"No time to wash hands" in Mumbai

COUNTRY: India - Mumbai
PROGRAM: UniBreak
PROJECT: Community Health Work
WRITTEN BY: Helen Foster

Well as I sit and write this we are officially into our last week of our program in Mumbai! What an amazing and crazy time it has been!!

Week 3 brought the usual expected madness, along with some very unexpected obstacles as well! Lauren, Rachael and Jo spent the week shadowing Dr Nicol Dada who works in a range of hospitals and clinics around Mumbai. The girls could not get over the difference between a public hospital and a private hospital. On a visit to Oshiwara Hospital, a gynaecological hospital, they could not believe that only one consultation room had curtains to conserve the patients privacy, that two patients were getting operated on at the same time and that latex gloves were sterilized and reused rather than disposed of.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, the clinic offers antenatal care for pregnant women and reportedly anywhere up to 400 women turn up and wait for a check up. There is no system in India that requires you to receive a referral from a GP to see a specialist, meaning that the hospital system sees a vast rage of conditions; from serious complaints that you can just not fathom, to much milder ailments that could most likely be dealt with by a GP or a nurse. This makes the hospitals extremely busy and the girls were shocked but not really surprised when Dr Dada said “There is no time to wash hands”.

Hygiene standards are definitely different in the public hospitals to that of the Sanjeevani private hospital, as Rachael and Jo found out when they got splattered by a bloody cloth that was thrown across the operating room. This combined with other unhygienic conditions was all too much for Rachael and by the end of the day she passed out at the site of urine on the floor and had to have a little rest in the chair until she recovered. This week the girls will be working with an NGO who provides health care to communities in the slums.

Dani, Charishma and I have had another great week at SEC day school. Dani and Charishma have been very excited to see progress in the students they have been working with and touched to know that some children have been going home and practising the techniques they have been teaching them. SEC is so much more than a school, the commitment of the teachers and carers make it more of a community, where the children look out for each other and complain about being sent home at the end of day. It is very sad to know that once we leave the children we have been working with for a month will not receive any occupational or speech therapy until the school is able to hire someone else.

We will be very sad to say goodbye to our new beautiful little friends and miss seeing their faces each day. In our last week we will spend a day visiting two other SEC sites in Mumbai and comparing the facilities and level of education offered.

On Thursday morning at 3:30am I woke up to Rachael shaking me awake and saying “Helen, wake up, the apartment is flooding!”. As she hurriedly led me towards the bathroom, I could see that yes, the apartment was indeed flooding and there was water everywhere! In the bathroom there was water bursting out of cracks in between the tiles. The most concerning thing though was that on the other side of the wall, conveniently placed, was the mains switch board to the guest house, which had water cascading out of the bottom of it! We managed to turn all the power off and the water, after a run in with the pigeons who were living in the maintenance cupboard.

The CEO’s driver was sent to help us clean up the water and once all the water was gone, he casually flicked all the power back on from its position on the saturated wall saying “water, electricity- no problem!”. We had a very loud conversation about the fact that we thought it probably WAS a problem and kept the power off until it could be looked at by someone a bit more qualified in the morning! We found out the next day that the reason for our random late night feature waterfall was that we had accidently left the hot water switch on. Not realising that not only does the switch not have something that stops it getting hotter and hotter if left on, the pipe was also made of PVC so we had successfully melted the pipe! Thank goodness for safe hot water services!

Friday was a public holiday in Mumbai. We took a ferry to Elephanta Island and visited the islands Hindu temples which were carved out of rock and dedicated to the god Shiva. Along with the caves, the island is also home to hundreds of monkeys. Despite having so much to look at, we once again found that we were the main tourist attraction, with Indian families trying to get us in the background of their pictures and asking us to pose with their children!

Saturday was both Australia day and Indian republic day. Charishma, Dani and I got up early to go and watch the Independence Day ceremony at the school and then we all decided to head down to Colaba to Leopold’s Café to have a few drinks to celebrate our own national day! So after taking the usual 3 hours to get all 6 girls ready and out the door, and an hour train ride, we arrived at Leopold’s to find that unlike Australia, India celebrates its national day by banning the sale of alcohol across the country! We were devastated! But we still had a great day at the markets and our livers thanked us for it the next day!

On Sunday we went to the national park and hired bikes and pedal boats and enjoyed the day away from the busy streets and crowds. We finished off our week with dinner at Juhu beach and reminisced about our time in Mumbai.