In Memory of Muktabai Pol

Today was a sad day. A life had been lost before I even woke up, and it was several hours (until this afternoon) that I found that Muktabai Pol – a village health worker for over 25 years, who had improved the health landscape of her community and trained dozens of other health workers – had taken her own life.

We saw Muktabai in the hospital in our first days here, sitting on a bed, listless, a weak smile for us standing at the foot of her bed to say hello as we toured the hospital. We had read about her on the website and in the book on how The Comprehensive Rural Health Project (CRHP) at Jamkhed was started, and were all surprised to see her in the hospital. Dr. Shobha told us that she had issues with depression, and had been admitted periodically for her debilitating bouts of sadness. We saw her again in our second week, asleep, and in the third, when there was no glimmer of her legendary personality in her eyes, or even a forced smile for us and the new students with us. She managed to sit up, using her pillow to prop herself up off of her stomach where she had been lying, but she stared at the floor. She had gone home to her village at some point in the last week.

I say legendary personality because she was one of the first nine village health workers who, over the past 25 years, carried out the work of improving women’s status, decreasing child illness and mortality, assisting women in childbirth, and removing the stigma of leprosy and tuberculosis so that marginalized people in the community were once again accepted. All the village health workers accomplished these feats, but Muktabai must have been special, because when CRHP pooled a team to present at a World Health Organization event, they asked Muktabai to speak. This is what happened (from the book, Jamkhed: A Comprehensive Rural Health Project, by Drs. Raj and Mabelle Arole):

In a huge conference hall in Washington DC, over a thousand participants listen with rapt attention to Muktabai Pol, a village health worker from Jamkhed, India. The listeners include officials from WHO and UNICEF, ministers of health, health professionals and representatives of universities from many parts of the world. Muktabai shares her experience of providing primary health care in a remote Indian village. She concludes her speech by pointing to the glittering lights in the hall. “This is a beautiful hall, and the shining chandeliers are a treat to watch,” she says. “One has to travel thousands of miles to come to see their beauty. The doctors are like these chandeliers, beautiful and exquisite, but expensive and inaccessible.” She then pulls out two wick lamps from her purse. She lights one. “This lamp is inexpensive and simple, but unlike the chandeliers, it can transfer its light to another lamp.” She lights the other wick lamp with the first. Holding up both lamps in her outstretched hands, she says, “I am like this lamp, lighting the lamp of better health. Workers like me can light another and another and thus encircle the whole earth. This is Health for All.” The audience rises to its feet in a standing ovation.

This afternoon, I was unaware that anything was out of the ordinary, until I saw Shobha, the daughter of the founders of CRHP and Medical Director, leaving the hospital and saying, “we are having a ceremony. There has been a sad death of one of the VHWs” [Village Health Workers]. I asked who it was, and Alex, another student, replied, “Muktabai.” I immediately pictured her sad, tired eyes, but then envisioned this humble, illiterate woman in her clean but well-worn sari, lighting a candle in front of a hall full of doctors and public health officials. She was trained to do so much to impact the health of her community despite her simple background that she became a well-respected healthcare provider – a member of an elite and exclusive class – by a room full of “experts,” not to mention the hundreds in her village whose lives she saved or whose babies she welcomed safely into her hands and the world over all those years.

Members of the CRHP community gathered around as a van pulled up with a group of people from Muktabai’s village, including her husband, teary-eyed. They climbed out, then pulled a stretcher out with Muktabai on it, wrapped in a white shroud with her face and hair exposed, her eyes closed and her face relaxed and soft. They carried her lovingly into the garden of Dr. Arole’s house, where Shobha said a few words:

“Muktabai was a very special woman who loved the Lord. She had tried to commit suicide before, and last night she went home to her Father.”

All in attendance said a quick prayer with bowed heads, then lined up to place fistfuls of marigolds and rose petals on her resting body. I saw her husband then, lip quivering, eyes glassy, muttering, almost humming, in distress and pain. The women rubbed his arm and covered their hair with the ends of their saris. We lined up and, in a procession that wrapped around her, we each placed our offering of gold and red petals on Muktabai’s peaceful remains.

It is difficult to explain why I – a stranger to both the country and to Muktabai – can feel so moved by her passing and by the pain that those close to her are feeling. She, and all of these women, are so extraordinary in their contribution. But it is more the tragedy of her depression and the taking of her own life. When she did so much good, how could she have felt so sad? Today, though, she did seem at peace and encircled by those who love her, and by that I am comforted.