By Joonho Jo
On Friday, I left the Home Care office and visited the Day Care children. They were living in dhramshalas, tight-packed dormitories that were built for out-of-town patients. The facilities were located by AIIMS, and were filled with mattress after mattress of patients. There seemed to be an unending line of people in this hot, sticky, and dirty hall in which there were ten times as many bugs as people. These patients did not deserve to be in such conditions, but neither did they have a choice. With the financial burden of moving already taxing their family, they could not afford to live anywhere else.
As I walked down along these beds, I recognized so many faces from Day Care. There was Ashish and Shuddah and Mankhush. But this time, we weren't in the CanSupport office. We were in their living space. I saw the families of these children, crouched on the stained mattresses. I saw the packed lunches they had received from CanSupport lying empty at every step. And I saw the gravity of these children's situation. During Day Care, since it was in a protected and comfortable space, it was easy to overlook the truly dire circumstances of the children. Some of them had been living in this "dormitory" of dirty mattresses for over two years, waiting for a doctor to complete one single MRI for them.
For the next two hours, I sat down with these families and spoke to them to the best of my ability. Yes, the language barrier existed, but a smile went a long way. These patients seemed grateful that they had company at all, that someone would come and say "hi" to them. It saddened me that more people could not come into these dorms to just ask "how are you?" It saddened me that these people had no one to turn to during the hardest times of their lives.
After this, we brought a group of patients who needed supplementary medication to a local vendor and purchased these medications for them. As pictured below, the line extended so far back, and the total cost amounted to around 6000 rupees. In other words, to buy pain-reducing, life-improving medication for over 40 people, it costed us less than 100 US dollars.
When I returned to Day Care, my interactions took on even more meaning. I began to see more than just a child doing arts and craft. More than a child patient doing arts and crafts. I saw a child with cancer who was living in nearly unlivable housing, receiving debilitating treatment whenever possible, and suffering through questions such as "am I going to live?" For the teenagers, the Day Care coordinators brought in two chefs who showed the children how to make "Indian-style Crepes." It made me happy to see the children enjoy cooking the crepes and eating them. When some kids asked me for seconds, I gladly offered them more. They absolutely deserved it.
