![\"bihar-flood.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/e.amritapuri.org\/blogs\/files\/2008\/09\/bihar-flood.jpg\")
<\/p>\n6 Sep 2008, Bawanipur, Bihar<\/p>\n
We were in Bawanipur – a village in the Purnia district of Bihar, which is by the side of the most affected district Madhepura. The government had set up a relief camp in a school. Our first medical camp in this relief and rehabilitation project.<\/p>\n
I had been helping control the crowd, talking to the people – the impatient adults and the curious children. After a couple of hours I found another job close to the entrance of the school. And then a woman came up to me and said something that I did not quiet catch. “Have you not understood the instructions of the doctor? Do you need help with them?” I asked. She repeated herself – expressionless in her suffering, “Where do I stay? My house was washed away.” For a minute I was silent. “In a few days we will be setting up temporary shelters, maybe then you can stay there. Let us see how things turn out.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
She walked away with her child. And I was thinking – “What can I do? There are thousands of such people. What sort of suffering makes a face seem dead even when narrating woes that would surely weigh heavily on the mind – a house around which a life was built – smoke had risen from the top as the wind would have carried the aroma of cooking food, the sound of children playing around the house, growing up, a place of rest which you came back to after a long day in the paddy fields, some cows resting in the shade of the tree in front – home. And now all gone. And a face as blank as the wall when saying, “My house was washed away. Where…..?”<\/p>\n
Where? Oh where? Can they not even hope? Will that face ever brighten with light and hope? Maybe you have the answer. Where?<\/p>\n
– Nijamrita<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
6 Sep 2008, Bawanipur, Bihar We were in Bawanipur – a village in the Purnia district of Bihar, which is by the side of the most affected district Madhepura. The government had set up a relief camp in a school. Our first medical camp in this relief and rehabilitation project. I had been helping control […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[401],"class_list":["post-854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-disaster-relief","tag-flood-relief-bihar2008"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/e.amritapuri.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/e.amritapuri.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/e.amritapuri.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e.amritapuri.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e.amritapuri.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=854"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/e.amritapuri.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/854\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/e.amritapuri.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e.amritapuri.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e.amritapuri.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}