Episode 6

Yesterday we visited a slum in Delhi. The slum sits next to the train tracks in a fairly well to-do government area. The slum has been there for over 30 years and most of those who live there built the structures that they call home. Considering its location, a corporation in connection with the government has decided to put a 5-star hotel on the land that sits right next to the slum. Many of the slum-dwellers work at the construction site and provide an arsenal of cheap labor. Those who do not work on the construction site are mostly trash collectors, and sift through mountains of trash, removing plastic and cardboard that is to be sold to recycling companies. However once the hotel is completed, the entire slum will be demolished, and of course the tragedy is that almost 1000 people will now have no where to go and will be provided no compensation by the government. How ironic, that the people who help to build the hotel will be displaced by its completion.

We walked around the slum for a while with our guide and spoke with a few of the people who lived there. They were all unbelievably nice, and with what little they had offered us tea and bread. We found out that many of them live on about $60/month for a family of four… That’s about 50 cents/day/person. I’m sure those who are building the hotel can relate…. We spoke with one family for about an hour and they told us their story. A woman and her husband moved with their 8 children from a rural village to New Delhi to find work. She explained to us that she was not educated about sexual health, and because she couldn’t afford the hysterectomy, she thought she had no way of controlling her family. The family lived in this tiny brick room with a sheet metal roof; the room was no bigger than 10ftx8ft for her entire family. She explained to us that her husband had been in a construction accident and broke his spinal cord, and now with the hotel they did not know what they were going to do. She was going to have to take her kids out of school so they could all go to work to make up for the lost wage earned by their father. There were numerous stories like this one; I felt simultaneously enraged, saddened, and disturbed.

Today we went to Apollo hospital and shadowed one of the HIV specialists. Apollo is a private/corporate hospital, a sharp difference from what we had seen before. Many of the HIV cases we saw were co-infections with Tuberculosis, and some of them were quite serious. With many of the cases, the patient would begin to feel better and so they would stop their anti-retroviral treatments despite the doctors orders, and their HIV would quickly progress to AIDS. It was an interesting day, but I have to say I much prefer working in the slum. Many of the people who came into Apollo were quite wealthy, as they could afford the expensive treatments, and even with their privilege would not follow the regimen that so many would die to have….