NY TIMES: Six Nuns Came to India to Start a Hospital. They Ended Up Changing a Country.
India had been devastated by World War II and then partition, which split the country in two. By the end of 1948, two of India’s cities, Delhi and Mumbai, had each absorbed more than 500,000 refugees, and the country had endured violence, dislocation and food shortages on a mass scale. More than 20 million Indians lived under direct rationing, entitled to 10 ounces of grain a day. That was the period during which a handful of Catholic nuns from Kentucky chose to come to Mokama, a small town at a railroad junction in northern India on the southern banks of the Ganges River, to start a hospital.
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One of them was Sir Joseph Bhore.
A distinguished Indian bureaucrat who had served the Crown loyally, even as Gandhi’s independence movement gathered force, Bhore retired with a knighthood in 1935 to the island of Guernsey. When German forces occupied Guernsey and the other Channel Islands in 1940, he was forced out of his quiet retirement. With nowhere else to go, he went back to India. In October 1943, the colonial government of India asked him to lead a “broad survey” of health conditions in British India, the first of its kind.
It was the most significant assignment of his life.
Sister Crescentia Wise (in white habit) with a doctor and hospital staff registering patients for the Hansen’s disease clinic.Credit...Sisters of Charity of Nazareth Archival Center
He recruited more than two dozen British and Indian doctors and colonial public health officials to serve on his committee and dispatched them to every corner of India. The result, which has become known as the Bhore Committee Report, is a startlingly bleak picture of what it meant, physically, to be an Indian at the time of independence. The starkest numbers were among children. In 1941, of every 1,000 babies born, 158 would not survive their first year. Children under 10 accounted for nearly half of all the deaths in India.
Bhore had presented, in heartbreaking detail, the toll that hundreds of years of colonial neglect had taken on the bodies of hundreds of millions of Indians, and yet he believed, in his technocratic way, that Indians themselves could reverse the effects of generations of cruelty.
The overall goal was simply to increase the number of doctors and other health professionals. There was one doctor for every 6,300 people in India, compared with one per 1,000 in England. He set a target of increasing the ratio to one for 2,000 by 1971, and imagined a network of small village health centers. A pair of trained doctors would be in charge of several villages, serving, with a staff of 36, a population of about 20,000. This was one of the very few moments when someone in the government of India saw with absolute clarity what was required to change India for the better, how to do it and what it would cost.
The six pioneer sisters, soon after arriving in Mokama in December 1947, with the empty hospital building behind them.Credit...Sisters of Charity of Nazareth Archival Center
Lawrencetta Veeneman was 51 years old when she accepted her order’s mission to Mokama, leading the six nuns — three teachers and three nurses, three in their 20s and three a generation older — who founded Nazareth Hospital.
When she arrived, Veeneman found an empty warehouse, a series of empty rooms. There were no hospital beds, no medicines, no electricity, no source of running water, no doctors, nurses or other trained staff. The sisters’ mission was to turn this building into the tenth Sisters of Charity hospital, and they would have six months to fulfill it.
On Jan. 5, 1948, less than a month after the sisters landed in Mokama, a young woman arrived on their doorstep. She was tiny, not even five feet tall, and had been living with the Carmelites in Patna, the closest big city, for several months. Her name was Celine Minj, and Veeneman offered her a bed on the roof.
She looked at what the sisters called a hospital and was not impressed. There was nothing, just a small hall in a building near the railway station, and a dispensary with a few boxes of medicines. But even so she was a step closer to the life she wanted......
Opinion | Six Nuns Came to India to Start a Hospital. They Ended Up Changing a Country. - The New York Times (nytimes.com)