Our third day in India had us conducting a site visit to an Aastha Parivar (“Family of Support”) site that centered to helping and empowering individuals working in the Mumbai sex trade. The visit to the Women’s Welfare Society, a community based organization (CBO) that provided educational, clinical, and social support to the sex workers was interesting in that it challenged many of our conceptions of the community and our role as public health experts and educators. Shortly after we arrived for our service project (to help train the CBO leaders and volunteers, we quickly realized the shoe was quite literally on the other foot. It was they who had much to teach us and our role was to listen and learn about what were the actual ground conditions. In sharing our training materials and seeking feedback to improve them, we learned how the women in the trade dealt with health issues and how they already negotiated respite to conserve their health and support one and other.
Ultimately we left with several excellent ideas to improve upon the training materials and a lot of exchange of good will on the part of both sides. Some of the key lessons include the age old need to survey real-time ground conditions in developing public health training materials, really listening to the target audience to learn what their concerns are, and realizing that in the end everyone is part of the human family and that all women around the world share the same concerns, stories and ways of coping.
From the depths of Byculla and Grant Road, our team proceeded to the heights of cosmopolitan Mumbai and the Colaba area with its fancy shopping, hotels, monuments and skyscrapers. Although, somewhat disorienting, it nevertheless provided an interesting contrast to the earlier experience and added to our understanding of the multifaceted nature of the city and country.
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