Since November 1 last year I have been a happy volunteer

surrounded by the whole CR family.

One of the projects I have been helping out with is the

street medicines programme. This is a project where every

Thursday, about six staff members go to the slums in a

CR ambulance to provide medical help to the people living

there.

These communties are mostly made up of refugees from

Bangladesh and the poor and destitute of society.

Every week CR staff members visit a specific area to do

health screening and registration of the people living there.

At the same time health education is given on topics like

hygiene, nutrition and immunisation.

The vacccination status of the children is also checked. If

needed, the children will be referred to CR’s Sealdah

Clinic.

In general, a lot of people are referred to hospital for

investigations or examinations, or are referred to one of

our CR clinics. There they will receive further treatment.

Before the people see the doctor in the ambulance, they

get health education. Topics like immunisation, deworm-

ing, vitamin A lice, leprosy, scabies,TBC, HIV/Aids are

all brought up.

Also there is special attention to pregnancy and the

importance of antenatal and postnatal care. Pregnant

women are referred to our Tala Park Clinic.

Health education in this setting I think is extremely

important. Often people really have no knowledge at all

about these subjects, and are poorly informed about dis-

eases and hygiene.

Our motto is “prevention is better than cure” (or not

being able to cure at all!..)

What I find really impressive about this project is that

it’s very similar to the work Dr Jack started doing all

those years ago.

For me it’s clear that CR is such an important phenome-

non for a lot of people here.I truly can say that I really

feel very priviliged to have the opportunity to work for

Calcutta Rescue – it really is an incredible organisation.

Wilma van Woerden

Infection Control Nurse from the Netherlands

They say you learn best when the teaching is fun. This was the

approach taken by Calcutta Rescue's rural outreach workers who

created a play to get across vital messages about TB, worms,

Vitamin A deficiency and scabies.

It was written by Gyanabrata Sen Gupta and directed by

Debuprasad Chakraborty – both professional actors as well as

being dedicated outreach workers for CR.

In addition to stressing the importance of basic hygiene, they

warned of the dangers of misplaced loyalty to faith healers and

quack doctors.

After numerous rehearsals, the drama team took to the road on

World TB Day to stage the show in two villages. In the first village

around 200 excited people, mainly children and women as the men

were out working, showed up at the venue, the local panchayat

(local government) building.

The play had been specially designed to grab and hold the audi-

ence’s attention by splitting it into different scenes, making the plot

dramatic, injecting humour and ensuring it was easy to follow.

The audience were very enthusiastic and congratulated the actors

afterwards on their efforts.

In the second village an even larger audience of 500 saw the play

in a local school. And outreach workers had even rigged up a

sound system so it could be heard throughout the entire village.

Overall the play was a resounding success and the team involved

has learned valuable lessons for the next time.

The play’s the thing for health education

Back to the roots of Dr Jack’s work

Audiences reacted enthusiastically to the show

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