26-year-old Ponneeshwari was married off ten years ago, just when she had completed her class 11, to her maternal uncle in line with her familial customs. Originally from Madurai, she moved to Chennai with her husband immediately after her wedding and has been confined to the four walls of her house -- running the household and tending to her two children -- since then. However, today, she is a proud community outreach worker (ORW) contributing to Chennai’s fight against COVID-19.
Ponneeshwari is a part of a 24-women team of Neelam Foundation, an NGO that works in the development sector, that has tied up with the Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC) to help in its fight against COVID-19.
The GCC, in May, signed agreements with a few NGOs to help them keep track of the health status of the residents in the city everyday. Neelam Foundation was one of the NGOs that had been chosen to set-up teams and train them to record health parameters of the people. Neelam Foundation was allocated three divisions in Zone-8 with eight slums. There are around 3,500 households and 13,000 people living in these areas.
“It was a conscious choice to select only women in the team,” says Muthamizh Kalai Vizhi, the Founder and CEO of Neelam Foundation. The women in her team are all residents of the slums which they visit and have fought the odds to stand up and work for the society. “All these ORWs belong to these slums and they have lived there. So it is also a way to provide them with necessary leadership skills and take charge and ownership of their own community,” Muthamizh adds.
For example, take Divya's story. A 26-year-old postgraduate in Geography, this is Divya’s first time in a work environment. “My parents lost their jobs during the lockdown and no income was coming into the house. So I thought this is the right opportunity for me to pitch in and do something for the community and my family and thus offered to work with Neelam,” she tells TNM.
The team’s work is to go to each house allocated to them and get an update on the health status of the residents on a daily basis.
“It might seem easy, but in the initial days, we have been yelled at by the residents for ‘disturbing them’ everyday by asking the same question. However, over time, it became better and now if I don’t visit, the next day they ask me why I didn’t come the previous day,” Divya says.
These women build rapport with the people living in the houses allocated to them over time and have been instrumental in early detection of COVID-19 infection in a few cases.
“I think, of around 25 people I had sent for RT-PCR testing, half of them have turned out to be positive. Thus their outlook towards us also changes that way,” Ponneeshwari explains.
While taking down health parameters keep the women occupied till around 1 pm every day, the remaining 2-3 hours are spent participating in awareness programs in the slums they work and engaging the community in activities like stitching masks and teaching art forms to them.
Neelam Educational Center is another initiative of Neelam Foundation, that works closely with women and children at the grassroot level. The Foundation will soon be inaugurating centers in all the eight slums they have been working in for the past two months and setting up study centres there.
“Now that there are no schools, we wanted the students to maintain the connection with their education.We are focussed on providing extra curricular activities like silambam, mimes, theatre etc. We have planned to tie this learning of arts with their school attendance and their progress in the study centre, which means if they have to learn the artform, they have to study well,” explains Muthamizh.
“Our aim is also to reduce the number of dropouts from the slums. And we have been doing this for the last six years across Tamil Nadu and have found it to be an efficient and successful model to discourage school dropouts and encourage them to learn art forms,” Muthamizh adds.
Neelam Foundation will inaugurate the centres in the eight slums in August and plans to run them on a sustainable model with the help of donors.