Bihar: A Recollection Of The Year That Was

I wanted to share with all of you an experience from Bihar, India. It was an eye opener for me and the rest of the team members who shared their time and energy to serve the victims of the Koshi River. I hope you all will like this video I made.

Hunger's Worth

It has been three days since I have looked and posted here. I was away with two donors visiting the field. I have had so much new things to write these past three days but I can't seem to get down to it.
For instance, having past the 200 mark on my visitors since I started this blog 2 Saturdays ago.
Or I could write about the ironic beauty of Manipur in India - where there are majestic mountains bordering Myanmar - but houses terrors brought by the underground insurgency groups.
Or I could write about my work here.
Or the daily angst in an unequal society.
And then, just as I was wrapping things and closing my laptop, I saw a picture taken by my friend Tim (who is by the way, touring the world on his bike) - of me cleaning the wound of a boy from Bihar, India, when we did the medical explo some weeks ago.
The boy (D.P.'s the name), was staying in the roadside camp with his father. His mother drowned in the August 18 flood when the mighty Koshi River overflowed and destroyed most of the districts in Bihar.
So DP was living in this make shift tent by the road, living on day to day existence. One day, a truck passed by their tent throwing bags of 2-kilos rice. DP wanted to catch some of the "blessings" - along with hundreds of other people - and did not notice another car behind. He was hit and his right foot was ran over by the following vehicle.
He was given 500 rupees (11 USD) for his foot.
Three days later while we were passing on that road, our car was stopped by the father begging us to see his son. He said that something is wrong because the wound is still bleeding and has a very bad smell. This was, despite having brought the boy to a private clinic and the wound treated.
So despite our agenda, we went and saw the boy. The foot, although stitched/sutured was reeking of dead flesh. There were bone fragments sticking out of the wound and pus was everywhere. The toes and the ankle were necrotic. This is not a good sign.
I cleaned the wound and had the boy referred to the district hospital an hour and a half away.
I explained to the doctor on duty what transpired. We both opened the dressing and both agreed that DP's foot needed to be amputated.
This is just one of the many sob stories I gathered from the victims of the Bihari-Koshi flood. It seemed pointless to enumerate them all because all of the stories tell of desperation and human suffering.
A few months ago, I published an article about my experience in Ethiopia where we had the hunger gap/malnutrition intervention. I questioned about our priorities - us living in a decent, well-provided world against the world where people feel pain and hunger and suffering brought about by war, famine and calamities. And no matter how much I try to equate the situations that we have, we still stood out to be very lucky. That is the sad truth.
DP may have caught a bag of rice for the price of his foot. He may not go hungry for a day, but he can not run as he used to, or play like any child his age.
And so many times I have ask friends and families, the worth of the little caprices that we have.
Is it worth a foot?
Is it worth anything that we value?

Food For Thought

I went to this posh resto in Delhi, about 30 minutes away from our house in Defence Colony. The place is in Greater Kalash II, next to a couple of posh bistros and resto. The place has been mentioned in a lot of travel books and food magazines, so it merited a visit from us. Though parking was a bit of a problem, the restaurant offered what others have not - ambiance. The food was amazingly good and amazingly expensive as well. Being poor volunteers, we ordered salad as starters, and most of the team had fillet mignon while I had the Himalayan trout. We ended the dinner with a cup of espresso and a serving of creme broulee. Looking around, I noticed that it was also a very posh crowd. I wondered where Victoria Beckham was.... The bill was enough to support a family of 8 from a small country in Africa for two months.

Dinner conversation rotated around food and nice restos in some distant country. I interjected my Bihar experience - trying to be funny. But then my joke backfired! Nobody seemed to have noticed but I immediately stopped short in my statement and just shied away from the conversation. I swear I stopped eating my salad (for a brief moment).

The main reason is that, people are starving in Bihar. Just after the flood, tens of thousands of men, women and children left their homes to move into camps. These people carried what little they had and lived in these camps around the main towns, hoping for at least 1 square meal everyday. Some had to walk for miles to have lunch or dinner then walk back home in the evening. Others would be starving because they came from other districts, and because they have no political affiliations (most food camps are ran by politicians). The same in Ethiopia where people would travel to Abdurafi to look for work so they could have money during the hunger gap. Most of them don't come back because they either have Kala Azar, Malaria or die from starvation.

Probably this situation is the same all over the world.

Anyways, enough of dampening the spirit. I really did enjoy that dinner. One of my friends noticed my uneasiness and unusual silence; and he asked if I was okay. I told him what I thought and he started to laugh. " Escape your world for a brief moment," he said.

" The world will still be the same tomorrow."

With that said and probably a split second thinking --why not?

We then fought for the last bit of creme broulee on the bowl.