Check out www.couchsurfing.com. If not now, then after this post. It’s such an awesome initiative through which I have met some really neat people/had some cool experiences. For instance, Neha. She’s a journalist with Times of India and for our first meeting she invited me to come along with her while she was covering a story on Jaipur Foot. So we got an awesome behind the scenes tour of the administration, the factory, and clinic. Jaipur Foot is a NGO that aims to empower and dignify physically disabled individuals through by material means of artificial limbs/wheelchairs. The NGO explicitly states that their work is not charity in the sense that this idea would perpetuate a superiority/inferiority complex. The organization’s primary beneficiaries are those who do not have legs. Coming from the states where the government has gone to lengths to provide facilities to handicapped people and living here in India where life really is a free for all and not much is done by means of public initiatives to assist handicapped people, it was encouraging to learn of Jaipur Foot. JF offers high quality artificial limbs and necessary rehabilitation free of charge to their patients who come from all across India. They’ve also held limb restoration camps elsewhere across the continent. JF appears to have started as a Jain inspired endeavor but its services and effects (in no way visible to me) are limited to individuals from a certain class/creed/religion. Isabel and Elizabeth were also with me and we noticed that there were far greater male patients and learned that is only so because males in this country are generally the victims of accidents resulting in leg loss more so than their female counterparts. Anyhow, now I can’t help but notice JF’s yellow bicycle wheelchairs all around the city!
