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| Rural Village Home |
Today, I went to the rural area outside of Mumbai. There, I witnessed the interconnected network
needed for Leprosy treatment and prevention.
The villages were all separated from each other and each village had one
or two Leprosy patients. All the patients
completed Multi-drug therapy (MDT) treatment, but all of them needed supplies
for disability prevention and treatment.
BLP goes out once a month to provide these supplies to the
Leprosy patients in the rural areas. I
went with members of the BLP satellite clinic, and we saw approximately twenty
patients over the course of nine hours, showing how difficult it is for
patients who don’t have access to transportation or clinics to receive health care.
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| Rural Village Home |
This experience has also shown me how extensive BLP’s
network is. Not only does BLP work with
people in Mumbai, but it also reaches out to the rural areas, something that is
extremely difficult to do. In order to
achieve this, BLP has a volunteer in each village who visits the village
members afflicted with Leprosy and contacts the organization if there is a new
case of Leprosy. This is a form of
community-based prevention, as the volunteers are all members of the community
who know everyone in the villages, and know the cardinal signs of Leprosy. Not only is this more effective, as
volunteers will be able to detect incident cases faster than the BLP workers,
but there will be less of a stigma towards Leprosy.
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| Rural Primary Care Center |
Throughout my experience here, I have realized the need to
learn more than one language. Everyone
in India knows at least two or three languages.
Finding that out has humbled me because they can communicate to such a
big range of people. I've realized that
I need to learn another language if I want to communicate to a greater range of
people.
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