SONU IS ALIVE AND WELL!
Jayatri is a poor, low caste Hindu. Her husband left her for another woman, leaving her and her 10 year old son destitute. She works as a domestic helper to pay the bills. We met her when she worked briefly at our house.
One day a few months after she took another job, she arrived at our gate, distraught, with her unconscious son, Sonu, in her arms. We took them in and managed to revive the boy. Through broken stories we pieced together a tentative, non-professional diagnosis: it was either an advanced stage of meningitis or cerebral malaria, but either way the boy was dying.
We called a doctor friend and took Jayatri and Sonu in to see him. Because we were there as guarantors, the boy was received and treated. He was immediately admitted into hospital and blood and spinal fluid tests were done. The results: tubercular-meningitis.
The doctor wanted to just let the boy die at this point. But I insisted why? He said that he could treat and cure the meningitis, but that the boy would eventually die of tuberculosis anyway. Again I asked why – because many doctors in India refuse to treat poor, uneducated patients for tuberculosis. It seems they begin to take the medicine and start to feel much better after a few doses, so they stop taking the medication. The result is a mutated disease; it kills the patient anyway, and possibly spreads a new strain of tuberculosis that is immune to treatment with the current medications, thus killing many more people.
I gave the doctor my person guarantee that she would carry the course of medication through the entire 6 month regime. The doctor and I explained forcefully to the mother that if Sonu didn’t take the full 6 months of medication that he would die. I then arranged with a local pharmacist to give her the medication on a weekly basis and to put it on a line of credit for me to pay later. Thus there was no downside for the woman – I paid the bills and her son got better. There was accountability through the pharmacist who would only give her a week’s worth of medication at a time, preventing her from selling it – this satisfied the skeptical doctor.
At the end of the six months of medication, Jayatri and Sonu disappeared from our lives. But three years later, a strapping young lad of 14 arrived at our gate to thank us for what we had done for him.