Nagapattinam: Our babies have
no milk*
The next afternoon we drove several hours through small towns, past bullock
carts and coconuts, engineering colleges, women herding goats, and men perched
on Brahman bulls with piles of hay that seemed to reach the sky. From the
city of Trichy with the famed Ganapathi temple on the hill to the white
gates of Thanjavur, there were villages dotted by palm trees and children
playing.
We arrived at our destination Nagapattinam. This district was hardest
hit by the tsunami. In the morning we drove along the Velaganni-Vedaraniyam
road to reach the small village of Pushpavanam, Upon hearing that this village
had been abandoned , no longer receiving aid and stripped of an economy
because all its boats had been destroyed, we brought with us four sewing
machines, cricket bats, board games, and hope.
I placed my feet in the sand. A woman in her sixties, Mrs. R. Pattamal,
showed me where her house once stood. She lost everything. A younger woman
in a red sari shared with me that her husband had gone fishing the day of
the tsunami. Thankfully, her husband came back but his boat was washed out
to sea. She showed me what was left of her house, half of the structure,
a fractured roof and a hole in the floor that looked like a boulder had
landed in it. She told me she had been taking a bath in a nearby pond and
when she came back her house was devastated.
The men showed me their boats. They were split in half, split in pieces
of six long pieces of wood torn apart. As I scanned the area, I was overwhelmed.
Even in the aftermath.
While the teachers were setting up the sewing machines, I stood in the doorway staring
at the sea. Someone whispered in my ear that they were afraid that I was
there in case of another tsunami struck. I empathized by telling them I
grew up on an island close to the beach and after seeing this, I could imagine
the fear in which they live. A young girl came to me and was pointing at
her chest. She had a baby in her arms. Even though I didn’t speak Tamil—I
understood her gestures.
She was telling me that she had no breast milk
to feed her baby girl Arthi. Arthi was six months but looked about three
months/. When I asked how she coped, she told me that the aid agencies had
given her a supply of milk powder, but she was almost finished with the
supply. When I asked what else she fed her baby, she shrugged. That mother
was only twenty years old and her husband was not working, like all the
men in the village.
It was our hope that by donating the sewing machines that these women could
work in shifts, tailoring and sewing clothes to earn a living. We calculated
that with four sewing machines, at least 16 women could be helped if they
worked in shifts.
In the one little house that remained standing, we faced the ocean with
the light of a single flame and the blessing of the village head—we
inaugurated Ananda Pushpavanam—a sewing school for young women.
* Fieldnotes by Levani
