Humans of Covid-19 Relief: Chennai Volunteers
Our healthcare system collapsed in this Pandemic. A system developed by management experts, processes deliberated and sealed into policies by humans who were recruited via multiple selection criteria — failed.
Something else thrived. Informal human networks. No qualifying criteria, no long experience, no specialized skills, no training from experts.
Simply humans who cared enough to learn adapt innovate persist.
In this article, I highlight one group of humans in Chennai, huddled around the Chennai Relief Riders group but exceeding the mandate of the Relief Riders area of work.
I highlight this work through the eyes ears heart of one volunteer— Aravindan Sundar.
This group has been on-call since the beginning of Pandemic. But their work became most intense through the dreaded Covid Phase-2 through April-May-June 2021. Their work was focused on some of these areas: providing oxygen cylinders and concentrators both at home as well as those waiting outside hospitals; providing food for attendants and patients; helping procure medicines and other medical support; negotiating logistics like taxis, tests, hospital beds, being a communication channel for patients, healthcare staff and the attendants.
The relief riders provided logistical support with groceries, simple medicines and help with errands for families struggling with covid.
All of the above may feel familiar for those who had people struggling with Covid symptoms or on social media supporting the patients and their families.
My objective is to zoom in further.
This group of humans included Thilak Raj of Sevai Karangal, Arivarasan, Ather Ahamed, Umasree Ragunathan, Anandhi Sabesan, and many others. I have written about Thilak, Dhana and the work of Sevai Karangal in several previous posts. You can find them here and here. Volunteers participated in various tasks as per their mobility and access.
Aravind’s morning started not with a volunteer job but a simple cycle ride at 4 am to rejuvenate his spirits. Thereafter he arranged for ORS solutions and food packets to be given to attendants and patients. Then he checked through the databases for latest requirement of meds, oxygen, and other support.
For example, once a patient needed a medication immediately but had no access to a 24-hour pharmacy. Aravind having developed connections with medical shops knew where to go and get the required meds. This may seem trivial. But in pandemic lockdown, here is where the informal world succeeds where systems fail.
The relief riders had areas of Chennai demarcated. If a particular item was available in one area, the rider assigned to that area would procure it and ride to the area boundary where the other rider would baton-pick it and so on, until the item reached its destination.
The many ways in which volunteer teams naturally evolved in trust and shared purpose. This group had worked together during Chennai Floods of 2015 too besides the many cycle rides they had taken together over the years.
In the most intense phase 2 of the Pandemic, when people waited desperately in queues outside hospitals to get a bed, the group quickly arranged a makeshift space outside key hospitals to provide oxygen as they waited. The volunteers had strict processes on measuring o2 levels, keeping track of CT scans and other reports, marking them, and clear handover to volunteers of the next shift.
And volunteers also kept tabs about which bed was available to help critical-need patients and their families . Aravind finished his relief delivery routes and then showed up in hospitals at 10 am and stayed around till late evenings.
In the process, they learnt which oxygen delivery mask was to be used when, the art of managing oxygen cylinder use, refill and delivery, and the appropriateness of using oxygen concentrator. Aravind even learnt how to fit a Bi-Pap machine. All of this helped patients greatly in the uncertain medical spaces as these volunteers had quickly upskilled with requisite knowledge. Someone was out there observing tracking the process and stepping in for each patient.
In a chaotic medical situation, each patient had a guardian angel watching over them. The attendants had support. No level of setting up health literacy and patient-friendly systems can provide for the inherent flexibility and creativity that is required in such situations.
It is not just that India lacked beds and oxygen. Indian systems lacked flexibility and creativity. They were boxed into rules and procedures and threats, its professionals lost in trying to protect their status quo and power structures, its leaders terribly lost in the unfamiliar space of having-to-caretake.
The overwhelmed hospital staff in many places walled off and became inaccessible. The staff retreated to safety of familiar organizational processes instead of adapting to the situation. For example, in one case a patient with kidney transplant needed essential medications. He could not travel to the hospital in Pandemic times. If these meds were bought in private pharmacies, they cost Rs 25k each round. However, the patient had a Government order to procure them for free.
Aravind stepped up to get these meds which required writing multiple letters of request to hospital and departmental heads, getting them signed by different departments until the final sanction came through. The order expired every three months and Aravind had to go through the entire cycle all over again.
When the requirement for Remdesivir had increased, there were days he stood for 12–14 hours to access meds at affordable costs. The process of procuring these meds required approved prescription formats, supporting medical documents, letters which had to be stamped approved before the medicine could be handed over.
In times of crisis, bureaucracy and its paperwork continued like a sloth slowly crawling over time.
The most difficult part of the volunteer work was supporting people cremate-bury their loved ones. Aravind helped with the last journey processes of thirty humans. He says the two most difficult burials were that of a 19-year-old and an infant. The family of the young person were all covid infected and in hospital. The parents were themselves on oxygen and could not even see their teenager before burial. Aravind coordinated the entire process from receiving the body to the burial and documentation.
This included him listening and comforting the devastated parents on phone. A stranger stepping in to love, care and honour those that our systems couldn’t be bothered to notice.
I asked him how he took care of himself. He looked at me puzzled. He had simply stayed in the moment, caring endlessly, moving from one patient need to another, each day at a time.
At home, he stayed in a separate room upstairs quarantined.
He was amongst the early vaccine recipients. He had participated in the vaccine trials. He used N-95 masks with a surgical mask over it. He didn’t wear a PPE suit as the Chennai temperatures were soaring through the summer months. Instead, he maintained careful hygiene of not touching his face or being without mask.
Volunteers of Covid-19 Pandemic are the juice that kept our worlds moving. To call them as heroes is to isolate them as individuals with some wonderful qualities. Rather I ask you to pay attention to these informal human networks that keep our worlds alive. Without them, India would have lost many more people and thousands others would have been scarred by the experience.
In your organization, your neighbourhood, your family, your classroom, your project what are you doing to help these informal networks thrive?
And how can you stop controlling them?
And how can you be one of them?
