Archive for 'Health'
Maternal Mortality in India: Photo Montage
Posted on July 6, 2010, by Hanna Ingber Win, under Health, International, women.
Hanna Ingber Win explains her Pulitzer Center reporting project in this photo montage:
Learn more about this reporting project.
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Life Beyond Birth, India (Audio, Photos)
Posted on June 22, 2010, by Hanna Ingber Win, under Health, International, women.
“If Sulekha Lohar had only had access to an ambulance instead of that handcart.
If the clinic just had a doctor, instead of just empty shelves.
If the hospital only had a bloodbank, as we hear from American journalist Hanna Ingber Win, Sulekha’s children might still have their mother.”
Listen to Hanna’s dispatch from a tea plantation in Assam plus an interview with her on maternal mortality in India. The story and interview aired on CBC Radio’s “Dispatches.”
Go to CBC Radio for Hanna’s slideshow from Assam.
This reporting was sponsored by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
Learn more about this reporting project.
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Looking for Hope in Child Brides
Posted on June 9, 2010, by Hanna Ingber Win, under Health, International, women.
I had written about child marriage before. When I went to Ethiopia, I visited a program for girls who had fled early marriage in their villages and ended up in the capital Addis Ababa. I met a classroom full of such young girls. With their schoolbooks in hand, they looked like kids, not brides. I talked to some of the girls in depth about how their desire to continue their schooling had pushed them to leave their families and traditions behind and flee to what they hoped would be a better life. These girls had dreams, and the courage to pursue them.
This time, in a small village on a remote island on the Brahmaputra River in northeastern India, the story was still on child marriage, but everything was different.
This time, the girl, Hasina Khatun, did not want to continue her education. She had not been to school a day in her life. Hasina was 13 when her aunt had told her she would get married. Like the girls I met in Ethiopia, Hasina did not want to leave her family behind and start a new life with a husband. But unlike the others, she accepted her life. When I asked if she had goals or dreams, she couldn’t think of any.
Unlike the girls in Addis, Hasina hadn’t fled.
Whether in Ethiopia or India, girls who have a baby under the age of 15 are five times more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth as women in their 20s, according to the UN Population Fund. Girls 15 to 19 are twice as likely to die.
Wherever the girl lives, child marriage increases the likelihood of domestic violence. It generally lowers the age of a first birth and ends a girl’s opportunity to get an education, thereby decreasing her chances of employment and earning potential. Sent away from her family and village, the girl is likely to loose her support network and face social isolation.
In Ethiopia, this information served as a backdrop for what the girls I met had escaped. In India, as I chatted with Hasina inside a bamboo shack on the island, her life felt like a checklist.
Domestic violence? Three days after getting married, her 19-year-old husband told her they would have sex. She said no. He forced himself on her. Check.
Low age of first birth? She’s now 15 and five months pregnant. Check.
Education? She works in her in-laws home, helping cook and clean. She lives on an island with no secondary schools and couldn’t get an education if she wanted one. Check.
Isolation? Her family and friends live 25 kilometers away on the mainland. It takes a boat two to three hours to get there. Check.
Physical health? Hasina’s hemoglobin level, which should be at least 11 grams per deciliter, is 6.4. She’s severely anemic. Check.
As I interviewed Hasina, I had a million things on my mind: getting this timid young girl to open up, jotting down details on the chickens wandering around us, convincing the male translators to ask my questions on sex, shooing away the neighbors and husband who kept crowding around the door.
It wasn’t until I left Hasina and her village of 886 people, got back on the boat and checked into my humble hotel on the mainland that I began to process the girl’s story. I connected my camera to my laptop and began downloading photographs of Hasina. I sat alone in my room and stared into an image of her face. Hasina does not look like a woman or a wife or a mother. She looks like a sweet young thing.
The girls in Ethiopia will undoubtedly have difficult lives trying to survive as teen migrants in the capital. Many of them must work as domestic helpers while trying to continue their education. But those girls see potential in their lives, and they will strive to achieve it.
Hasina sees nothing.
She has decided that despite what the boat clinic nurses and doctors tell her, she will give birth at home. Her body might be too small and undeveloped to handle the burden of a pregnancy, her home might be hours away from medical help if there is a complication, but she says she does not care.
As a reporter, I kept trying to get Hasina to tell me something positive or uplifting about her life. I thought my story would be better if I could add a happy twist and show what gives Hasina – just like other teenage girls around the world – a sense of joy.
And yet, I couldn’t find anything. Perhaps I didn’t ask the right questions, perhaps I didn’t stay with her long enough. I am sure there must be something that makes this young girl roll over with laughter. But I didn’t find it.
At the time, I wanted that extra information for my story. It would be my ending. Now, as I look at the photographs of Hasina over and over, as I envision her holding her sari up to her face as she whispered one-word answers, I realize I was looking for a piece of joy for myself, too. Without it, I am left with the image of a young girl with a swollen belly and not a shimmer of hope.
Read more about Hasina here.
Follow Hanna on Twitter @Hanna_India.
This reporting was sponsored by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
Learn more about this reporting project.
This originally appeared on True/Slant.
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India: Married as Children
Posted on June 3, 2010, by Hanna Ingber Win, under Health, International, women.
PITHAKHAITI, India — Growing up in a small village in northeastern India, Hasina Khatun spent her days helping her aunt around the house and playing with her siblings. She did not drop out of school; she never started. Hasina began menstruating at the age of 13 and soon after her aunt, who raised her after her mother died, told her it was time to get married. Hasina did not understand what her aunt meant, or that her life was about to change dramatically.
“I thought marriage was a game,” Hasina says as she sits in a bamboo home in her husband’s village. She fidgets with her orange, black and green sari that covers her head and falls over her breasts, unusually big for her tiny frame. Hasina is now 15 and five months pregnant.
Nearly half of girls in India are married before they turn 18, according to the International Center for Research on Women, making India home to a third of the world’s child brides. In India, there is often social pressure on women to give birth soon after marriage to prove their fertility. Child brides like Hasina — even though their bodies are often too small and undeveloped to handle the burden of a pregnancy — are no exception.
Child marriage increases the chances of a maternal death due to an increase in the likelihood of pregnancy complications combined with lack of knowledge about maternal health, lack of control over medical decisions and lack of access to timely and adequate health care. A girl who gives birth under the age of 15 is five times more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth than a woman in her 20s, according to the United Nations Population Fund. Girls 15 to 19 are twice as likely to die.
Continue reading and view the slideshow at GlobalPost.
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India: The Challenge of Educating Muslim Girls
Posted on June 1, 2010, by Hanna Ingber Win, under Health, International, women.
VIHOOR, India — The air feels cool at this early hour in the village.
As roosters yap away, a small truck delivers a crate of plastic bags filled with fresh milk to a roadside shop. A man rides by on a bicycle with a girl in her school uniform sitting in front and two little girls behind him.
On both sides of the road, girls in matching blue and white outfits gather at the bus stops. A young one with braided pigtails and a backpack waits patiently. An older one wearing a white headscarf and matching pants soon joins her, and a mother dressed in a black burqa walks them to school.
In Vihoor village on the Konkan Coast about 100 miles south of Mumbai, the Muslim women almost all stay at home raising their children, and when they go out, they virtually all wear the burqa. In many ways, the village is conservative and deeply entrenched in tradition, yet family after family here said their community is undergoing a significant if gradual change: more girls are going to school, and for longer.
Continue reading at GlobalPost.
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Health Food Booms in India
Posted on June 1, 2010, by Hanna Ingber Win, under Business, Health, International.
MUMBAI, India — As I devour a (delicious) frozen yogurt, store manager Ankush Chopra tells me that Indian celebrities frequently visit his Mumbai shop. He rattles off names of Bollywood stars and then pulls out his mobile phone to show me proof. He turns his phone to me so I can see the photograph he took of one such actor, Jackie Shroff, wearing sunglasses and sitting in his car in front of the store.
“He has taken the ‘berry blast’ flavor, one medium, one small,” Chopra tells me. “With all the berries [as toppings] – strawberry, blueberry, raspberry and blackberry.”
Bollywood actress Raveena Tandon prefers the original flavor, Chopra adds.
As we chat in the store’s outdoor seating in Mumbai’s relatively posh Pali Hill neighborhood, a deliveryman from the nearby market walks up to the shop, carrying a two-foot wide basket of fresh strawberries on his head.
Cocoberry, India’s first non-fat premium frozen yogurt, opened a year ago in an effort to capitalize on a rising demand for health food among India’s growing class of wealthy consumers. The health food market, measured at $92 million in the end of 2008, is expected to nearly triple in size by the end of 2013, according to Shushmul Maheshwari, the chief executive of market-research company RNCOS.
The beginning of an organized, formal market for health food began a few years ago when big retailers began offering health products in their stores, Maheshwari wrote in an email. This developed as a result of a rise in education level and the emergence of strong advertising channels by which retailers could reach consumers.
Continue reading at GlobalPost.
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One Mother’s Story: A Casualty of Three Delays
Posted on May 11, 2010, by Hanna Ingber Win, under Health, International, women.
DIBRUGARH, India — One night in late March, about 24 weeks into her pregnancy, Sulekha Lohar woke feeling ill. Sharing a bed with her husband and two young sons, she felt her chest pounding and her legs swell. She began convulsing. After about an hour, her husband, not knowing what to do, decided to seek help from his parents.
Too poor to own a phone, Bhangru Lohar left his wife in bed and rushed from his humble home with a tin roof and mud floors down a dark, dirt path of the Ghorijan Tea Estate in upper Assam, past the piles of firewood, bamboo fences and homes of other tea workers, to his parents’ house. He woke his father, Rama Lohar, who woke the neighbors, and the men decided to bring Sulekha to the tea company’s health center, according to Bhangru and Rama, who independently told the Pulitzer Center this story.
There are three ways in which necessary treatment for pregnant mothers can be delayed that increases the chances of a maternal death, according to maternal health specialists. The first delay can occur when the mother or family first decides to seek appropriate medical care for a pregnancy or labor complication.
Continue reading on the Huffington Post.
This reporting was sponsored by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
Learn more about this reporting project.
Follow Hanna on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Hanna_India
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Three Wives, 10 Kids Is Enough
Posted on May 3, 2010, by Hanna Ingber Win, under Health, International, women.
TENGATOLI, India — The air crackles as a team of medical staff and crew walk across a peanut field, lugging a big generator from their boat into a village of 850 people. Near a collection of thatchroof homes, the crew sets up a projector on the dirt floor of a small bamboo structure that also serves as the community’s schoolhouse. Well, it occasionally serves as a schoolhouse. The teacher lives on the mainland, a three to four-hour boat ride away, and only makes the journey along the Brahmaputra River to Tengatoli village in lower Assam to teach once a month. Sometimes once every two months.
Barefoot children and mothers holding infants trickle into the school-turned-cinema hall. The boat staff, part of a boat clinic run by the Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research with funding from the Indian government and UNICEF (see previous blog post on C-NES and the boat clinics), show a video on maternal and child health, including the importance of family planning.
Some of the video clips are in Assamese, and even though many in the crowd only speak Bengali, the language barrier does not seem to dissuade them from watching. Many who live on this island without electricity or televisions have never before seen a video.
One of the women watching is Anuwara Bezum. Dressed in a vibrant yellow, orange and red sari, she wears her head covered, an assortment of bangles and a nose ring. Bezum, who does not know her age but thinks she is about 30, grew up in a village on the mainland. Like many of the girls in her community, she got married at 12 or 13. She left her family and friends and moved to her husband’s village on the island. Bezum had her first child at around age 15, she says as she slowly rocks her fourth and youngest in her arms. This baby will be her last, she says through a translator.
Continue reading at the HuffingtonPost.
This reporting was sponsored by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
Learn more about this reporting project.
Follow Hanna on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Hanna_India
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On Remote Island Village, Health Worker Challenges Tradition
Posted on April 27, 2010, by Hanna Ingber Win, under Health, International, women.
AZIMOR, India — After a couple hours of cruising down the Brahmaputra River, the boat clinic arrives at a desolate mud bank. A fisherman nearby dips his pole into the water and pulls up a large net. Two community workers emerge from the boat and set off with a box of medical supplies towards the thatch-roof homes in the distance.
The doctors, nurses and I follow behind, zigzagging through the rain-soaked grass. We take off our shoes to wade through the flooded areas. The air feels fresh and crisp. With no roads or vehicles on the island, the only sounds we hear are roosters, cows and our feet sloshing through the water.
About 1,200 Bengali-speaking Muslims live in Azimor village. They have no electricity, toilets or clean drinking water. There is a primary school, which consists of a one-room structure made out of bamboo walls and a tin roof. The week before our arrival a storm had picked up the school and dropped it off in another part of the village.
Continue reading at True/Slant.
This reporting was sponsored by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
Learn more about this reporting project.
Follow Hanna’s tweets from Assam @Hanna_India
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India: The Orphans of HIV
Posted on April 26, 2010, by Hanna Ingber Win, under Health, International, women.
MUMBAI, India — Three teenage girls pull up chairs and form a semi-circle around me. Sabeena, whose pigtails and wide eyes make her look younger than her 15 years, carries a bowl of grapes and offers them to me. No, no, I tell her, I’m fine. “Take one,” she insists. I oblige.
Her friend, Amrita, also 15, tells me she is in her last year of high school. How long have you lived at this orphanage, I ask.
She smiles and puts her hand over her mouth. “One second, no?” she says and runs into the kitchen to ask the correct English word from Sister Shanti Remedios, the sister-in-charge of the HIV section at St. Catherine’s Home in Mumbai.
Amrita runs back and jumps onto her seat: “13 years.”
I try to ask the girls about life in the orphanage and living with HIV. I ask where they will go once they turn 18 or 19 and must move out. They do not want to discuss it.
“Which Hindi movie is your favorite?” Sabeena asks me.
Continue reading at GlobalPost.
