Research has begun!

Hello!

The past week has been pretty busy, because I have finally been able to start my research. Fortunately, women are pretty fine with answering the questionnaire. Unfortunately, women up here work so hard that it has been very difficult to track them down and get them to answer the questions. Sarita, my interpreter, is very helpful and very supportive. She has however, had a lot of family commitments, which has limited our ability to do field work. She is pretty passionate about the study though. She explained to me that she is one of the few women in her community who went to a hospital to deliver, and she ended up needing a c-section. Three years later, she still has abdominal pain where her incision was. She told me that it was a bad hospital and a bad doctor, but Dehradun would have been too far to go to for a decent hospital. Aunty--my landlady--delivered both of her children in Dehradun, but she has family around Dehradun. Aunty is also wealthier and has a higher level of education than Sarita does. Sarita is not poor or uneducated by any means, which indicates how difficult it truly is to get to a well-run hospital in this area.

The most striking thing about Garhwal in comparison to Mewar--the part of rural Rajasthan that I lived in--is the presence of women in the home and economic life of the villages. Rajasthan has a very strong tradition of purdah or veiling. Women would even cover their faces in front of me sometimes. Here, purdah has never been popular. Aunty's daughter, Monica, told me that purdah was "nonsense" and that in Garhwal women only cover the back of their heads with their scarf when showing respect to an elder man or woman. I also see women working in almost every area here. Women work the fields, they have government jobs, and they are teachers.

The biggest health problem that I can see so far is that women are too busy working to take care of themselves. Sarita's aunt is a dai, or traditional midwife. I asked her to explain the birth and postpartum process here. She told me that women have seven days after delivery to rest and then start working the fields again. I was shocked to hear this, because it is a far shorter postpartum rest time than what similar studies have reported in other parts of India. This rest time however, is close to what studies in Nepal have reported. Rural Nepali women have a very high rate of uterine prolapse, which some researchers believe is due to the very short recovery time after delivery. I have not been able to find any research on uterine prolapse in Garhwal, but I am interested in finding out what the local term for it is, so that I can begin asking about it.

The mountains here are gorgeous and my research takes me to beautiful places, however I am always reminded of what a burden the geography is on the shoulders of the women with whom I work. Even Sarita has to work the fields, and she has a separate job as a forest guard. Men do work here as well, but it is undoubtably the women who do most of the manual labor. This is partly due to the fact that Garhwali men have traditionally comprised a huge percentage of the armed forces in India. Therefore, there is a so-called "geography of missing men" here that requires women to do a lot of work. I have also noticed that while women collect crops, men sell them. This is a less physically demanding job and it gives them more economic freedom than their wives have. Nevertheless, women are certainly more liberated here than in Rajasthan. While my point-of-view as an America is that women should have the same opportunities as men, I am gratified that I spent time in Rajasthan, so that I can appreciate how vocal and free-moving many of the women are in Garhwal.

I certainly not upset that I choose this area for research or that I'm working with women. But right now is is very tough to work with women who give so much for their families and get back comparatively little. I will say though, that women laugh a lot more here than they did in Rajasthan. They are also very quick to tell me a lot of information about their health, from early infant deaths, to vaginal discharge, to urinary incontinence. Sarita is great and does not get embarrassed at these conversations. She just keeps saying, "Cute project. Good project." Cute is one of the only affirmative English words that she knows, so she is basically saying that she thinks the work is important and doesn't mind having these conversations to get the data. I could not imagine carrying out this work as a foreigner in Rajasthan and I certainly don't think that I would have found a field assistant who is as positive as Sarita is.

As I am here, I get continuously more frustrated with the abortion debates back in the United States. I got particularly irked with a bill passed through Congress that gives hospitals the right to refuse to perform a medically necessary abortion. For example, a woman could be miscarrying and bleeding heavily, but if she goes to a hospital that does not want to perform any abortions, they can refuse treatment. It would essentially give hospitals the right to put a fetus, which will probably die soon anyway, above the mother's life. It is a bill that probably won't make it through the Senate. But it is so incredibly short-sighted, because if a mother dies than the child that she is pregnant with will die as well. So what is the point in refusing to treat her medical condition? Such debates frustrate me, because women here don't even get the luxury of going to a hospital when they are miscarrying. We have so many facilities in the United States, but we get so locked down with ideology that we forget to just take advantage of the well-developed health system that we have. I cannot imagine Garhwal ever having as nice a health system as even poorly-served areas in the United States. I makes me wonder how we mess things up so much in our health system when we're already ahead of so much of the world.