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Christa Drigalla: Helping the Nepalese to Help Themselves (Satis Shroff)
Christa Drigalla is an amiable German lady, a hospital managers who worked at the Diakonie hospital in Freiburg (South-west Germany), where she did Nursing Management. Sometime back, this author had the opportunity of going for a walk to the Emperor’s Chair (Kaiserstuhl), a volcanic wine-growing area in the vicinity of Freiburg, with Christa.
‘I’d love to trek to the Rara lake. I saw colour transparencies of Rara shown by a Freiburger professor in St. Georgen and was so fascinated’, said Christa. She has been to Annapurna, Chitwan and Langtang. ‘Springtime in the Himalayas is wonderful’, she said as she drank her Nepal tea and mentioned names like Kanchan Gompa, Laurebina-pass and Sundari and about 17 to 18 degrees centigrade temperatures in the month of November. But she said she liked to brave it all and wouldn’t miss trekking a bit.
At the beginning Christa worked as a nurse at the Shanti Seva Griha, a leprosy clinic run by the Dortmunderin Marianne Grosspietsch, which is located in Pashupati, near the river. She helps where she can, and is uncomplicated. The small 12-bed clinic, an outdoor Ambulanz (In German Ambulanz is not a car to transport injured patients, but a ward to cater to the needs of the outdoor patients. An ambulance in the English sense of the word is called a Rettungswagen). Shanti Seva also runs a school for the children of the leprosy patients. There’s a coffee-shop, a tailoring-service and a branch in Budanilkantha, which is open twice a week. The outdoor ward has over 2,300 registered patients.
The poor, ill, blind, lame and lepers come from the miserable, smoggy streets of Katmandu and the temple complex of Pashupatinath, Nepal’s biggest and holiest gold-roofed hinduistic temple. The sickly beggars are never too tired to beg for alms from pious people (Hindus from Nepal and India), who are allowed to worship in the sancrum sanctorum of the Shiva-temple.
The other curious visitors who are obliged to remain in the periphery of Pashupatinath are the camera-toting foreign tourists. Whether it’s coy and ashamed bathing Nepalese women in wet, sticky saris, burning Hindu corpses and the mourning relatives of the deceased, hungry lepers or agile Rhesus temple-monkeys, the dauntless tourists photograph everything for their transparency, video and DVD-shows back home. The Shanti Seva Griha takes care additionally of the white-haired, wrinkled widows, women and children from the neighbourhood. And the treatment is free. The Griha also has a rehabilitation-centre near the Royal Golf Club Nepal. It has a tailoring workshop where stigmatised Nepali lepers work in peace. Lepers are still heavily stigmatised in Nepal, like the people with plague in the Middle Ages in Europe. Today, it’s possible to cure the disease by using an antibiotic cocktail.
Christa said that she put up at a small lodge near the Clinic, and lived sometimes with Nepalese friends near the Ring-road. There’s a German nurse named Irma who hails from Achern and she has additionally a leading role at the Nursing Campus (Patan). Christa comes from a hamlet named Albringhausen, with a population of 229 in Lower Saxony, a flat state at an elevation of 14metres above sea-level.
‘It’s all farms, corn-fields, meadows and windmills. More and more farmers are giving up their farms and the farms are in poor conditions due to the bad EU agricultural politics. It’s East Friesian country with fishers, crabs, cows.’ She has a brother and a sister out there in Lower Saxony but she lives the mountains. If she’s not trekking in the Himalayas then she’s invariably wandering up and down the Swiss Alps or in the Black Forest Mountains.
‘I have it in my genes, this Wanderlust,’ she says almost apologetically. Christa Drigalla has been running the Interplast Germany’s hospital in Nepal for a long time. Interplast is a US- German undertaking which carries out plastic surgery on leprosy patients, which is extremely useful for the poor Nepali patients, who are ostracised and shunned by the Nepali society.
She talks at length about the corruption scandals in Kathmandu. ‘Everybody is pumping money into Nepal but where is it vanishing? The number of beggars in Katmandu, and Nepal in general, seem to multiplying. I don’t see any structure in Nepal. There are so many NGO projects, and there’s hardly any monitoring done.’ All the NGOs ought to be coordinated by the new government’s Social Ministry. Every big foreign country has, in addition to its official development volunteer programme, a bevy of NGO projects. Even local NGOs are cropping up like mushrooms after a monsoon shower. And all international organisations want to help the fifth poorest country in the world to get up on its feet.”
Where are the priorities? For instance, most of the foreign projects have programmes in the educational sector, but they don’t dare to intervene and help develop new, attractive vocational curricula. They just open or support existing schools, and let the Nepalis carry on with their own anachronistic teaching methods and curricula. Only the rich have access to modern education. What are Nepal boys and girls to do after they have done their School Leaving Certificate? Who is going to finance higher education? There are just not enough vocational outlets.
There’s no question about the need for NGOs but where does the money disappear? Isn’t it literally helping others to help themselves through the aid-industry? The money and effort just doesn’t seem to trickle down to the grassroots. Quo vadis development aid?
Christa Drigalla says, ‘‘A deep orthodox faith in religion is not good for these modern times. For now. It’s better to try and improve one’s present life(style) than to expect that it will be better in one’s next life. I often hear paralysing fatalistic opinions like ‘ke garnu? jindagi jestai chha (What shall I do? Life is like that). Or ‘ke garnu? upai chaina! (What shall I do? There’s no way). Modern educated Nepalis tend to say ‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way’. Perhaps that is the value of education.’.
‘Practical steps are useful in pepping oneself up. When I was at Shanti Griha we constructed a shower for the staff and patients. She longs to see the friendly faces of Prabha the social worker, Hari the sanitater, Krishna the physiotherapist, Dr. Singh the team-physician and Marianne.
‘I’ve been expanding the plastic surgery hospital project run by Interplast at Salambutar, near Sankhu,’ says Christa Drigalla. This new hospital was opened officially in November 1997 and was dubbed Sushma Koirala Memorial Hospital (SKMH) after the daughter of the former Nepalese Prime Minister who burnt to death in her sari. The international medical team of the SKMH is busy with operative corrections of patients who have scars from burns, deformities from birth, or have lost a part of their hands or feet through leprosy-infection. This medical area has been the connecting link with the Shanti-Griha-Project with its leprosy patients. Besides rendering concrete medical help to these Nepalese patients, the aim of the ‘Interplast’ organisation in the whole world is to teach local surgeons special operation-techniques, and to give their know-how to them so that they can operate independently at a later stage. Other members of the medical-staff like nurses, sanitaters, physiotherapists also receive special training and instructions to take optimal care of the post-operative patients. The Interplast-run hospital is, after a period of initial financial and intellectual help, to be overtaken by the Nepalese counterparts.
Christa has been working for more than a decade in Nepal and has survived the revolution of the eighties, the nineties and now the Maoist take over at the recent polls.
‘I’m sure that this ‘help to self-help’ (Hilfe zur Selbsthilfe) is the most effective solution towards improving the situation of the patients in Nepal,’ says Christa Drigalla. She has always had an inner desire for a long time to get to know Nepal not only as a tourist, but to live here and to experience the entire seasonal changes of Nature, with winter and sommer, the dry period and monsoon, to get to know and understand the people better and to do more trekking’. And that’s exactly what she has been doing all these years and has even built a wonderful house in scenic Nagarkot from where she can peer at the Himalayas..
One can only admire her courage, endeavour and the ability to assert herself and I’d like to wish her well. She is what we call in German eine gute Seele, a good soul, and is the personification of togetherness, Miteinander.
