Friday mornings are volunteer meeting days, so we spent an hour this morning just updating each other on what we're doing and discussing any questions or issues anyone had. Then I visited the Leper Community which is about 45 minutes away by car with Ramanbhai who is the health coordinator along with two Masters of Social Work students who are doing a one month field experience at Manav Sadhna. The leper community is a 120 home colony of people affected by leprosy. These people live here with their families. The children and many of the spouses are unaffected. Most all of the lepers have parts of their fingers missing due to complications and lack of treatment. Thus, most all of the lepers work as beggars. They go to various villages and spend a few days there begging for money since they are unable to perform work with their hands and are often shunned away due to their disease. The families in this community are not originally from Gujarat, they are from the state of Maharastra. Manav Sadhna has built a community center in this community. They run a preschool in there and use the center for various functions. In addition they are looking to start tuition classes for students, since the government school these kids go to are not very good, and the kids don't learn very much. Manav Sadhna has also helped by advocating for the community and getting a gutter system put in, funding the building of a garden for the kids to use, providing garbage cans and education regarding the importance of using the trash. In addition, every month Manav Sadhna brings a health camp to the community. Last month they had a dental camp where 10 dentists volunteered to come out and do a dental exam on all of the residents. Any residents needing further care were followed up in the next few weeks, driven out of the community in a bus, treated at a clinic, and then returned. In August Manav Sadhna is going to organize an eye clinic, since many of the people in the community have complained of vision problems.
I went back to the ashram after we went to the leprosy community and found the girl I had talked to about chewing tobacco the other day along with her friends. They were doing garba for goro (fasting that young girls). They pulled me in with them and I danced and watched how innocently they were enjoying themselves without a care in the world - no one would have been able to guess they came from such difficult backgrounds. I tried to leave to go eat, but the girls wouldn't let me. Apparently they had come to the ashram looking for me yesterday and today and someone told them I would be back soon so they waited. Goodie, AKA the gutka (type of tobacco) girl, proudly told me she hadn't had any tobacco since I talked to her. The girls would not let me out of their sight. I realized quickly that they looked up to me - this became much more real when they told me they were going to talk to their parents to switch them to the ashram school so they could come be with me. All I had done was spend 10 minutes talking to these girls about the effects of tobacco and the importance of health. Yet those 10 minutes of attention were filled with more compassion than some of these girls had ever experienced. It really hit home the idea that sometimes the smallest acts have greater impacts on the lives of others than any of us can understand or imagine.
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