The title of this post might lead you to believe that I’ve been having no luck with interviews. The opposite is true. I’ve moved field sites due to the poor conditions in the higher elevations. I’m currently in Mandal Valley—a beautiful, bucolic valley near the district capital of Gopeshwar. When I was at my conference in Kerala, there was another researcher from Nepal who was performing research very similar to mine. She said that there’s a Nepali phrase stating: “Under a candle is a shadow.” She found this to be true of the district that she was working in, which is close to Kathmandu but overshadowed by the needs of the city. Rather than gaining from being close to Kathmandu, this district suffered. The same can be said of Mandal Valley.
There’s no way of getting around the fact that Mandal is poor. So much so that my assistant, who is also my roommate, doesn’t even know who is scheduled caste and who is general caste. She knows that her family are not scheduled caste i.e. dalits or “untouchables.” But we were interviewing people and she had no idea that they were. Everyone is poor; there isn’t much distinction. It’s strange to me that such a beautiful, natural resource-rich area is so poor. Joshimath and Gopeshwar and worse off in terms of location, but they are undeniably wealthier. I think religious and adventure tourism has a lot to do with Joshimath’s relative success. It is home to one of the great “Maths” (pronounced with a hard t.) This is of considerable religious significance and gets tourists from Delhites and Mumbaites to Europeans and Americans looking for enlightenment and dressing very silly in the meantime. Joshimath is also a starting point for many amazing treks.
Mandal, however, does not have my to recommend it other than the fact that it is a nice place to sit and look at mountains. But even these mountains pale in comparison to what you can see about two hours away in Joshimath. The family that I’m staying with is clearly poorer than the family that I’m staying with in Joshimath. The schools here are clearly worse. People have trouble using the hospital, because a doctor is never there. If they go to the hospital, then the doctors and nurses often verbally abuse them. The closest real town is Gopeshwar and its hospital hasn’t gotten rave reviews from my interviewees. In spite of coming from a different background than my Joshimath friends, my field assistant is very charming and intelligent. I do get frustrated that she hasn’t had more education opportunities, but she does seem to be getting along very well with what she’s been given. Although she speaks in English, she can understand my broken Hindi very well. Therefore, we’ve been going through interviews at an astonishingly fast pace.
The interviews, although plentiful, are disturbing. I met a woman who gave birth to her child prematurely and he was born on the road to the hospital. The child is six years old and cannot talk or walk. They parents have never been able to bring him to the hospital. Today I spoke with a few fifty and forty-something women. Three of them had lost children, sometimes multiple children. I don’t know how to process this. On the one hand, they’re stories do not demonstrate how the health system is working right now. But the point is that they suffered multiple, great losses. It’s terrifying and saddening. I wanted to connect with them, but how can I do that when I don’t speak or understand Garhwali? What am I even doing trying to talk to someone about these issues?
I did like the women who I talked to today. One was very sassy. She joked around with her old mother and smokes beedis (village cigarettes) to relieve tension. I wish that I could’ve talked to her more, but she has no formal education. Her Hindi was pretty muddled and my Hindi is too bad for her to understand. She is also a dai i.e. traditional midwife. Dais are interesting, because they only use massage for delivery. It’s so different from the hospitalized medicine that I’m used to seeing in the United States.
Pity is also an interesting emotion. I can feel pity for the women who I meet; but they also feel pity for me. They clearly look sad when I say that I’m in India and my parents are in America. They look sad when I say that I have no brothers and sisters—especially the brothers part. Pity is useless, because it doesn’t actually change anything. I am sad when a woman tells me about her child dying. I am deeply upset when I meet a child that is six years old and acts like he is six months old. He had a grown up upper-half, and very small, underdeveloped legs. How do I confront that pain without feeling pity? What do I do with the feelings of anger, frustration, and dismay that I undergo during these interviews?
Maybe it helps me to know that I’m the only one who is out here and talking to these women. I haven’t heard anyone say that they’ve been asked about these health problems before. How are some places over saturated with NGO’s and Garhwal has no one working on public health? I know that it’s a new state, but it’s more like a forgotten state. I’ve been told that people here are too poor to start NGO’s. I don’t believe that. There are NGO’s here, but they work in environment. I’m all for ecology, but human need help as well.
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