Together Everyone Achieves More
Malnourishment in Sonshiv, 2016
On the 12th of September 2016, a newspaper article about the starvation and eventual death of 12 children in Maharashtra caught the attention of a T.E.A.M volunteer. Articles like these often slide under the radar in the midst of the reporting on major events and the bigger cities, but T.E.A.M. decided to dig deeper and help the locals in the village for its next project. Initial research suggested that the children needed an immediate supply of high calorie foods to help them recover from severe malnutrition, build their immunities and sustain themselves in the long run.
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T.E.A.M. fundraised and put together high-calorie food kits for families (providing one month’s food supply for 6 children), which included ghee (a clarified butter that is an essential ingredient in Indian cooking), dal (lentils rich in protein), biscuits and root vegetables with long shelf lives, peanuts, and full-fat milk. Volunteers visited the village on 13th September 2016 and distributed over 500 kits to the villagers, enabling 3000 children to receive a plentiful supply of nutritious food that they desperately needed.
After visiting the village and looking at the situation on ground, T.E.A.M. realised that many children were also suffering from severe mineral deficiencies that could affect them at a later stage in their lives. To tackle this long term problem, they set up a medical camp to get all the children tested by doctors, and put them on a path to being healthy in the long term by providing them with the relevant mineral tablets and medicines they required.
However, while solving one problem, T.E.A.M. volunteers came across another, equally pressing issue. They observed that several families were living in extremely poor quality housing - straw huts without roofs that were woefully inadequate for both the hot summers and the harsh monsoon rainfalls. These houses also had no sanitation, and women were forced to travel long distances into a snake-infested forest to use the unsanitary open lavatory. A few T.E.A.M. members also experienced these outdoor toilets, and quickly surmised that it was an unacceptable and unviable solution due to the risk of disease from malaria, the potential exposure to snake bites, and the inconvenience of being forced to trek into the forest every few hours.
T.E.A.M. began to tackle the issue by installing hygienic public toilets within the village, providing all the locals with a sanitary and safe way of using the restroom. Additional fundraising allowed the volunteers to construct a number of sustainable and safe homes for the locals. Straw huts were torn down and replaced with sturdy brick houses, all under immense time pressure as the villagers couldn’t live in their homes during the construction process. In just 6 weeks, T.E.A.M. members and volunteers were able to build 20 homes, providing safe, long term housing for over 800 residents of Sonshiv.
Summary Video
