A year of collecting stories and storytellers August 15, 2009

Its been a while since this blog has been updated. As of August 2009 I have joined the Centre for Public Health and Equity as a Research and Communications Assistant for one year to work primarily on the communityhealth.in project. So you can expect more energy and activity on this blog and the project website.

Over the past two weeks I have been reflecting on the nature of my work, which is primarily concerned with enabling the Health For All movement to reach out to a greater audience. The idea is to create better ways to communicate the complexity of the health system in India as well as the  political analysis and structure of the movement in a way that allows activists to advocate better for Health For All. I have recently discovered that a lot of what I plan to do in the coming year is called info-activism.

A lot of the current campaign material within the Health For All movement in India is in the form of charters, reports and pamphlets, a formidable wall of text which as a rather politically incorrect friend of mine pointed out is ‘simply not sexy enough’. Simultaneously at the grassroots level, community health organisers are master storytellers, using a rich collection of stories to animate local communities to demand their Right to Health and to take collective responsibility for their health. Stories however, dry up as one looks at communication and education initiatives aimed at students, health workers, doctors, public health professionals and other members of the politically powerful Great Indian Middle Class. Its no surprise hence that the mention of Health For All is most often met with a blank look from those who have the greatest political potential to ensure that the poor and the powerless have access to health.

I have two expectations of what my year long project will set in motion. The first is the creation of a community of researchers and writers who will use www.communityhealth.in, a wiki encyclopedia to bring together the ingredients that make up the health story in India.  The second is creating a community of storytellers who will use these ingredients to create stories and other effective tools for advocacy and change.

This blog will be the story of this year long journey and beyond. It will hopefully grow from being merely the official project blog of communityhealth.in to being the community blog for Health For All communicators.

If you read this and would like to get involved do leave a comment, mail me at lalit82[at]gmail.com or visit the Community Portal at communityhealth.in.

A brief history of communityhealth.in January 14, 2009

The idea of a website that focused on the theme of community health probably occured to me during the time I was doing volunteer work for the People’s Health Movement website in 2006. It arose from a frustration that I could not upload a large number of useful documents and other resources because they were not officially PHM material. It was a time in which people within the Health For All movement were still largly unconvinced regarding the usefulness of websites. Most existing websites were organisation based and contained only resources which were officially produced by the organisation. This made little sense to the end user who was interested in theme in general and not only a single organisation’s contribution. A wiki based website that allowed multiple editors from different locations to create content on community health and not merely community health organsiations seemed to be a reasonable solution.

The idea got a tremendous flip when I chanced upon the Dag Hammerskjold What Next (2005 – 2035) Report. This innovative report uses a series of semi fictional short stories to sketch out possible futures for health in the world. One short story described an Indian nurse who attends the Second People’s Health Assembly in Cuenca, Ecuador and then goes on to create Technopedia, a website that was eeriely similar to the wiki site I had in mind.

Participants at the Medico Friend Circle Annual Meeting in December 2006 create content for one of the first communityhealth.in portals - Exploring Community Health.

In December 2006, at the annual meeting of Medico Friend Circle in Bangalore the participants discussed ways to introduce new people to the Health For All movement and filled up blank pieces of paper that I had pinned up on boards with suggestions on people to meet, places and organisation to visit and books and movies to see. The initial idea was to create some sort of booklet but it soon became apparent that such as format would not to justice to information that changed very often and was almost always incomplete.

Over the next few months I spoke to a number of people regarding the idea for a wiki website and recieved an encouraging response. In December 2007 I registered the site with a hosting provider and set up MediaWiki, an open source content management software that runs Wikipedia among other websites. The material from the Medico Friend Circle meeting as well as old material from my days working with PHM and JSA websites formed the initial content of the website.

The current communityhealth.in headquarters

The entire website was set up using a BSNL WLL internet connection in Sittilingi, a tiny village of 3000 people in rural Tamil Nadu where I currently work as a medical officer for the Tribal Health Initiative. Ten years ago one had to travel 80 km if one needed to make an STD call. The fact that I can now sit in the comfort of my tiny cottage, the current headquarters of communityhealth.in (pictured above) and upload content to servers based in the UK through a wireless connection is testament to the tremendous work done by BSNL in connecting rural India. The website has developed intermittently over the past year since I have only been able to work at it during the few periods of relative quiet admist the clinical work and health worker training that are my primary responsibilities. I finish with Tribal Health Initiative in August this year after which I hope to have more time to work on communityhealth.in.