The Antara Foundation Blog

  With one month having rolled by since I joined The Antara Foundation (TAF), I decided to pen down and reflect on my journey so far. After having traversed for miles to reach the remote edges of the district, hopping, and skipping around the murky trenches and eating my meals on the road, I have garnered myriad experiences over the course of thirty plus odd days. Whilst documenting everything that I have undergone over the past one month might seem a tad bit long and overwhelmingly emotive to write, I could do a better job salami slicing my learnings into small little nuggets. Patience - The first and most important skill that I have learnt over the past one month - perhaps the sharpest tool in my negotiation arsenal. Much of my work involves educating, counseling, and informing the community and frontline healthcare workers on various aspects of health and nutrition. The work isn’t rocket science, but it takes an effort to ensure that your message has been passed on, understood,...

On a warm summer day, I met Surekha at an Anganwadi Centre in Chhindwara district, Madhya Pradesh. Surekha had recently given birth to her third baby. After resting for a week, she was back in the cotton fields, working as a daily wage labourer. The cracks of her palms and feet were filled with mud as she entered the Anganwadi Centre during her lunch break. While talking to her, I learned that all her three children were falling into different stages of malnutrition, including her newborn who was only 2 kilos, weak and malnourished. The Anganwadi Worker (AWW) had identified Surekha’s older two children as Severely Acute Malnourished (SAM) and the third child as Moderately Acute Malnourished (MAM) after weighing them. I saw the confusion Surekha felt while listening to these words. She was trying hard to make sense of the phrases SAM and MAM, but to this mother who struggles every day to make ends meet, correcting an invisible illness seemed like a futile effort. Surekha’s story mir...

In my recent field visit to Madhya Pradesh’s Barwani district, my colleagues introduced me to three most resilient women. One of them works as an Accredited Social Health Activist, known as a village ASHA and two are Anganwadi Workers (AWW) who are primarily in charge of nutrition and well-being of children under five. All three had two things in common – a childhood brush with polio, and the unstoppable courage to defy the odds. Life had dealt each of them a difficult hand before their second birthdays. Prior to when the Polio vaccine became widely available in India, all three women became victims of this debilitating disease. Each of them remembers getting a high fever, followed by paralysis, severe for one of them, milder, yet crippling for the other two. When I heard what daunting adversities these three women had surmounted and saw the courage and drive with which they were helping other women and children in their communities despite their own struggles, I felt that I must share...