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Public Buses Reema is a lady health worker who lives in a small village outside Kaifabad. I visit her in the very early spring, when the mustard is in bloom; the fields around the cluster of cement buildings that make up her village are brilliant yellow. Reema’s supervisor leads me up the narrow, muddy alleyway to her house. After warmly welcoming her supervisor, who leaves after introducing us, Reema invites me into the formal part of the house, a dark room with cement walls and floors. We sit on a wooden couch with hand-embroidered covers on its foam cushions. Reema serves Mountain Dew in chipped glasses and talks about her work on polio campaigns. When you consider that we go door-to-door, our pay is nothing. But thinking of God [khudā ko nazar nazar rakh-kar], we say we’ve left our house to work, we should do our duty well. . . . The problem comes when we have to work in areas we don’t know well. We know our own areas, so covering all the children there is easy. You know whether there are children in a certain house, right? When we go to other areas, that’s when problems come up. People don’t know you, you don’t know whether there are children in the house or not, and then you are with another lady health worker, both women. If there was a man with us, then we wouldn’t be frightened. That’s why all the lady health workers say we don’t make nearly enough money for as hard as we work. . . . Even refreshments, we get sometimes and sometimes not. And then our monthly pay, the 1900 rupees [about $30], it doesn’t come every month, it doesn’t come regularly, it doesn’t come on time. . . . We have to work all day long for five or six days, and then there are still problems [pher bhī yih pareshāni hojati hai]. We do the best job we can [kisī jagah apnī taraf-se nahi฀ cho฀te]. Then, when later the people come to check our work they make a fuss [shor kartehein] and say, “You didn’t do good work, we found a missed child here.” This creates huge difficulties for us. Look, the next campaign is in the summer—that one will be tough. In that much heat, your sweat never dries. But what can I do—I have to work, I have to answer to my supervisor every evening, I have to give reports to his supervisor. . . . To get to some of the places where I work during polio days, I have to change buses twice. I have to change a bus just to get to the basic health unit where I go every evening to give my report and every morning to pick up the day’s vaccine. Look, those bus fares add up. Every day it costs me 20 or 30 rupees [50 cents]. . . . Think, every day going to the basic health unit to get vaccine takes time, it takes bus fare, and then you have to work the rest of the day. Do something about the pay—some of us are very poor. My husband had an accident and broke his leg— for ten months he hasn’t really worked. ...

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