New Hope - Part II (Paramedical Training)

April, 2005

Read Part I

Even one month had passed since the tsunami--the Math began providing for tsunami survivors in Alappad Panchayat (and in fact in other parts of India as well).

The Math is making available training and job opportunities so that people can begin to become self-sufficient as tailors, drivers, electricians, plumbers, security guards, paramedicals and more. In Kerala, one of the main centers for this activity is AIMS (the Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences, the Math's state-of-the-art super-specialty hospital three hours north of Alappad Panchayat).

Take a look at the AIMS paramedical training and employment program, which is open to young men and women who have successfully completed secondary school. Before the month of January had ended, the first batch of students left their fishing village lives for the city, embarking on an unanticipated future.

The mood was excitement mixed with curiosity and a tinge of trepidation when young people gathered at the Math to make the bus trip north to AIMS to become paramedical trainees.

The over two hundred paramedical trainees are fed and housed at the medical facility, provided with student uniforms as well as ordinary clothes, given a monthly stipend to help out at home, and most important of all--taught what they need to know to enter the paramedical profession. All completely free of charge.

Over two hundred young men and women from Alappad Panchayat have joined the first batch of students in the AIMS paramedical training program. Most are working for a degree as nursing assistants, but a few are training to become X-ray technicians, ward secretaries, medical library assistants, and so forth.

When young people are uprooted and placed in a new living situation, there are, naturally, adjustment challenges. When these young people have just been through a trauma like that of the tsunami, the situation can be particularly difficult for them. The AIMS students have the advantage of a very motherly woman in charge of them: Mohanamma. “One girl said that when she closes her eyes she sees that her sister is going under the water,” Mohanamma said, adding that some nights when the girls are upset they come to her room and she consoles them—and occasionally they even stay with her to sleep for the rest of the night!

Because many of these young people have never had to be dependent before, Mohanamma says, for some of them it was difficult to receive so much. Every day the Math was sending supplies up to AIMS—everything from clothing to bedding to toiletries. Whatever a resident student might need, the Math was providing. There is even a monthly pension of Rs. 500 (much of which students tend to send home to help their famiiies).

(to be continued)

- Janani
Correspondent from M. A. Math

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