Pre-Nid activities in Bhiwadi

The day before the NID is usually spent on awareness raising events and also visiting some of the host club’s service projects. We noticed this year that the number of "Polio Immunisation Tomorrow” signs out in the general countryside was very much less than in previous years and hence this year this type of awareness activity is even more important.

In Bhiwadi, we were initially divided into three groups and taken to three different schools in the area.

My group went to Bal Bharti Public School in Bhiwadi, which is a private fee paying school in one of the villages near Bhiwadi.

Many of the school’s pupils were assembled to welcome us

and a welcome sign which had been produced overnight. 

incorporating the usual messages.

When we sat down to one side as guests of honour and I opened the folder in fromt of me, I found I was giving a short speech on Polio followed by a Question and Answer Session.

As we have now come to expect, there was more dancing

and also singing

I gave an impromptu speech about Polio and the importance of everyone in the audience ensuring that tomorrow they were vaccinated if they were under 5 and if they were older, that they brought their younger brothers and sisters to be vaccinated. The questions from the school pupils were extremely searching and showed an interesting understanding of the issues associated with Polio vaccination and care for those who have had Polio in the past.

and then the President of Bhiwadi Rotary Club “Ram Prakash” introduced Geoff to the school and explained why he was there.

Exactly the same activity took place at the schools visited by other members of the team. Above is the private fee paying RPS Public School which is a favourite amongst the middle classes in the area. When you get further down in this blog entry, compare this classroom

at RPS (a picture taken from their website) to that in the Balwadi school we visited in the afternoon. 

Service Projects in Bhiwadi

We spent most of the afternoon visiting various service projects sponsored by the Bhiwadi Clubs. Perhaps amongst the most unusual Service Projects I have ever visited was Moksha Dham - a rotary sponsored and supported Hindu Crematorium.

From the entrance, one can see a large

statue of a Hindu deity 

and immediately behind it the Rotary symbol atop a monument.

Inside the gatehouse is a fridge / freezer used to store bodies until the family have assembled for the cremation. 

Adjacent to the site is a large word store and sawmill

whose product is used to fire the funeral pyres. There is space for six to take place at the same time. 

but only the remains of one was alight when we were there.

The club also sponsor an Ambulance

which although somewhat basic when compared with those which I ride in, it does provide an essential service within the town. I suspect however that the conditions of the roads and the traffic jams would affect its response time.

Training Centre

Another of the projects was a school and training centre for the wives

and young children of the Gadia Lohar community. This is a nomadic community who are ironworkers by profession and move on from one place to another as jobs appear and disappear.

Called Balwadi (Bal = small children, Wadi = a kind of home), if this school did not exist, it is unlikely that anyone in the community would gain an education.

The wives attending the beauty element in the skills training centre immediately started

offering Henna decorations to anyone who was willing to sit down. 

Pat of course was a willing subject and came away with a nicely intricate but not over the top hand decoration.

In another room, there were a number of women learning sewing skills

using hand powered machines.

The idea was that they would gain a skill which they could take with them if they move on with their family and thus always be able to get some employment. The club had set up a scheme whereby they could buy their own sewing machine at a 50% subsidised price if they wanted to. The club also had a plan to set up a small business making clothes for children attending the local schools staffed by ex-students still living in the community.

  

Geoff was very popular in the classroom and despite our interruption,

many of the children were more interested in completing their work than is us.

Although teaching resources appeared thin on the ground,

overall there seemed to be a quite concentration on learning and good class discipline was obvious.

Drains and Toilets

It was obvious in the areas around the school why India has to keep vigilant about Polio. Adjacent to the school was a community run toilet, part of the campaign to reduce the estimated 65% of the population who do not have access to (or do not wish to use) a proper toilet.

There were also bullocks being used for (amongst other things),

cooking fuel production.

However a little further away, there were open sewers

carrying exactly what you might fear they carry

and acting as a potential means of spreading a disease such as Polio

whose primary means of transmission is through faecal contamination.

There were a number of other service projects we visited, overall an astonishing number showing the determination of club members to be true Rotarians.

Government Hospital

Our final official activity of the day was a visit to the Government Hospital to meet the Chief Medical Officer of Health - the man responsible for the organisation of tomorrow’s NID. Here we reviewed how tomorrow would work and discussing the slightly different (to that we have experienced elsewhere) method of approach they intended to adopt.

 

Here the vaccine is stored until the day and then distributed in cool boxes, many of which were ready for packing the following day.

An important part of the briefing was to ensure we all understood the need to keep the polio vaccine cold when we were administering it. All polio vials had a themo-sensitive marker on their side which changes colour if the vaccine starts to get warm.

We were now ready for the NID tomorrow after we had been to dinner that evening with members of the clubs.

London to Bhiwadi and the Rotary Briefing

This year we were accompanied on our immunisation work by “Geoff the Polio Bear”. All of the Rotary clubs in District 1240 were given a Polio Bear by the District Governor. The idea was that he/she would be taken on travels around the world by club members, they would pay the club a fee which would then go to Rotary Foundation for Polio Immunisation, and they would take a picture of him wherever he went. 

So Geoff (having adopted the name of our club President) went with us to Terminal 4 to fly to Delhi as an important member of our Polio Immunisation Team and within a few hours he was in India. We had exactly the same difficulties having our fingerprints taken at Delhi Airport as we had last year and it was a very exasperated immigration officer who finally stamped our passports.

Geoff was soon wearing his welcome marigold garland together with the usual insects which infest the garland - a reason why the experienced traveller to India usually takes their garland off as soon as it is polite to do so. 

The Friday before the NID starts with selling the very important (and compulsory to wear during the NID)

yellow shirts to those who do not have one, then a briefing from Rotarian Raman Batia

who has led the campaign to eliminate Polio in India for many years. The content of the briefing changes slightly from year to year and this year focused more on the end game for Polio.

One of the challenges for the Bhiwadi group was that overnight our numbers more than doubled. Last year, the groups which went to Karnal and Ludhiana were affected by riots occurring on the road between where they were and Delhi (there is more information on this in the blog for last year).

This year the prospect of more riots during the NID suddenly appeared in the news and whilst they were getting on the plane at Heathrow, the decision was taken not to send them to Karnal but to try to transfer them to Bhiwadi. It is to the credit of all concerned and in particular to the President of the Rotary Club of Bhiwadi, that by the time their plane landed in Delhi, additional hotel rooms had been booked, the coach had increased in size and the vaccination programme in Bhiwadi had been adjusted to accommodate them. 

So the two groups found out that they had been combined into one when they were given their destination briefing in Delhi - to their credit they all accepted what had happened without complaint and regarded themselves as one larger than expected group.

Bhiwadi is a growing industrial town about 65 kms (two to three hours drive down and then off National Highway 8) south west of Delhi. We knew very little about the town before we went there other than that its population was in excess of 100,000 (55% male), the predominant language was Hindi. It is also in Rajasthan but only just over the state border with Haryana. They had very successfully hosted an RIBI group the previous year.

On our way there we stopped for lunch at a McDonalds - to many Indians a company which is a symbol of success and the new India although I would have to say that the new India has not yet arrived in many of the places we go to as Polio vaccinators. Being a vegetarian and having suffered their poor offerings for vegetarians in the UK, this would normally have caused me to grimace and say no thank-you. 

However, being in a Hindu area, I knew that beef would not be on the menu and therefore there was a greater variety of vegetarian offerings as well as chicken.

 
The Economist’s BigMac Index says (if I have interpreted it correctly) that even when taking into account the poor performance of the £ against the Rupee after Brexit, when this blog was written, BigMacs were 33% cheaper in India than in the UK. So I splashed out on a Veggie Maharaja Mac Meal (cost 240 rupees or roughly £3)

which is the above plus french fries and a drink. It is impossible to eat politely and therefore I made no attempt so to do. McDonalds also offered the advantages of reliable food hygiene, clean toilets and able to serve 20 people quickly and cheaply.

Awaiting us when we arrived were drums (so loud that I have cut the sound track from a video I took at the time and use it as the ring tone on my phone)

and numerous members of the town’s three Rotary Clubs and its Inner Wheel Club 

and much dancing went on 

together with garland presentation and marking us individually with a Tilaka as a gesture of welcome before we were allowed into the hotel. I can safely say it was a unique welcome which we have never been given elsewhere and typical of the hospitality we were to experience during this tiring long working weekend.

That evening the Rotary Clubs arranged a reception for us and all of their members and families.

There were speeches (here Geoff is being introduced to them)

 

Yet more dancing both from professionals

and amateurs

and mutual presentation of brooches and other items, here Pat is afixing an Inner Wheel brooch upon the President of the Inner Wheel Club of Bhiwadi.