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Health and Hygiene
In the shanty-towns, as in the villages where we work, the living conditions for children are very difficult. They are unsanitary and dangerous for children’s health. The principal reasons for this are the quality of the water, the food and the deplorable conditions of hygiene to which the children are exposed. Thus, we have very quickly realised that food and medical aid are closely linked to our work in education. For example, our pupils have numerous intestinal problems which are caused by poor food. This problem is exacerbated by the poor water quality. The extreme poverty of most families means that food kept for too long under inappropriate conditions is rotten or decayed.
The health and hygiene of children is critical and often requires us to act immediately. The sicknesses we most often have to treat are skin diseases, eczema, carbuncles, respiratory infections, tuberculosis, infections of the lips and eyes as well as intestinal problems, gastro-enteritis, diarrhoea and dysentery. The solution obviously lies in directly improving the hygiene conditions to which our pupils are exposed.
The most difficult and dramatic situations are encountered in the large cities like Calcutta. Limited by our financial resources, we cannot undertake all the initiatives needed to respond to this problem. For the most serious cases, we work with the hospitals to ensure that the necessary specialists take care of our pupils. But, too often the health costs are too high for us. As a result, we are constantly searching for a solution that will ensure decent medical attention.
We need medicines and hope to obtain some outside help. From 1999, we set up our first healthcare programme in Calcutta. We organised a medical team consisting of a coordinator, nurses and volunteers who visit our various schools each week. Each child with a health problem can in most cases receive the appropriate treatment.
Even if we are faced with difficult working conditions due to the lack of money, we are pleased to note that the health of our pupils has considerably improved. But a lot remains to be done to improve conditions of hygiene. Water quality remains a major concern.
Following our first experience launched in 1999 in Calcutta, we have extended our health control and medical care activities into the rural areas as well as to South Bengal, the Sunderban Islands, Bihar and the district of Gaya. In the countryside, children’s state of health is less problematic than in the cities. Nevertheless, our work is far from complete from the point of view of basic hygiene conditions and vaccinations. In the district of Gaya, we are in the process of constructing a dispensary to care for village children. Based on this experience, we will undertake a similar venture on the island of Ganga Sagar, in the Sunderbans, as well as in the Thar desert in Rajasthan.
In the shanty-towns where our schools are situated the pupils receive one daily meal in their class-rooms. The food is prepared in our various schools where we have set up small kitchens. As a general rule, the children from the big cities are less well fed than those from rural areas. For this reason, our food programme is more important in the shanty-towns. For these shanty-town children the meal we offer them is often all they get to eat in the day. This situation is less critical in the rural areas.
As in our Hygiene and Health programme, the work we can undertake is limited by our financial resources. Schooling is without doubt our first priority, but we cannot ignore the deficiency in nutrition from which most of our pupils suffer, particularly in the shanty-towns.
