A Social Biography Of Health In India
Birth and Early Childhood Challenges
Discuss about the Health Social Biography and Education.
I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth as many rich people in my neighborhood. As a matter of fact I was born in some of the poorest environments in India ten years before my family could relocate to the city. However, I consider myself lucky to have been born in hospital by a mother who had not had much education and in an environment where not many people accessed institutionalized treatment. The main reason probably because of the challenges that one had to encounter before they could even get to a hospital and the high poverty levels which forced many people to seek herbal medicines from local health providers as opposed to hospital care (Patel, et al (2015).
The history of my birth starts on the 1st of April in the year 1999 when the world was somehow obsessed with the millennium issues. Just like any other child born in rural India, I encountered the same problems and pressures of growing up. To this day, living in New Delhi, I still encounter challenges and pressures of growing up similar to those of the fellow youths in the city. Among the major challenges many people faced at that time was poverty, lack of access to health care, high levels of illiteracy in the community, shortage of schools and other social facilities as Nambiar, & Muralidharan, (2017) explains.
I was born in a very small but extended family – a very rare phenomenon – back then in 1999. The family consisted of my parents, an elder brother and an elder sister, my grandparents and my uncle who was then a student in the university. My parents were not very learned as they did not have a university education. My dad who was more learned was a college dropout who had encountered several challenges in raising school fees and the incapability of his parents in taking care of him and his brother which forced him to move out of school to look for greener pastures. After many years of toil and sweat he had resulted to opening a hotel which did earn him just enough to sustain the family. My mother was then employed as a cook in a local high school a few years before she could join dad at the hotel business.
The year 1999 was a year that had many hurdles for me and my family. My grandfather had been diagnosed with cancer of the liver and liver cirrhosis. His persistent alcohol abuse had turned against him. Grandmother who had lived for almost ten years with diabetes was having challenges with her blood pressure. Her diabetes was worsening especially due to stress after she heard that grandpa was diagnosed with cancer. The two were therefore being hospitalized every now and then. Health was considered as a priority at home despite the fact that my parents had not had so much education. The cost of medication incurred by my grandparents was therefore increasing day after day.
Moving to New Delhi
Due to the financial constraints that we were going through as a family, some challenges were inevitable. Among these challenges was feeding on a consistently balanced diet, hygiene and sanitation around and inside the home, access to clean drinking water, regular health checkups and quality treatment explains Andres, Briceño, Chase, & Echenique, (2017). These are days when our lives were consistent with the popular inverse care law which states that people who need health care the most are often the ones who encounter the greatest challenges in trying to access quality health. Surprisingly, these are the very people who seem not to be alarmed by even the very little things that they can do to improve their health such as boiling drinking water to make it safe for drinking. To these poor people good health has consistently been defined as absence of illness. This has made most of them to only go to health facilities when sick forfeiting regular checkups and preventive treatment.
Amidst all these challenges, I always feel obliged to congratulate my parents since none of us including my two siblings was diagnosed of any serious health problem due to food and mineral deficiencies. Unlike my elder brother who was and is still three years older than me, none of us suffered any big illnesses apart from the occasional colds, flu and stomach upsets that affects young children. It is the joy of every parent to see their children attain school going age. At the age of three, I was enrolled to nursery school. You could have seen the expression of happiness in my parents’ faces as they saw me off to school. One of the reasons they were so happy about is because I had reached an age where the risk of infant mortality was not as high and where my health needs were considerably few (Venkatesh, Rai, Sykes, & Aljafari, (2016).
It was a while before I joined primary school that I had the best experience of my life. Mum had joined dad at the hotel business and they had been able to set up a bigger hotel in New Delhi whereby dad had moved to the town leaving mum to run the smaller hotel. Business was booming in New Delhi as dad was able to open up another branch in the same town. This necessitated our moving into New Delhi city which I have called home to this day. Life in the city was far much better as compared to that of the village; better food, quality health and a better social economic status was just the beginning of the life am so proud of.
Primary and High School Challenges
I joined primary school at the age of five years. I wasn’t a very bright student but I always managed to outsmart several of my kids in school. I occasionally managed to become position seven out of the fifty three class one pupils I called my classmates. Were it not for mathematics, I could have probably managed to outsmart my fellow pupils. All through my class one, I recorded a consistently poor grade in mathematics almost getting to zero. My mother often sympathized with me as none of my siblings had performed well in it either and could therefore not help me much. She therefore resolved to teach me mathematics whenever she was free.
My initial years in school were not bad in terms of my health, my grades or my social abilities. I was always a very playful kid and always made sure that my clothes were soiled in dirt from head to toe. With dust all over and fifty three pupils congested in a classroom, the risk of contracting communicable diseases was relatively high. My immunity was however able to hold together because by the time I was finishing primary school, I had only suffered from malaria and pneumonia. I still remember to this day how uncomfortable it feels to have pneumonia. I had attended my grandfather’s funeral and I witnessed my parents crying something that had made me fear death. I resulted to praying for recovery every time when the thought of dying hit my mind.
It was in the year 2009 when I joined secondary school. I had always wanted to go to secondary school based on the numerous experiences I had heard from my siblings and friends about high school. Besides, I could advance my skills in cricket, a sport that had fascinated me when I was still in primary school. I had played cricket in and out of school but I had not made major achievements until I joined high school. I started realizing I had a talent in cricket when I was able to rise and shine above my team mates and I was made the team captain. Ever since I have served as team captain for five consecutive years and I was finally awarded the best cricketer of don Bosco School.
All through high school and junior college, the main thing I have battled with is to strike a balance between my studies and playing cricket. There was always this other match that I was thinking about and preparing my team for and there was always an exam to be scored at the end of the day. I however found a lot of inspiration in words that I always told my colleagues that the best player is one who is consistently good in class so whenever they go for the game they have nothing to worry about. My excellence and hard work in class is reflected by my 86.8 % grade in 12th grade which made everyone happy about me including my dad who was always paranoid with my grades and kept on insisting that there was more I could do.
Balancing Studies and Cricket
There are many important things that I learnt from writing this social biography. The most relevant is a reflection of Mills, (1959) sociological imagination whereby am able to focus on my life not only as a product of my choices those of my parents or even my personality but as a result of the conditions in which I have lived. In this perspective, I can describe health in relation to environment where one is brought up in, the culture, the available resources and other factors such as population density and social systems (Cowling, Dandona, & Dandona, 2014). This is because I can describe my quality of health from the seriousness my parents had in addressing health challenges during my infantry period and also the quality of health services in New Delhi.
I would have encountered so many challenges were it not for my mum and my brother who took their time to narrate to me the interesting story of how I was born, the challenges I faced as a kid, how I responded to them and the reason why I have come this far. Indeed, I have always counted on the duo for help in every situation. They have always had an answer be it academics, social life or even in my health. There is nothing however that I feel I’d have done differently by completing this assignment. All my life, I have a lived a life that has never had any regrets. I appreciate everything that has happened to me and the reactions I have always taken.
I find this assignment important in the culmination of the course because it helps to reflect at health through a sociological perspective. This involves looking as health as being determined by social factors. This helps to strike a difference between health and wellbeing. In addition, it helps to define our health through that of others. Weiss, & Lonnquist, (2017) argues that determination of social determinants of health is the first step in fighting the social causes of diseases. It is therefore important to use such a perspective to focus on health. The assignment also helps change our thought process and be able to prove that health is not deterministic.
References
Andres, L., Briceño, B., Chase, C., & Echenique, J. A. (2017). Sanitation and externalities: evidence from early childhood health in rural India. Journal of Water Sanitation and Hygiene for Development, 7(2), 272-289.
Cowling, K., Dandona, R., & Dandona, L. (2014). Social determinants of health in India: progress and inequities across states. International journal for equity in health, 13(1), 88.
Mills, C. W. (1959). The social imagination. New York: Oxford University Pres.
Navarro, V. (1999). Health and equity in the world in the era of “globalization”. International journal of health services, 29(2), 215-226.”
Nambiar, D., & Muralidharan, A. (Eds.). (2017). The Social Determinants of Health in India: Concepts, Processes, and Indicators. Springer.
Patel, V., Parikh, R., Nandraj, S., Balasubramaniam, P., Narayan, K., Paul, V. K., … & Reddy, K. S. (2015). Assuring health coverage for all in India. The Lancet, 386(10011), 2422-2435.
Venkatesh, V., Rai, A., Sykes, T. A., & Aljafari, R. (2016). Combating Infant Mortality in Rural India: Evidence from a Field Study of eHealth Kiosk Imlementations. Mis Quarterly, 40(2), 353-380.
Weiss, G. L., & Lonnquist, L. E. (2017). The sociology of health, healing, and illness. Routledge.