After giving away the last of the lunch packets, Aishwarya announced that this was it. They – the volunteers and employees of the Kerala Fire and Rescue Services (KFRS) – would not be coming with lunch packets after May 3. Many of the major restrictions put in place during the extended lockdown for the coronavirus pandemic were being lifted, and only partial restrictions were in place from May 3 onwards. Restrictions, however, continue in pockets containing COVID-19 cases.
Aishwarya handed her last packet to a 17-year-old migrant worker she saw every day. He smiled and asked in sign language, ‘when will you come again.’ That’s when Aishwarya, a social worker and counsellor working as civil defence member with the KFRS, understood he had speech disability. “I had thought he didn’t know the language and so had not spoken to me all these days I handed him his food. He wouldn’t stand in queues but wait for the last turn and then come and get his packet only from me,” Aishwarya says fondly.
In over 40 days, she and others in the department had grown fond of the many they met every day to distribute food or medicine during the pandemic lockdown.
Fire force in Kerala delivered food packets to 1200 needy people everyday during the lockdown, collecting from the community kitchens, from residents associations and flats and also bringing from their own homes. #keralafireforce #kerala pic.twitter.com/aEqHEd5lSA
— Cris (@cristweets) May 5, 2020
“There are 124 fire stations in the state and about 4,500 employees. In addition, there are 50 civil defence members (like Aishwarya) under each unit,” says R Prasad, technical director at KFRS. May 4, the day after they finished their food deliveries, was Firefighters' Day.
The firefighters joined the COVID-19 fight in mid-March, when the state government launched the break-the-chain campaign to avoid the spread of the disease. On March 22, when the Union government announced Janata Curfew, asking people to stay off the roads, employees of the KFRS used the opportunity to disinfect public places such as railway and bus stations. “Afterwards, when the lockdown began, we also began disinfecting hospitals. We’d also disinfect the vehicles carrying goods from other states and those leaving our state,” Prasad says.
Till May 4, the department has disinfected 42,481 public places, hospitals, isolation and quarantine areas and 1,51,053 vehicles carrying food materials.
They also delivered food and emergency medicine to people. Up till May 4, they had delivered medicine to 38,049 people, and delivered food through community kitchens to 58,145 people. The department also took 2,122 patients in ambulances to hospitals, and 499 others for chemotherapy and dialysis treatments.
This was all in addition to their regular firefighting duties and providing other emergency services.
“That happens too in the middle of all this. There was a major fire at the Kalamassery junction in Ernakulam the other day. Another time, a buffalo went loose in Kaloor,” says Unnikrishnan A, Ernakulam station officer.
It is Unnikrishnan’s number that is listed as the emergency number for all COVID-19 enquiries. “We need to cover the entire Ernakulam district, be it Muvattupuzha or Mattancherry. Medicines come from everywhere, which we sort out at stations and send out to different places across the state. Then there is the food distribution. In addition to the packets we get from the community kitchen, we also collect food from resident associations and flats, and the volunteers also bring from their homes, delivering about 1,200 food packets every day,” Unnikrishnan says.
Aishwarya says that on the first day her unit carried ten food packets from the community kitchen to an area, more than 30 people came running, seeking lunch. Her heart sank when she had to turn away most of them. “We thought then that there were 50 of us in a unit, so if we tried to bring one packet each, there’d be 50 more. I put this on our WhatsApp group and a few responded. The next day I took ten packets from my home and some others brought two or three packets each. But even then, it didn’t seem enough to feed the poor,” she says.
By word of mouth, more people – from the residents associations and apartment buildings – volunteered to cook. “We found a place which was earlier a sort of small hotel, to cook the food with the help of the old chechi who worked there. We meant to cook for 50, but ended up cooking for 500! A health inspector would duly verify that the food was fine.”
Five hundred from the department and 700 more from the apartment dwellers made it 1,200 packets every day. It went to migrant labourers, street workers and the homeless.
Aishwarya remembers a couple of people sleeping under one of the metro pillars every day, not even strong enough to get up and ask for food. “At first, we thought they were asleep. But every day when I saw them in the same posture, I wondered what the matter was. It’s when we went to ask them, we found that they hadn’t eaten in days and were too fatigued to get up. From that day we kept two packets for them every day.”
Another time, she found young men who had come from other districts to drive Uber or Ola cabs and found it too expensive to stay at rented places, sleeping in their cars. She also remembers a man with mental health issues sniffing suspiciously at the food she brought and breaking glass pieces and injuring himself. He was taken to the Thrissur mental health hospital. Aishwarya also became a favorite of two transgender persons who were staying inside the Ernakulam South bus stand, hidden and neglected, and without food. When she sought them out and brought them food, she became the ‘Amma’ whom they trusted.
Aishwarya had too many stories like these of the people she became fond of in the last many days. She says she felt an ache when on May 3, they ended their service and said adieu.