Cecilia Adhav rscj

Some of Cecilia’s students, Ashankur.

Women of Ashankur. Photos: Lolín Menéndez rscj

I have been in the service of Health Education for 23 years, an area of great need in India. And in these 23 years my contribution, my preferred field, has been training young women in a non-formal situation.

I took the General Nursing and Midwifery Course in 1972, at St. Luke’s Hospital, under the German Sisters then in charge of the hospital. Today I look back with gratitude to the thoroughness of the training received. I am grateful for the Society’s openness in allowing those who felt drawn to nursing to take part in the training programme after Vatican II. It was my own choice to take up this training, and today I have no regrets. I have opted throughout to be a trainer, drawn by the educational mission of the Society. I made a determined effort even while nursing in KEM Hospital, Pune, to study for the BSc Nursing Tutorship, in spite of time constraints; this has given me the platform from which today I am able to do accomplish my part as trainer of others in Health Education.

At present my involvement in the field takes various forms. I am trainer of a group of 30 Nurses’ Aides, and Principal of the Auxiliary Nursing and Midwifery Institute, in collaboration with the Protestant Mission of the Church of North India. I visits ten and more villages in the area, giving women instruction in Infant Nutrition and providing Sex Education classes to two schools. one of which our own school at Haregaon.

Besides this outreach work I give instruction in Home Remedies at Ashankur Gramin Mahila Training Centre, where we collaborate with the Jesuits in the empowerment of young women through a variety of skill training programmes. The life at Ashankur, where I am at present, is a fulfilling one.

I recall a peak experience in my nursing career, an incident when along a village road I met a man taking his wife on his bicycle to hospital for delivery. The woman delivered her child in a field on the way. I was able to help with the delivery with whatever I had in my nursing kit. The child was not breathing; at once I applied mouth to mouth respiration and this helped the child. Looking back, I still have a sense of awe that by my own breath I was able to awaken breath in another human being and enable it to live, and that a Divine Providence should arrange for me to pass that way just at the opportune moment.

Cecilia Adhav rscj
Province of India