Field Visit

10 days old

Today I went for a field visit to go see a primary health center in one of the villages outside of Nagpur.  It was shocking, even knowing ahead of time that the primary health centers do not have much, to see a medical facility with so little.  It services over 40,000 people and only had a few rooms: one delivery room, an operating room, an inpatient room for females, and one for males and a couple of offices.  It is such a sharp contrast coming from Boston where I’ve seen some of the best health facilities available.  My mother works in the NICU at Mass General so I’ve seen their unit and all of the machines and supplies (not to mention space and sanitation!) that they have, compared to the delivery room I saw today that had a scale and ambu bag and not too much else.  The good thing is that there are auxiliary nurse midwives (ANMs) and medical officers who can identify pregnancy complications and send those women to secondary or tertiary care hospitals for their appointments and deliveries.  The ANMs I met today were really impressive, they each cover 5 or 6 villages and when asked about a specific patient they could list her expected date of delivery, village where she lives, about her family and health, etc. – so it was obvious that they are very dedicated and care about their patients, they are also very skilled and help to deliver many healthy babies, like the adorable baby in the picture above! This picture was taken when I visited some of the homes in the village, they let me hold her - she was very cute and had lots of beautiful dark hair.

Getting the fire started - they used mostly wood and animal dung as fuel

I visited the homes to see the cooking conditions and get a better understanding of the indoor air pollution.  All of the women were so kind and once the people I was with explained what I was studying (they speak Marathi so we had to have someone translate for us to communicate) they took me right into the kitchen and lit the fire to show me how they cook.  Seeing this helped me to understand even more the huge impact indoor air pollution can have on their health.  The women will spend 5-6 hours a day cooking and from standing there I could see that it took only a few minutes for the room to fill with smoke.  There’s no ventilation and the ceilings are generally very low, some of the homes had a window in the kitchen but others didn’t, so these women and often their children and other family members too are exposed for hours each day.  Overall it was a really eye opening day and made me glad to be working on this project.

Another home with a window in the kitchen but
the room still filled with smoke after only a
few minutes

Village Street