she was now impure. She was enraged and asked her brother-in-law to prepare a pyre, she steps into the fire but the fire God presents her to the husband, telling him that she was purer than the purity. Next, when the spies tell Rama about a washer man shouting on his wife who had returned from another place telling her that’ I am no Rama, to accept a tainted wife’. Listening to this the king Ram, immediately asks his brother to take Sita, his then pregnant wife to the forest and to leave her there without telling her the cause of this abandonment. This is what controls Indian psyche and while interviewing a lady who made documentaries, it was a startling thing when she shared that in the burns ward a father of burnt ward had grieved that it is the repetition of Sita’s ordeal. No where in the world are women burnt for dowry except India, a kind of ripple effect of that trial by fire to prove her chastity. I can go on and on, I was reading this article that kind of sums up an average Indian household’s maniac servitude towards sons. This article is about this spoilt son and tormented daughters and what became of this family. Most probably, it was mother who fostered these beliefs and see what it came to. I often wonder now, how important it is to be a balanced parent as the wounds we inflict on one generation are carried over to so many generations.
Here is a blog entry I did a while back on the same topic: http://rinatripathi.blogspot.com/2009/03/sick-and-tired.html
here, read this article, the slimy, sick putrid state of Indian society is here for all to see:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Did-rogue-son-plot-the-end-of-Bhilai-family/articleshow/7977637.cms