Saturday, December 23, 2017

A birth in the Short Stay Home (Swadhar Greh)

This is currently run by Aruna Tella under the auspices of APMAS. Yesterday night, one of the girls here gave birth to her second child, a son again. The pains started around one in the morning but the girls could not get a response from the hospital. Aruna Tella was woken up around three a.m. and somehow the voice of the person who spoke mattered and an ambulance was arranged immediately. The birth came around four thirty in the morning. There was no doctor at that time though one was supposed to be present. But the ambulance and the treatment were free thanks to a scheme introduced by CBNaidu and improved by Y. Raja Sekhara Reddy.
Some of the cases I have seen here are from lower middle classes with failed marriages often arranged by parents for underage girls. The girl’s case is one such. Parents forcibly married her to a person who turned out to be a drunkard and wife beater. She could not take it and came to the house with one child. Then there was reconcialiation for few months and she came back again pregnant. At some stage she developed a relationship with somebody she liked. She claims that the second child is his and possibly the first child too. Luckily, he is prepared to marry.
She was taken to the hospital by two other girls who were also in the home after difficult relationships. The first girl was in love with a person of different caste and her parents were against it. She joined the home and started working hoping to marry after she turned eighteen. She started working and fell in love with another at work. The first lover was heartbroken and tried to commit suicide. After that failed attempt, he continued to implore her and she complained about him to the police for harassment. The other girl came from better economic background and waiting for her lover to complete his studies. But she does not want to share work with others and often pays others to her share of work. There are some problems of fights, thefts and so on but in emergencies, they seem to come to each other’s aid.

some of these problems seem related to sex and marriage. There is an impression that extramarital affairs have been generally on the rise. The cause of these problems may be the desire of the parents to marrying off the girl’s at a young age with their own norms of alliances, property, status etc and not taking in to account the temparement of the children.

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