Visit to Govt. Girls High School

“He who wants to do good knocks at the gate, he who loves doing good finds the door open”——-Rabindranath Tagore.

Date :10th February 2006.

Place :Government High School (Girls)Amberpet,Hyderabad.

Team Pankhudi : Me, Nitin, Praveen, Soumya, Shailaja, Arvind (From Pankhudi )Other volunteers from TCS, in association with whom this initiative was taken up!

The statistics are mind boggling…there are nearly 1,24,000+ students studying in the various govt. schools in and around Hyderabad and Secunderabad alone. Many of these students suffer from ailments ranging from minor eye-sight problems to some major skin problems, hearing problems and deficiencies which get overlooked. Many cases have been reported where students with eye-sight problems that could be easily rectified by usage of glasses, have been rendered permanently blind due to negligence and ignorance of the parents and children towards eye-care. The children fear that if they report their problem to their parents, the parents will not allow them to attend school any more because the treatment would cost them money.
There is an urgent need to screen these govt. schools for children who are in dire needs of medical attention.This project involves 2 steps —

1) Preliminary screening – Done by voluntary organizations such as ~Pankhudi, Premalaya etc. It involves a few basic tests like the height-weight ratio test, preliminary eye-test through various eye-charts, hearing ability tests, checks for vaccinations, mental stability tests, learning and physical disabilities tests, skin disorder tests etc.

2) After all these tests are done, the cases which need medical attention most immediately are forwarded to the respective medical institutions. For e.g.: all cases pertaining to eye-care are forwarded to the LV Prasad Eye Institute, which is a leading institute for eye-care in India. This institute has come forward to provide free treatment for all the children diagnosed to be needing help.

Today, as part of this project we happened to visit the Government Girls High School. There were about 15 of us present at the school. We split ourselves into groups of 2-3 and got started off on the tests at around 10 in the morning. The school has a batch of roughly 250 kids attending the morning school and 250 kids attending the afternoon school. It had classes from 6th to 10th.

Initially the kids were very shy to tell us about their problems, but as the interaction progressed they opened up to us. We screened through the 250 students in about 3 ½ hrs or so. During the process of the general check-ups we had the chance to interact with the kids and ask them about their family and the general state of the school. It was wonderful talking to them and they were very enthusiastic to let us know about their favorite subjects, their favorite heroes and movies!!
In the coming week another 15 schools are going to be screened for which the volunteers are going to be sourced from NSS.

On a parting note upon asking what she wanted to be when she grew up, one girl answered — “Even if we want to become something, we don’t have that chance, we are not that lucky!” Her answer really got me thinking.