My Fantasies

My first week in Srikakulam district, over two dozen people died in monsoon flooding. It serves to remind me how marginal survival is for so many people here. For instance, a huge killer of children is – diarrhea. When you’re starting off malnourished, there’s not a lot of buffer. Luckily, it’s not the case for me. I came with plenty of “buffer”.

The villages have all been really consistent in what they site as main health challenges – febrile and diarrheal illnesses. Usually, these come seasonally. Fevers can be caused by so many things: malaria, typhoid, dengue, chicken gunniya. Yes, chicken gunniya! It sounds funny but it really sucks. It’s an arbovirus like dengue (breakback fever), which means you get it from a mosquito bite (the Aedes mosquito, not the Anopheles that spreads malaria). The fever only lasts about 5 days, but the body aches seem to last up to 6 months! It can be so bad that sometimes it’s treated with steroids.

I’m struck by the sanitation in these villages. There are “canals” that are just open sewers with all kinds of foulness just there, in the middle of where the animals and kids are. And the water that people are drinking – it’s all contaminated. There’s agricultural runoff, sewage leaching, people bath and do their laundry just by the wells. The tribal folks hunt, and know that they get sick when they drink stream water, but people don’t seem concerned about the well water.

They’ve been recommended to drink “hot water” – it doesn’t have to be hot, just previously boiled – but they don’t. I asked and they said “lazy fellows”. I don’t really believe that (Geez these people are hard working). I think they don’t like the taste, and they’re just not used to it. Folks keep their own houses very clean (a huge challenge given the mud and dirt and no screens to keep insects out, etc) but have no consciousness of keeping public spaces litter-free. So rotting food in the road brings more bugs, that of course, bring more illness.

It’s so outside the scope of my training, but I feel that addressing these issues is really the only thing that will make this trip truly worthwhile. I think the top 2 health prioritites have to be removing fecal contamination from the environment, especially protecting the water, and controlling the mosquitoes. I’m reading the Humanure Handbook, and wracking my brain to figure out how that concept can be put into practice here. It feels a little hopeless to think about how big a change in daily behavior this would be, but being here would just be a waste without even trying. I guess the main thing I can do is talk about how important this is, talk about some solutions, and hope that people are convinced enough to try to implement some changes.

Years back, the government tried implementing a scheme to place sanitary latrines in every village. Unfortunately, they were an entirely inappropriate technology (required water, for one thing) and culturally inappropriate, too (the only time the ladies get out of the house to gossip is when they trek into the fields together to go squat!). The project failed miserably and if they’re still standing, the loos are used as storage sheds.

I fantasize about appropriate technologies: compressed earth bricks (so much fuel is consumed firing the crumbly bricks that are used produced currently); humanure compost, solar power… I pray to Shiva and Kali and anyone else out there… let these technologies diversify and propagate like grains of sand on the shore!

Soundtrack today: Jennifer Noxon’s Water and Alison Krauss Down to the River to Pray.