3000 km bike ride for villages in India

 My bike ride for Village India

An update on my progress so far.

When the ravaging second wave of Corona Virus hit India’s metropolitan cities the TV cameras showed us people waiting in the streets outside government and private hospitals, in private cars, in ambulances, and on trollies.  All waiting for someone to die so that a bed would be available for themselves, a sick mother or father. We saw queues of people with empty oxygen cylinders waiting to get them filled. These were people who could afford to pay, or took loans from relatives. People who had cars or could hire private ambulances. Hospitals ran out of oxygen. Desperate people resorted to stealing cylinders and hijacking oxygen lorries. Trains brought oxygen tanker lorries to Delhi and Mumbai from industrial works thousands of miles away.

As the infection rates dipped the cameras went away, instead of turning their attention to the fate of the vast rural hinterland with a fragile and ill- equipped rural health structure. Villages to which those who had attended the PM’s election rallies and the twelve million pilgrims from the religious festival in Haridwar, had returned. They brought the virus with them from unmasked, congested ‘super-spreader events’ to their home villages and small towns.

Having worked in rural India for almost 20 years, my first thoughts were for the Indians who cannot afford hospital beds, doctors’ fees, medicines and oxygen. I was inspired to try and do something for them. I had lived among, and worked with, villagers in the poorest states of India, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Odisha; states where 90% of the population live in rural villages. 

My inspiration came just in time for the people of Dharauli village where Covid struck in the second week of May. I contacted my ex-physiotherapy colleague, Rajni. He told me that in his village 110 people were infected. I sent money for the drugs that had been recommended by Rajni’s cousin, a thoracic surgeon. I wrote my appeal to friends and relatives. The villagers and I are grateful for your response. We were able to buy drugs and soap, have masks made and persuade the local doctors, whom we equipped with UV thermometers, BP and oximeters, to use the drugs we provided and not charge for visits.  We tried to get oxygen and have only this week succeeded in finding a machine that makes oxygen out of air. Sadly, 7 villagers died but the rest recovered. We are providing soya protein to help them build up their strength. Now we are expanding our area of care to include tribals and the lower castes in the nearest town, Bhabua, and the poorer people in neighbouring village of Dumdum.

The Indian government decided to make the vaccination programme digital, thereby cutting off the opportunity for millions of village people to get vaccinated.  The government requires people to register for vaccination on a smart phone. Rural poor people do not have smart phones! True some better off young men have sacrificed and scrimped and saved to buy the Chinese and east Asian versions for chat and music but they are not familiar with filling in forms online, as the majority are illiterate.

The poor, tribal and lower caste people do not have smartphones. Rajni, his family, driver and staff use their phones to register 4 villagers at a time, internet permitting, in an area where power cuts regularly come and go.  For the poorest we are providing the auto rickshaw fare to encourage them to go 12 miles to the nearest Public Health Centre. These trips take about 3 hours, including travel, queues, faulty computer connections and the availability of the vaccine. These village people exist by providing daily labour in the fields and houses of richer villagers. They lose a day’s wages by going for the vaccine. Luckily with intensive education, and with the support they received from your donations, from Rajni and his team when they were ill, the Dharauli villagers are now willing to make this sacrifice and go for vaccination, unlike their town cousins.

My fifth week of cycling had a setback in that my bike had to go for a service which lost me three days of cycling. I used the time to catch up on housework, office work and a did a bit of pottering in the garden. My mileage this week was concentrated into 3 days and hence only 111 miles. My total for the five weeks is 668 miles, which sounds much better as 1028 kilometres. Either way I am over a quarter of my 2000mile target.

I follow an ordnance survey map and explore different routes around Suffolk’s villages. Following signposts, when not obliterated by overhanging greenery, to remote hamlets along badly surfaced roads as well as visiting larger villages with timbered manor houses, thatched cottages and a church.  Grey flint-stone decorated churches from the days when East Anglia was a prosperous sheep farming area. Churches with steeples, round towers, castellated towers and stumpy towers. There is not time to visit them but I have been to many on the fundraising cycling days for ‘Churches of Suffolk’. As the countryside has become depopulated and vicars are in short supply many of the churches take Sunday services in rotation, while bats, birds and rodents take up residence!

The trees have greened up this week and I am grateful for their shade.  The verges of buttercups and cowslips, Queen Anne lace and ragwort have been replaced with ox-eye daisies and poppies, with dog roses climbing through hedges and stinging nettles reaching out to unwary passing legs.  

An abundance of roses, having replaced the wisteria of last month, cling to cottage walls. Ducks are evident on village ponds. Working farms along dusty lanes and workers houses where arable farming predominates, border fields of yellow rape, potatoes, sugar beet, wheat and barley. Larger villages have a village hall promising events ‘Boris permitting’ but villages shops have disappeared except where they straddle a main road with a garage-cum-convenience store.

This week I have been exploring the east of Bury St Edmunds which is, on the whole, less hilly than the area of the Barrow heights and the Moulton hills on the Newmarket side. I am glad for a long downward hill to rest my legs which have to go round and round for three or more hours a day. However, the topography is very undulating, and I have usually have to peddle like mad on the downhill to hope to get up the inevitable uphill that follows it. All for a  good cause though!