Making Headlines: Crematoriums, Suffering, etc.

Aka My First Field Visits, October 3-8, 2007

It was just after 8:30 pm when I shouldered my hiking backpack (the one I had been so happy to unpack just two weeks ago), said goodbye to my flat-mates and the prospect of a candle-lit simchat torah dinner, and skipped down the stairs into the end of the rush-hour bustle on Tarnaka-Secunderabad road. After a few tries, I found an auto driver willing to not cheat me, and landed easily on the black marble benches of platform 1, Secunderabad Station. Minutes before our train was set to arrive, my co-worker, M, called, and we pushed (only sort of politely) on to the A/C triple-tier sleeper car. One brief night of fitful rumble-filed sleep later, we stepped down into the warm, slightly wet air of Nellore, the capitol city of the coastal district by the same name. Our hotel was nice, the cable TV stations were even nicer, and we picked up breakfast (idly, of course) at an open-air restaurant on the way to the bus station. The two-hour bus ride to Kavali was occupied by intermittent napping and smiling at a girl about my age taking hundreds of cell phone photos of my white face. [Note: children and women get a smile in return for pointing a camera at me, men get a glare, and I try not to take direct photos of people whom I haven’t met.]

M woke me as the bus driver pulled, apparently arbitrarily, to the side of the road, and as I stumbled down the steps, we were met by two grinning young women – the project coordinator (PC) and the multipurpose health worker (MPHW) who implement my NGO’s OVC program at the grassroots NGO (lets call it NGO-A for this entry) we were about to enter. A small white archway, painted with red lettering and red ribbons, announced the entrance to a compound of three buildings set around a courtyard occupied by a few motorbikes, benches, and a woman setting a baby to rock in a sari cloth draped from a small fruit tree. We were ushered into the main office, and served tea with a side of introductions. We were then promptly ushered back out, and through the care wards. In the first building, the patients stood to meet us, or sat up and spoke from their metal cots stretched across with netting and laid with sheets. They looked weak, a little haunted, but their smiles were broad. In the second building, which M unnecessarily translated for me as the ‘terminal ward,’ the skeletons wrapped in skin, fingers tapping lightly to pass time, chests expanding slightly for attempts at breath, could barely turn their heads. There were no introductions here, and we passed, a small procession of prosperity leaving a grotesque exhibit, quickly back into the sunlight.

While M reviewed the records for our OVC program with the PC and MPHW (in Telugu, of course), I made faces at the children appearing around the edge of the office door. The grinning kids couldn’t speak any more English than the women in the office, but they were happy to communicate by other means. With a ‘it will make them happy’ from M, I stood up to go and play. The little ones disappeared. I peered out of the barred, glassless window. Three faces were peering up, but giggled and dropped down at the sight of my own. Hide and seek had begun. Eventually, after passing through an animalistic snarl-smile game, this turned into a full-on version of Simon Says / do-as-I-do, with a growing audience of older women looking on. We danced. They sang for me. We did somersaults. I touched the ceiling; we waddled on the floor. Eventually, it was time for lunch; meat curries and the special Andhra chutney (leafy greens fried in spices??) with white rice on a banana leaf.

After lunch, we loaded onto an auto and a bike, and took the smooth highway roads out to a tiny town where NGO-A runs an orphanage and school. I asked them later why they had started it. ‘Because,’ the NGO head explained, ‘when we started the care and support center it was one of the first, as part of the state AIDS control program, and people would leave children at our gates in the middle of the night. So we built this to take care of them.’ Practically all of the resources used to build and sustain the orphanage are drawn from the local community – the villagers donated the land, and the labor and materials to build the dormitory and schoolroom. A local TV station did a segment on the home, and decided to donate school uniforms. My NGO provides school supplies, doors, chairs, etc for the classroom. A local businessmen provides enough money to pay two teachers – the NGO head’s wife and brother-in-law work for free as an additional teacher and caretaker.

As we entered the school compound, eighty-odd children, from maybe three to eleven years old, filed out of an open classroom, and sat in a perfect grid, giggling at this strange young woman being offered a nice plastic chair and a cold Limca soda in front of them. After some language-strangled introductions, a talent show began, with individual and group songs, dances and exercises. I taught the first verse and chorus of ‘a great big moose’ (GG4L!) – they made excellent moose antlers, although I’m pretty sure there aren’t any moose in India. They taught me their aerobics routine, and then asked me to lead it. We tried to play elbow tag, but when this seemed to dissolve, they taught me a very different version of hide-and-seek (it involved me being blindfolded with my own dupatta in a large circle of children, trying to track three of them by the sound of their voices). The afternoon wore on, and villagers trickled in, standing quietly at the edge of the playground to watch. After some more official business, and a dash of logistics in translation, we climbed back into the auto to the sound of many ‘good-bye Lili’s (the difference between the vowels in my name are quickly lost in any other language). The buses weren’t coming, so M flagged down a car, and we rode quickly back to the lights, the hotel food, and the Samuel L. Jackson HBO comical-cop movies of downtown Nellore.

With a slightly better night of rest, and a proper set of idly’s behind us, M and I met the PC and MPHW for NGO-B… who had waited breakfast for us, so… after another set of idly’s, and a short car ride to an upper-middle-class neighborhood of Nellore, we left our shoes at the door and went in to meet the director of NGO-B. NGO-B is well established, and provides a wide range of resources; they work in disaster relief and preparation along the coast, in HIV prevention and support services in nearby slums and villages, on income generation projects for the old and disabled, sustaining traditional arts. While M, the PC, and the MPHW leafed through home visit and support group registries, I read the National AIDS Control Office (NACO) policy on Children and AIDS (with a little dozing and a lot of water in the morning heat). For lunch, we were invited to walk a few doors down to the home of the NGO-B head; there was a pile of sweet carrots cooked with mustard seeds, dal made with dark greens (to be dribbled with pure ghee butter), fried greens with chillies, tamarind and white rice, curd to cleanse the palate, fruit, and a strangely green ice cream with raisins and cashews for dessert. We feasted.

After lunch, we traveled to what I thought would be a slum, but was actually an urban clinic in a nice neighborhood. The beds inside were empty, but a woman in a light purple sari occasionally walked in and out of a door marked ‘counselor.’ Left alone, I dozed in a chair. Eventually, women, different ages, draped in different colors, some matching, some wearing tired cloth and tired expressions, trickled in, trailing toddlers in khaki shorts. They sat in a circle on the brilliantly white tiled floor, and when the PC and MPHW joined them there, I sat as well, smiling greetings with enthusiastic head wobbling to try and make up for my complete lack of language. The meeting – a support group for care givers of children infected or affected by HIV – began and soon M joined, asking their permission for me to take photos. I looked at them through the lens, and listened to the cadences of the conversation. Three quarters of an hour passed, and we waved goodbye, trailing schoolchildren’s stares as our car pulled away from the clinic.

On the way home, M stopped to grab a copy of the district newspaper; a newspaper which contained a strange article about someone named ‘Lily Walker’ who had visited NGO-A the previous day, and promised to build them a crematorium, to provide daily funds for the orphans, and to fix their roof. The photos with the article were clearly of me, although I remain sure in the fact that I barely spoke with the NGO-A head, and mostly just played with the children (providing, of course, such lovely pictures). Back at the NGO, M and I observed a second caregiver’s support group, reviewed more files, talked some more official office talk, looked at photos of programs supported by our NGO, and waved goodbye as the sun was setting. Another night of HBO – John Tucker Must Die – which I justified with our ten-hour site visit days and an intense desire to communicate in fluent English, even if my conversation was with a television screen.

I woke up mentally prepared for one final site visit, and one overnight train home. When we entered the painted metal gates of the large compound of the Sisters’ church and NGO-C, the first things I noticed were the crosses painted on the low wall complemented by a haloed statue of Mary in the center of the driveway. The road leading in was lined with trees being hung with lights for the impending saint’s day feast, and we passed a church and a playground before stopping at the main office. The sisters, Roman Catholic nuns, wore cream colored cotton sari’s, long silver chains laying a cross to rest in the middle of their chests (the silver seems significant in a country where every woman who can even marginally afford to wears gold). The Sisters welcomed us to a dining room, and fed us with tea and sweets and savory chips before ushering us on to an office set aside solely for our OVC program. NGO-C’s main activities center around a home for ‘differently abled’ children; they have a school, vocational training, physical therapy, and a dormitory. The sisters also do outreach work in nearby areas, and it was through this work that they became interested in HIV issues. After the requisite record-reviewing (while I read about access to medicine in India) and expansive lunch-eating – the centerpiece was a special fried fish this time, as sisters eat plain foods – we left the comforting compound for a trip to some nearby villages. Leaving Nellore proper for the neighboring mandal of Kovur, we drove across the top of a damn, an adventure akin to driving through a shallow estuary; however, it seemed to be a main road out.

Our first stop was at a government-funded school run by NGO-C for disabled children. It wasn’t the school children, however, that we were supposed to interact with. A self-help group for HIV infected and affected children was run on the porch, and it was those children, along with a handful of widowed parents and grannies, that we were there to meet. There was an exchange of names, and of songs, and since we did not have time to stay and teach, I sang the refrain from ‘Be Blessed’ (Ebony Singers spring ’07!) in return for a Telugu tune about Jesus’ love.

Back in the car, and past an increasing number of raised ponds ringed with palm trees and small fishing huts, we pulled up an increasingly thin dirt road to the middle of a small but bustling village. Down an ally and around the back of a house we found the meeting – a group of maybe fifty children seated on tarps and facing a row of empty chairs. Assorted mothers and grandmothers sat in the back row, learning against the palm-leaf-roofed houses, pulling the youngest kids in and out of one another’s laps. M, the PC, the MPHW, and I sat down as the panelists, but quickly took a back seat to the usual Music and Dance Revue, which included my rendition of the first verse and chorus of ‘River’ (for those Islanders who care to know). We then embarked on a rousing round of ‘head, shoulders, knees, and toes,’ as they taught me the Telugu word for each body part, and I taught them the motions. The children learned quickly, but an old man in the audience, one whose mind was never quite anchored to this reality, had the biggest and the most glowing grin of them all.

As we waved goodbye, and they clustered together, an elementary school rumble broke out over the opportunity to stand near and wave… and I momentarily felt like the coke bottle in ‘The Gods Must be Crazy.’ Led in the opposite direction from where we’d come, the path back to the car brought us to the front porch of a man living with, and dying from, full-blown AIDS. Handsome, but wasting and match-stick thin, with two grinning, momma-sari-twisting young boys, he spends his days on a cot placed on the porch, partaking as he can in the life passing by along his street. I smiled, unsure of what was expected of me, and M exchanged some sentences I had no hope of following. We left, ponds flashing by as we deserted dirt roads for the highway, and a more direct trip back into town. When we returned to the Sisters’ compound, it was glowing, every fence and tree, every window and eve strung with multi-colored Christmas lights. Over tea and sweets and savories, we recorded our impressions and thanked them for the visit. Their smiles were warm and their genuine enthusiasm palpable as they explained that to gain the people’s trust, they wanted to offer more than information, they wanted to offer services. We smiled, warmly, and left.

Time for dinner, time for shower, time for train. Time to get a phone call from another NGO partner, in another district, begging us to please come to an event the next day in West Godavari. They would pay for everything. Weren’t we already in the field? A business man would be giving one lakh (one hundred thousand) rupees worth of nutritional supplements away to HIV affected children, and having a rep from our NGO at the event would just make the whole day. The volunteer could come too. The possibility of this actually happening fluctuated, so at the moment that I was lying on the top bunk on the train, inches from the air conditioner, pages from finishing ‘God of Small Things,’ and only so many hours of transportation away from my very own bed in my very own apartment, it still came as a surprise, a sort of a mind-game, that M and I would be getting down from the train at Vijayawada sometime between one and two am, and hiring a taxi to drive us two hours through the night (sleeping in the back seat with luggage as a pillow) to Tadepallegudem where we would sleep another two hours in a decently accommodated hotel. But it did actually happen, and after it actually happened, I actually watched most of a modern Lassie movie on television before breakfast had been served and cleared and showers had been taken, and I actually almost cried when Lassie drowned in the river. She probably came running miraculously back over the hill, but that would have been after we had already left.

The approach to the event hosted by NGO-D was not promising. The building looked half-built, and we climbed two flights of newly poured concrete stairs with no right hand wall before emerging onto the second floor, which was rather conspicuously missing the back wall. The room, however unfinished, was packed with over two hundred children, caretakers, NGO staff, and media, with a massive pile of all of their accumulated footwear announcing the crowd at the entrance. I was introduced to a dozen men, none of whose titles I could hear over the garble of giggling, crying, and generally restless children. As the day ripened, and the guests of honor had still not appeared (the guests of honor having clearly no appreciation for the work of the mothers trying to keep their kids relatively still in the massively packed room while nothing in particular happened), some of the braver twelve-year-olds came over to introduce themselves and sit with me. When the guest of honor finally did show up, and I was asked to sit at the front of the room, I continued the smile-sillyface-frown-wink-smile game with the kids in the front row to pass the time as a series of speakers talked about what I presumed was the importance of fighting AIDS and helping children. After speeches (including a rather forced and translated one by yours truly) came handout time, with a massive milling confusion snapped into frames as each child was held by the arm and posed to receive their gift while the donor received a promo photo in return.

I photographed, I handed out, I played hand-clapping games with a little girl in denim and a polo shirt. I smiled blankly at adults, and more sincerely at children. I gave away the AJWS WPF card when I was asked questions above the din. Finally, I ducked away to the office of NGO-D, to a fresh-cooked lunch, and to a journalist waiting for interviews and photos. After my recent bizarre appearance in the Nellore district paper, I wasn’t sure that journalists were a particularly good idea, but decided it might be worth giving my own words a try, with minimized answers about my own life and maximized answers about NGOs, and how ‘we’re all affected by AIDS.’ So there were more photos, more words, more NGO tours. There was waiting and showering and eating under disco-lights. And then there was a bus, with a reclining seat that un-reclined as I slept like a prop in a Charlie Chaplin movie, and that dropped us off twenty kilometers outside of Hyderabad at seven-thirty in the morning because it lacked a permit to enter and security is high these days.

I arrived at work early monday morning, left my luggage behind my desk, brushed my teeth in the office bathroom, and ordered idly for breakfast. A few days later, my office received some news clippings in the mail. ‘We should feel that we are all suffering: Lily.’ ran the headline. The subtitle read, ‘A strong feeling of an American youngster for the victims of AIDS, Interview.’