The Doctor Who Found Her Purpose In Life Doing Good In Egypt
Dr Shibal Bhartiya was working as a senior research fellow at Geneva, when she was assigned to a humanitarian mission to a poor community in Egypt. As a doctor, she had learnt about ‘clinical detachment’ but what she saw here – lack of drinking water and the stark difference between high privilege and abject poverty – hit her hard! She had grown up as a sensitive child – despite being a DM’s daughter she was teaching poor children at the age of nine. She did MBBS and MS at a top college in Delhi, followed up by super specialty research work in advanced Glaucoma studies at AIIMS – and had seen sufferings of patients – before going to Switzerland. The visit to Egypt transformed her towards embracing inclusivity and giving. Her perspective shifted from not just doing well but also ‘doing good’. Back in Delhi, as a single mother of a five-year-old son, she came across perfect strangers being kind to her and realised that every small act of kindness and support leads to a ripple effect of positive change. She started with a small food bank for her needy neighbours and also began teaching their children in a park. Her journey of doing good had begun.
Around 2012 she moved to the flagship Fortis hospital in Gurgaon and continued spending all her free time on social work in the slums. The years 2015-16 saw the formal registration of ‘Vision Unlimited’ (VU) – a charity dedicated to teaching under-privileged kids around Badshahpur. Schools were set up within the slums closer to their homes so parents could leave their small children there in safe hands while they went out to find work and earn a living. The unfortunate arrival of Covid-19 meant huge gearing up and, with generous help from friends and family, VU ended up supporting 7,000 families during the epidemic. Work at the schools, often housed in an empty structure donated by philanthropists, wasn’t limited to teaching literacy and numeracy – essentially catch-up learning and helping parents with paper work to get the kids into government schools – and a hot nutritive meal. She realised that these children needed help beyond that. This gave birth to the unique concept of ‘after school clubs’.
Vision Unlimited and its driving force, the indefatigable Shibal Bhartiya – busy head of ophthalmology at Fortis – now run four schools, each with an ‘after school club’ across Badshahpur, with 450 students (900 enrolled since inception). The after-school-clubs play a crucial role by way of sports, extra-curricular activities, health and hygiene checks, immunisation, micro and macro nutrient supplements and counselling of children and their parents. The recent spread of conjunctivitis meant soap and eye drops for all. When some of the children left the slum cluster following a fire, VU followed them and set up another centre close to their new homes and persuaded them to remain in the safety net of the system. With the kind of all-round learning experience at the VU centres, these less fortunate children will hopefully do better in life, enjoy good health and also become empathetic like their teachers and the “Doctor Ma’am”. Communal tension is a new challenge but, I am sure, the VU children and their families will help douse this fire too.
