The Awakening, From Within

Achkalpur, the dusty hamlet that Sendi Bai comes from, has never known what reproductive and child health was all about. Sendi, like most other women from her community, was married off at an age when neither her body nor her mind was prepared for marriage. She had two miscarriages, back-to-back, her in-laws held her responsible for it, and often abused her. For Sendi, and many others like her in the rural interiors of India, suffering in silence came as a package deal with being a woman. She never even thought that this was unusual.

All of this, however, changed after her chance encounter with GIDF. Our field worker spotted her during one of his location visits for Project Jagriti, our RCH program in Madhya Pradesh. He immediately understood her story – she is one of those women whom ignorance and poverty has pushed to the edges. Her husband is a bonded labour in a farm run by a local money lender. Even while she is pregnant, Sendi has to work to keep her kitchen running. No one has ever told her about the precautions needed to be taken during pregnancy, because no one knows about them in their neighbourhood.

We linked Sendi Bai to our Mobile Health Outreach Program. While that took care of her persistent complaints of weakness with energy and iron tonics, we still needed to convince her family about proper pregnancy health-care. GIDF held numerous counselling sessions with her family, explaining her situation, and emphasizing on them the need to give her adequate rest before delivery.

Soon enough, Sendi Bai and her family ended up asking GIDF to name her son. Yes, Sendi is now the proud mother of a son. True to her promise that she will share her happiness with other women in the village, she has started work as a RCH volunteer.