On a Friday morning, Omana begins her work shortly after nine. The first house on her list was in Vayalikada, where she would bring blood pressure medicine to a 78-year-old woman in palliative care. The second house to go to is in Arthala, half-a-kilometer away, where a pregnant woman waits for her.
Omana is an ASHA (Accredited Social Health Activist) worker from Vattiyoorkavu in Thiruvananthapuram. The 51-year-old has 784 houses under her jurisdiction. Her job has become tedious following the outbreak of COVID-19. She is tasked with making sure that people who are to be quarantined, stay isolated. She has to be alert to people developing symptoms of COVID-19.
At a house in Arthala, she checks on a family– a couple and their child– in home quarantine. Omana ensures that they have enough stock of food materials, for which people in the neighbourhood help them. The husband and wife had come from Hyderabad. The couple wanted to go to the home of their relatives in Neyyattinkara. Omana didn’t allow it as they had eight more days to complete quarantine.
After leaving them, Omana visited six more houses in the vicinity. She would visit every house in between.
Omana talks of the people she helps like they are family. The pregnant woman in Arthala she visited had to go to the hospital for a tetanus vaccine and needed iron tablets.
“The vaccine was scheduled for Wednesday, but she missed the date because of the lockdown. I called up a health official who told me that it can be taken some days later. The woman was relieved when I told her. She had iron tablets with her; but not calcium. Her BP and weight were normal when she got tested last week,” Omana tells TNM.
“She can feel the movement of the baby in the stomach,” she adds. Omana remembers the details of all the people she visits, and there are quite a few of them on her daily routine.
She talks of another pregnant woman she visited that day. “She became pregnant recently and her name has to be registered with the Health Department. She doesn’t have a bank account to add her name to the Janani Suraksha Yojana. Only if she has an account would she get financial aid from the government,” Omana says, with emotion.
Like many of her colleagues, she does her home visits on foot. This has been the practice since 2008 when she became an ASHA worker.
The distances do not bother her. After visiting the house in Arthala, Omana walked to Pappad, 500 metres away.
In between Arthala and Pappad, she visited several houses on the way with her regular queries- ‘enthelum visheshamundo’- checking if the family had fever or any other health issues.
On Friday, there were no cases of fever; everyone adhered to the lockdown rules. But the intermittent rain in Thiruvananthapuram for the past couple of days has doubled her work.
She had to tell people not to keep any vessel or other objects that would store rain water outside the house. “It’s also dengue fever season, there shouldn't be any breeding space for mosquitoes,” she explains.
She would break for lunch by 1 pm, only to step out again by 3 in the afternoon. On the way home and back, she’d cover seven more houses at Pappad. In one of those houses, a child- a 15-month-old- had fever. Omana had given paracetamol for the child earlier. On Friday, she ensured that the child was recovering.
In the afternoon, she visited a house at Elluvila where a woman was in quarantine. The time was around 4.10 then. The woman had to go on isolation after she travelled from Pandalam in Pathanamthitta when the district saw a spike in the number of cases. She had almost completed her quarantine.
Omana had a bitter time there, which was unusual during her job, when the mother-in-law of the woman scolded her. “She was angry with the calls from the health inspectors and from me to enquire about the daughter-in-law’s health. She was telling me that her daughter-in-law had nothing serious. I have never had such an experience before. Everyone would be friendly with me because I had begun these house visits a long time ago,” Omana laments.
By 4.30 she covered 33 houses. The day's work ends for Omana but she will then go back home and make plans for the next day.