A little girl dies in a foreign land
Hayesville's Amy Nicolson watches over her near the end
By Frank Bradley Sentinel writer

Amy Nicolson is no stranger to poverty and hurt. She's seen it in the eyes of wrinklefaced grandmothers with no place at night to lay their head. She's heard the cries of children, sick and malnourished, both in Jamaica and the Philippines when she and her husband, Gilbert volunteered along with others from Habitat for Humanity to build houses and hospitals. She's helped feed and clothe the hungry who lost their homes from Hurricane Katrina. But the death of a 13-year old girl in Durgapur, India last month was a heart-wrenching experience Amy says she will never forget.

The Nicolsons, members of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Hayesville, were part of a seven-person team from the Episcopal Diocese of western North Carolina who spent three weeks in India in January and February, primarily working on a small school built by the church.

Amy has a friend from Blowing Rock, N.C., who is in Durgapur, an industrial city, north of Calcutta, that manufactures steel. Durgapur is very polluted and very poor. Twentytwo percent of the world's poorlive in India. It is the part of the world that has the most hungry people (204 million.) Amy's friend teaches English at a church school which serves children from the slums who need help with their primary education. The school provides children with good nutrition and the encouragement they need to break the cycle of poverty.

(L to R) Lynn Coulthard, Stefanie Pearson and Amy Nicolson with students from a chuch school in Durgapur, India.

In a recent interview with Amy, she told me that India has available but not compulsory education. Kids from upper and middle-class homes attend school and take their studies seriously; however many children from the slums either do attend school or do so irregularly because they have difficulty getting there and often don't have the money to buy needed supplies and books. Even the kids who attend regularly, often aren't motivated because their parents don't value education and this attitude rubs off on the kids.

Amy said the school, where she helped at, offers an afterschool program where the kids can have fun while they learn. There are a few desks in the four classrooms, but mostly the children sit on blankets on the floor. Each room had a chalk- board but didn't have shelves to put books, pencils, paper and other school supplies on. That was Gilbert's job--to put up shelving for all of the classrooms. Amy helped organize and shelve the supplies that the school had.

Amy said that most of the children in the school are Hindu. Since they attend a Christian school, they recognize and celebrate the holidays from both religions, she said.

Many of the children who attend the school are living in temporary squatter huts with dirt floors, no electricity and running water only two hours a day.

While in Durgapur, Amy said she had the privilege of spending time each day with 13-year-old Punima, who had fallen from a window trying to escape a rape and had broken both legs. At first, the girl had been kept a home for several weeks where she developed bed sores because the family didn't know how to care for her and didn't have the money for medical treatment. After the bed sores became larger and infected, Punima was taken to a public hospital and left to die. Amy's friend saw her there and took her to the Mother Teresa Ashram where the Sisters of Charity took here in and cared for her, but they had no nurse to replace a broken catheter and no doctor to prescribe antibiotics or painkillers.

Amy said she visited the girl twice a day, staying at bedside, holding her hand and comforting her.

"We were hopeful for a few days," Amy said. "The nuns would come by and say, 'she looks better.' But then she stopped eating. We would put water in her mouth and she would cough it up. Her wounds got so big in both her hips that you would have been able to put your fist in them."

Punima called Amy, 'auntie' and told her in broken Bengali that she loved her. "That was her gift to me," Amy said.

A day or two before the girl died, she called for her mother. Finally, the family came and got her and took her home, where she died the next day." "This was a preventable death," Amy told me. "It was caused by inadequate health care. She didn't deserve this."

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