Friday, April 01, 2016

My experience at Nirmal Hriday

Nirmal Hriday is the home for the dying and destitute. This was the first place that Mother Teresa had opened and the beauty is that this was an abandoned hindu temple. Such a beautiful act to support a beautiful cause.
I had heard some horror stories of Nirmal Hriday and was apprehensive about it to the point of being scared. The stories are right from the severity of illness seen here to the type of treatment given to these patients. But since I was here and got assigned to it I felt I must give it a shot.
This place opens up for the volunteers at 3pm and you are kicked out at 5pm :) I later heard that the morning shifts are more gruesome for obvious reasons.
The patients here are mostly old men (again women are in a separate space) who are either completely paralysed or have some mental disability or other serious illnesses. I would say luckily I didn't encounter a terminal case while I was here.
So what do we do here? Again just about everything. You help them change their clothes, help them walk around for exercise, give them their meds, feed them, take them to the toilets, cleanup their sheets etc if they wet themselves in their beds etc. You cringe a bit on the first day but after the first hour you just do what needs to be done. I never saw a volunteer shy away from doing anything that was needed to make the patients comfortable.
I was informed by a fellow volunteer who has been coming from Germany every year for the past 15 years that the severity of patients at Nirmal Hriday and Prem Dan has reduced over time. Hopefully that is a reflection of improving times in India and Kolkata. There were about 30+ patients here during my time.

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