Hi,
I’m A K Dhivya Prabhaa, I’m doing my final year MBBS in Government Chengalpattu Medical College, Tamil Nadu. I had recently attended the RSP conducted in IDO-Gattumalla and would like to share my reflections from the same. 

Beyond the Edges of the 21st Century

The three days in Gattumalla felt like stepping into a reality that exists quietly alongside ours, yet is rarely seen. The roads themselves seemed to thin out as we travelled further to remote locations like Rallacheluka, as if the world was slowly letting go of its conveniences. It seemed like these places had fallen off the face of the earth that we claim to be in the 21st century. What remained were clusters of small homes, forests stretching into the distance, and villages that felt suspended in a time untouched by the pace of the cities we come from.

Life here feels like walking on a rope stretched between necessity and uncertainty. Each day requires a careful balance. One illness, one failed crop, one dry water source: any of these could tilt that fragile equilibrium. The security that many of us assume to be ordinary does not exist here in the same way. Survival itself carries the quiet weight of effort.

One of the most striking realities was water. Something so effortless for us is, here, an act of endurance. People walk miles to find a source of clean drinking water, carrying heavy vessels back across uneven paths under an unrelenting sun. Water is not a tap that answers when called, it is a distance that must be travelled, a task that must be repeated day after day. Watching this, it becomes impossible not to think about how lightly we treat the things that others must fight to access.

The villages themselves felt like small worlds contained within invisible boundaries. Many people here spend their entire lives within these landscapes. The hills, the forest paths, the scattered homes, these form the borders of their lived experience. Beyond that lies a world they may hear about but rarely see. The outside world, with its crowded streets, hospitals, universities, and endless noise, feels impossibly far away from the quiet rhythm of these villages.

And yet, within that quiet, there is life that refuses to feel defeated. Children run barefoot across dusty paths, their laughter cutting through the still air. Women sit together in the shade after long walks for water, speaking in voices that carry stories of routine, resilience, and survival. The elders watch silently, their faces carved with years of endurance that no textbook could ever explain. There is hardship, undeniably, but there is also dignity woven deeply into the way people carry on with their lives.

What struck me most was the strength that exists without spectacle. It is not loud or dramatic. It is present in the ordinary, the way a family shares what little they have, the way a mother walks miles for water without complaint, the way communities remain bound together despite the scarcity around them. Resilience here is not something people speak about; it is simply how life is lived.

Walking through these villages left me with a feeling that is difficult to name. It was not just sadness or shock. It was a quiet unravelling of the assumptions I carry about what life should look like. The distance between our realities suddenly felt enormous, even though we share the same country, the same sky.

Gattumalla did not simply show me hardship. It showed me a kind of endurance that demands respect. And somewhere within that realization grew a quiet resolve, that the work we do in medicine cannot remain confined to comfortable spaces. There are places like this, lives like these, that deserve to be seen, understood, and served with humility.

And once you have walked those paths, even briefly, a part of you carries them long after you leave.

And visting IDO; it felt less like a facility placed in a remote village and more like a promise that good healthcare does not belong only to cities.

There was something deeply philosophical about it. In medical school we often speak about access, equity, and rural health as concepts, terms written in community medicine notes. But here those ideas exist in their most tangible form.

There is a certain humility that comes from witnessing medicine practiced in places where resources are limited but commitment is abundant. It reminded me that medicine is not only about treating the disease, but about bringing care, respect, and possibility to communities that have long been distant from it.

Last updated on 10th April, 2026