There aren’t many things I know I want in life. However something I do want is to be able to travel every year and dedicate two months of time working for a non-profit or on some sort of humanitarian project/story. Last year, I made a voyage to Nicaragua and helped document the Chronic Kidney Disease epidemic for La Isla Foundation. This year, I’ll be spending two months in the northern province of Uttar Pradesh, specifically the city of Varanasi, documenting the Indian healthcare system.
During my graduate-school days in France, I had the pleasure of meeting a global traveler and free spirit, Derek Treatman. We eventually began nurturing an idea for a project in which we would travel the world together telling stories, he writing, I taking photos.
Like many dreams, life ends up distracting us and we both went our own ways, keeping in touch and seeing each other whenever we could. Derek eventually ended up in India, working for Dimagi Software Innovations, developing mobile healthcare infrastructure. And, as I approached another crossroads in my life regarding my work, I decided to pay Derek a visit in India.
In 2005, the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) of India envisioned a nation-wide change of the rural healthcare system with the instantiation of its Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA) program.
As a community healthcare worker, an ASHA’s job is to connect the families with health services and to promote healthy behaviors in her community, for which she receives small monetary incentives depending on the service provided. Over 150,000 ASHAs have been enrolled to date, however challenges including limited training, supervision, and support restrict the program from reaching its full potential.
In 2011, a number of NGOs working alongside the NRHM including Save the Children, World Vision, Catholic Relief Services, Intrahealth International, Pathfinder International, and CARE India launched pilot programs to evaluate the use of an open-source mobile phone platform called CommCare as a job-aid tool for ASHAs. Using their mobile phones, ASHAs store details about pregnant women and new mothers in their communities and use the application’s illustrated images, audio messages, and videos while counselling women on maternal and newborn healthcare. The facilitating NGOs monitor incoming data for supervisory purposes and can configure automatic SMS reminders to ASHAs for events like a pregnant woman’s upcoming date of delivery or round of vaccinations. Since the initial pilot phase, each of these NGOs have scaled-up their programs bringing the total number of ASHAs using CommCare into the hundreds.
This is where Derek comes in. For the last year or so, Derek has been developing this CommCare system by designing the interface, testing it, training ASHAs and implementing the system in various rural cities in India. Furthermore, Derek was recognized as one of the Top 11 Innovators of 2011 by the Rockefeller Foundation and mHealth Alliance for his work integrating multimedia into the CommCare platform to promote its use as an educational tool in low-literate communities.
Although the work I’ll be doing isn’t very clearly defined yet, my goal in going to India is to document not only Derek’s work, but also the Indian healthcare system, specifically the roles of the ASHAs in that system. I find that, by not planning my work too much, and not limiting myself with what I will and won’t cover, I’ll be more open and flexible to capture the events I’m experiencing. Naturally, there will be plenty of other beautiful and exotic sights to capture along the way including Holi, the Indian festival of color. I also hope to begin building up a library of stock images which I can then sell on sites like iStock.
Even though I’ll be in very remote and poor areas of Northern India, I will be blogging as much as I can detailing all the experiences I’m having. There are several ways you can follow along as I journey; you can:
Welcome! I've had the immense opportunity of living in several countries throughout the world and to see the beauty that it offers in both its people and its everyday sights. I hope my photography captures some of that beauty and I hope you enjoy seeing the world through my lens.
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Safe travels, my friend. I look forward to many updates and beautiful, poignant images!