Kerala Rising: From Exporting People to Exporting Ideas · Page 175 of 353

KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS

KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS
12. Healthy Kerala
Walking, screening, donation, vaccination. The
same loop the state used for literacy, pointed at
the behaviours that decide a population’s health.
The most sensitive program in the book, and the
most carefully bounded.
A retired nurse in Kottayam organises a
morning walking group for the women on her
road. She knows, from forty years in the wards,
that the diabetes the doctors keep finding here
is fought as much on this road at six in the
morning as in any clinic, and that a woman
who walks with neighbours keeps walking long
after a woman who walks alone has stopped.
She also knows the state has no way to see her
group, encourage it, or help the next road start
one.
This chapter is about her walking group, and
the screening camp, the blood drive, the
vaccination day. It is the most carefully
bounded program in the book, because health
is where recognition could do harm if pointed
at the wrong thing. So it rewards only the
showing up, the walk taken, the camp
attended, and never a number on a scale or a
reading on a chart. What it makes visible is
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