CHAPTER 10
SHE’S WAITING FOR ME TOMORROW
Serving a purpose or a person helps to
pull you forward.
The challenges are overwhelming. Sometimes we are a blink away from hopelessness, feeling as though there are so many problems all around—very few of which we can actually do anything about—that we simply stand there, not knowing how to get through it all.
But deep inside all of us lies a clue that can help us move forward through the chaos. It is a deep desire to be relevant, to be significant to someone or something greater than ourselves. With so much noise in our jobs and our daily lives, so much uncertainty in the world, we can lose sight of something that gives us joy and happiness and that propels us forward: the ability to do something that has real meaning for someone else.
I raided the minibar in my hotel room and loaded my handbag with a bag of potato chips, a can of roasted nuts, a Coke, Purell, a hand towel, and Advil, preparing to go to the village later that morning. I had been to Indian villages before, but for some reason I was anxious and a bit nervous as I thought about all the things that could go wrong on this trip. Hope the car doesn’t break down in the middle of our trip. Hope I get back before sunset. What if I can’t get a cell signal?
As my car pulled into the village, about four hours from any major city, I noticed a lot of buffalo walking around, but no Prakash. He was supposed to be here by now. I reminded myself to be patient, because in India things always go late and something always goes wrong.
As I waited for Prakash to show up, my mind started to go into overdrive and I began wondering why I had put myself in this position in the first place. I didn’t have to make this visit. It was nice to do, but why had I put myself through such a hassle, driving all this way to a remote village just to see how social workers help deliver health care to villagers. I had seen the PowerPoint presentation. I got the idea. So what was the point?
I had to be crazy.
I thought back to a phone call with my friend Dr. Thakor Patel.
“Bob, you have to see for yourself all the good the SEVAKs do. You can only understand so much from behind a computer. These guys do such good work amidst some awful conditions, and that’s the only way to see how small changes can make a big difference when it comes to improving conditions in India.”
I had been considering doing some volunteer work in India and I had asked Dr. Patel about his charitable program. Dr. Patel is a retired U.S. naval officer who lives in Maryland. He still sees some patients at the Bethesda naval hospital, but he spends most of his retired life volunteering to improve health care in rural areas of India. About four years before, thanks to donations from friends and the generosity of a corporate donor, Dr. Patel had created a new charitable organization to help villagers in remote villages in the state of Gujarat get access to basic health care and sanitation.
He modeled this concept after what he had learned in the U.S. Navy, while working on a vessel that helped with disaster relief efforts around the world. He set up a core group of twenty-eight regular villagers who would serve as social/health workers for their neighbors. They were trained to check blood pressure, to screen for diabetes, and to provide education about proper sanitation and ventilation in huts and homes. They would provide support in areas without doctors, nurses, or trained medical professionals.
Thanks to the help of a local friend in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, they now have four regional coordinators who lead a group of about seven local SEVAKs. The Hindi word seva means “to serve” or “in service of others,” and the idea was to create a corps of local villagers who would serve in twenty-eight villages.
I was remembering all this when a tall, thin man with glasses approached my car with a smile. Prakash was in his midthirties. He was wearing a white long sleeve shirt, blue jeans, and sneakers that looked as though they had seen their fair share of travel in these villages.
“Hello. You must be Prakash,” I said.
“Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to be with you today, Prakash. I really want to understand what you do and how you do it.”
“Yes, sir. Shall we go visit the first home?” he asked, diving right in.
As we walked half a block with the buffalo to a woman’s house on a muddy dirt road, Prakash began narrating her story, referencing notes he had made from previous visits.
“Her seven-year-old daughter was brought to me because she couldn’t get out of bed in the morning.”
The mother saw us coming and knew we were there to see her daughter. Covering her head with her saffron-colored sari, she quickly went inside and returned with her daughter in her arms. She placed the girl on a makeshift rope cot of the type commonly found throughout rural India—not too different from the cot I had been born on some forty-two years before. Crying and covering her eyes, the daughter looked as though she might be paraplegic.
“She had trouble standing, sitting up, or doing anything at all,” Prakash said. “I took her to the doctor, about fifty miles from here, at the government hospital, but the doctor said that he couldn’t do anything about the bones that are sticking out of her back. She’s disabled and cannot get up even to go to the bathroom.”
Seeing the tears starting to form in the mother’s eyes hit me hard. I started to ask questions about what the doctor’s official diagnosis was, what treatment options were available, whether it was a money issue, a transportation problem, or something else. Prakash answered as well as he could, and with each response I felt more and more helpless. I felt sad and wanted to move on, knowing that it was not likely to get any easier.
Prakash told me about the next villager we were going to meet.
“This woman’s husband is a farmer and has severe diabetes,” he said. “They had never heard of diabetes before we came to their house. He refuses to take the medicine we have gotten for him.”
The farmer was lying on his bed, unable to move, likely because he was drunk.
The next person we met was a woman in her sixties who had started getting headaches and had sought help from Prakash. He discovered that she had severe high blood pressure and had taken her to the government hospital to see a doctor. Since then, she had been taking her blood pressure medication and was doing well.
We went from hut to hut, home to home, house to house. We saw a ten-year-old boy with cerebral palsy, a fifty-nine-year-old man with high blood pressure, and a recently widowed woman who had gotten her first-ever toilet installed, thanks to Prakash. With each passing hour, I felt overwhelmed by the problems in just this one tiny village in India. I could only imagine how Prakash felt.
But he didn’t look fazed by any of it. He seemed calm and purposefully sincere, focused on documenting the cases in his neatly organized folders and reading me the data points on blood pressure and so forth. As we started walking back to the car, he proudly listed some of the SEVAKs’ successes in this village.
“When we first started, only five percent of the people in this village had a toilet facility. After helping them fill out the forms the government requires, twenty percent of the villagers now have a toilet.”
Nodding, I continued to walk toward the car, moving faster as I observed the sunset. I didn’t want to be driving back from the village at night. Many accidents happen because of the narrow roads and the trucks that emerge at dusk.
Thanking some of the villagers who had gathered to see us off, I asked Prakash how he was going to get home.
“No problem, sir.”
I offered him a ride, and after much cajoling, he accepted.
I was emotionally drained and felt a wave of pessimism come over me. I wondered how they were going to make it, how they would survive. How did he do it? I had to ask.
“Prakash, I have to ask you: why do you do what you do? You’re not a doctor. You have no medical training. You can’t diagnose these people’s problems. You can only check their blood pressure, check their diabetes, and then take them to a doctor far away, which they may not be able to afford. Don’t you get overwhelmed with all these problems of the villagers?”
“Sir, you see, this woman I will be seeing tomorrow had a blood pressure of 160 over 110 when I first met her. She takes her medicine, but not regularly. I am supposed to see her tomorrow.”
Maybe something had gotten lost in translation, I thought, because he hadn’t answered my question. He was giving a specific answer and probably didn’t understand that my question was on a higher level. Trying to better understand his purpose and motivation for this seemingly thankless job, I switched gears and asked him about his family, how he found himself doing this work, and so on.
“I saw the advertisement for the SEVAK project in the newspaper and was searching for a job, so I called the number and was hired. I wasn’t sure what it was, but it paid well and I could work within my own village and do other things, too.”
Prakash gets paid about $100 per month, but the job is not secure. If the handful of U.S. donors stops supporting the project, his job will no longer exist. Even so, he seemed happy with this job, seemingly without stress or worry, despite the overwhelming odds he faced. Was this his purpose in life?
“So, why do you do it, Prakash?” I was trying to get to the heart of his motivation, to discover what made him get up in the morning. “Help me understand. You don’t have a secure job. You’re not a doctor. You cannot solve all these villagers’ problems. You work in some of the worst conditions, with no toilets, no resources, and no way of knowing if you’ll have a job next month. Why do you do it?”
“That woman with high blood pressure . . .”
Oh, no, I thought. Not again with trying to explain that she’s better off now that her blood pressure is controlled.
But with slow and deep sincerity, looking directly into my eyes for the first time, Prakash said, “That woman with high blood pressure is waiting for me tomorrow. I must see how she’s doing. She’s waiting for me.”
This time, finally, I understood. Prakash continues to serve, despite difficult circumstances, because he is compelled by a duty higher than himself. This duty doesn’t push him ahead; it actually pulls him forward by the strings of his heart. He is able to get through the challenges he confronts each day because he hopes to affect just one human life. He has no grandiose visions of a greater purpose, doesn’t know what the future will hold for him, but his daily actions are brought into focus by the belief that someone might benefit, ever so slightly, from his effort, his work, his life. He is compelled to rise each morning, despite tremendous problems, because someone needs him. That woman needs him. She is waiting for him.