When Dr. Geet Chainani decided to come to Pakistan in search of her Sindhi roots, little did she know that she would end up staying for months – finding not just her roots but “a sense of peace” as she puts it, in alleviating the misery of flood-affected villagers in rural Sindh.
Sindh Courier
Dr. Geet Chainani, an American Sindhi doctor, born in India and raised in New York City, trained as a doctor in the Caribbean, had visited flood zone in Sindh in August 2011. For the most of a year she had been treating families, especially children, in the tent cities of the flood waters of the Indus River, upstream from Karachi.
Geet Chainani, who grew up on Staten Island with grandmother, had said in an interview in August 2011 that her grandmother always told: “we are Sindhis first.” Meaning: master the Sindhi language early; think of yourself as a child of the world’s first big-city culture, at Mohenjo-daro, from 2600 B.C.”
Her grandparents were part of the vast Hindu migration out of Sindh to India in 1947, at the partition that created Pakistan. But Sindh was where Geet came looking for her roots a year earlier— for the tombs of the Sufi saints and the world’s oldest plumbing. The first big shock was Pakistan’s devastation by immersion. The second, when she pitched herself into the emergency, was discovering, with mothers in distress, that knowing their language was as valuable as her medical training.
“Being American is the ground for the work I do — the fundamental belief that all men are created equal. People say to me now: so you picked Sindh, and you’re saving these people. I’m, like: No. It picked me. And they’re saving me,” she had said in a podcast.
When Dr. Geet Chainani decided to come to Pakistan in search of her Sindhi roots, little did she know that she would end up staying for months – finding not just her roots but “a sense of peace” as she puts it, in alleviating the misery of flood-affected villagers in rural Sindh.
For the first six weeks after her arrival in Pakistan on August 30, 2010, she volunteered her medical services with the Organization for Social Development Initiatives, a Karachi based NGO. She had since been working as the director of public health of Life Bridge US (an organization she founded) and regional director of public health for the US-based Real Medicine Foundation (RMF).
Visitors with Indian origin often find it difficult to obtain visa extensions in Pakistan, but Dr. Chainani’s voluntary work had helped her to obtain the necessary permissions to stay on – which she liked to do in order to continue working with villagers around Dadu and Thatta.
It helped that she speaks Sindhi fluently. “Thanks to my nani, who raised me and didn’t speak English,” Geet said.
She had recently learnt that her great grandfather Jethmal Parsram Gulrajani was a well-known writer of books on Sufism and Sindh. “Interestingly, I had discovered Sufism about five years ago while I was in medical school and realized that it reflected many of the thoughts I had on God and spirituality.”
“Upon arrival in Pakistan I found myself in Shikarpur and Khairpur providing medical relief to displaced flood affectees in tent cities. Pakistan was in a state of emergency and the least I could do was help to keep people alive, having trained for six years to do just that. It’s been four months and I am still here, working to provide flood affectees with health care in the interior regions of Sindh,” she wrote in her email to Zarminae, a contributor of Aman Ki Asha.
“The most important part of my experience is the way Pakistan has welcomed me. The brotherhood I have felt in every single meeting since the day I first arrived has moved me beyond words. I have felt more love and genuine concern in Pakistan than anywhere else. And I have yet to see or understand how a Pakistani is any different from an Indian.
“As an American I know there is a fine line we all draw between the two communities differentiating ourselves from each other. The truth is we are probably the two closest communities in all of South Asia,” she wrote.
“My stance in life isn’t pro-religion or patriotic. It’s pro-humanity,” she said in a later conversation. “I would like to continue my work here as I have gained a great sense of peace in my time in Pakistan and in the work I am doing.”
Dr. Chainani was also working to set up sustainable health and education services through Life Bridge Pakistan and Real Medicine Foundation. She is also discussing partnership options with organizations like Shine Humanity, Comprehensive Disaster Response Services (CDRS), and Naya Jeevan in an attempt to prevent the duplication of services and provide a whole bodied, integrated and sustainable approach to healthcare delivery.
“We are all busy doing our part in flood relief in various regions and concentrations,” she explains. “Naya Jeevan ran affordable health insurance and various social causes prior to the floods; since then, they have added a safe delivery initiative. CDRS focused mainly on Azad Kashmir and NWFP; the flooding brought them to Sindh, particularly the Shikarpur area. I work mainly in Dadu and Thatta now. It’s hard to meet consistently and devise a strategy to work together, but we all support each other’s work.”
Dr. Chainani also worked with the District level governments to implement health care capacity building strategies to the flood devastated regions.
Realizing the donors’ need for transparency and accountability, she is working on a web and cell phone based program to provide transparency.
“It kills me that the international media has moved on from the Pakistan floods so quickly, even before the water level had decreased,” she says, emphasizing the need to raise awareness in the international media about the flood victims and the on-ground realities.
Dr. Chainani compares the situation to earthquake-devastated Haiti: “The 16,000 suspected cases of cholera in Haiti were being reported yet the 6, 00,000+ cases of acute watery diarrhea in Pakistan went ignored. The 9 million people of Haiti kept getting talked about yet the 20 million of Pakistan were out of the picture. The people affected in Pakistan were twice the population of Haiti yet they haven’t even received half the funding Haiti’s got.”
Working in the field in Pakistan was a revelatory experience. “I’ve met people who haven’t seen a doctor once in the six months, haven’t gotten more than a month’s worth of rations, who are sleeping in tents without blankets through the winters, women who can’t bathe because they don’t have a second set of clothing,” she says, “It’s an injustice. And now when funding was finally supposed to come through, the Davis case comes up and rocks the boat. In the political tug of war it’s the poor and helpless that hurt the most. There are 20 million people completely unaware of who Raymond Davis is. All they can think of is how to stay warm, feed their hunger and keep themselves alive.”
“So… the world needs to be reminded over and over again to leave the politics to the politicians, while we concentrate our energies on helping each other out.”
Overall, Pakistan “needs a fresh approach. I think the world also needs to see the other side of Islam – the peaceful, loving, brotherly, humble side. I experience it every day. I think it’s important to highlight that too.”
Her views are endorsed by another medical doctor from India with Sindhi roots who was in Pakistan working for flood relief last year – Dr. Manohar Jethani of Chicago who came here with Dr. M. Murtaza Arain: ‘My DNA is in the dust of Pakistan’. Dr. Jethani has been involved with humanitarian work in various countries for several years.
“I would love to be able to do some charity work in Pakistan annually if I could,” he wrote in an email to Dr. Chainani, who had contacted him with Aman ki Asha’s reference.
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Source: Radio Open Source (Published on August 8, 2011), Indus Herald (published on August 24, 2011), Aman Ki Asha
