Not Rocket Science: Improving Basic Nutrition In Rural Sri Lanka

By Emil van der Poorten –January 3, 2016

Emil van der Poorten

JaWhat follows has no pretense in the matter of bringing rural Sri Lankans into the First World overnight. However, the few elements of their lives that I intend referring to in this piece can be improved immeasurably without some revolutionary change in local administration or miraculous transformation of corrupt and venal officials who are the epitome of parasites on the helpless.
When I returned some years ago to the land of my birth and that part of Sri Lanka in which I grew up, what struck me most forcibly was the continuing poverty and deprivation that had worsened in the 30+ years I had been away from my home turf.

I kept hearing about and seeing underweight little children and a variety of poverty-related ailments that ended up in some local medic’s clinic where those attending departed with what is now the three-packet response: one packet of an analgesic medication, another antibiotic and the third that did (or did not) relate to whatever ailed the patient. Without exception, the little envelopes did not have the name of the drug on them but simply indicated the dosage and the time of administration. The patient went home and religiously took the medications and after a few days had elapsed, if the ailment had not gone away and the effects of the analgesics had worn off and the pain or discomfort returned, went to another doctor where the same process was repeated. While this sequence of events might not be the case in every instance, it certainly appeared to be in a majority of them. Not right and potentially dangerous? Darned right! The gross underfunding of our medical system is at the root of this problem and the solution obvious enough. When, on one occasion, I accompanied a patient to a hospital and he was sent to a bed in a ward and given some pills to swallow, the nurse in charge expressed surprise that we wanted some water from her to help him get the pills down the hatch and we had to “borrow” some bottled water from another warded patient to get this done! That kind of conduct, I would submit, is the direct result of the callousness that ensues from over-worked staff operating in grossly under-funded circumstances. Neither time nor space permit of the recounting of more instances of this kind of thing.

At the same time, in what might seem like a contradiction of the point made in the previous paragraph, I have seen staff in government hospitals displaying great patience and caring under the most intolerable of working conditions. But let’s not make any mistake: this situation is inexcusable and the fact that anybody who is “somebody” traipses off to Singapore or some other exotic (and expensive) location for so much as an in-growing toe-nail, often at state expense, only serves to further expose the enormity of the injustice perpetrated on the vast majority of our people.                                          Read More