How I created a mini-Leeds Infirmary for India’s poor

SYLVIA Wright had a comfortable life. Having trained as a midwife and paid her dues on the hospital wards at Leeds General Infirmary, by the early 1980s she was passing on her hard earned skills and years of wisdom to nursing students in Leeds.

Turning 40 is often a cause to stop and think, but while some go down the now cliched route of fast cars and reliving youthful dreams, there were more serious doubts preying on Sylvia’s mind.

A deeply religious women, she couldn’t shake the idea that she was been called away from her suburban existence.

At first she dismissed the idea and carried on with her usual routine and her classes at what’s now Leeds Metropolitan University, but as the months turned into years and following conversations with her parish priest and correspondence with Mother Theresa, Sylvia knew what she had to do.

Aged 44, she sold her house, all its contents and her car. Having withdrawn her savings and cashed in her pension by the time she boarded the plane for India all that remained of her old life were a few precious family photographs.

“There was nothing I really wanted to keep,” she says, remembering the day a friend drove her to the airport. “We all go through life amassing possessions, but when you stop and think most are of very little importance.”

On January 6, 1982, Sylvia landed in Madras, but her final destination was a six hour drive away on dirt track roads to Thiruvannamalai. Eighty miles away from the state capital, culturally and socially it was a world away from the secure life she had left behind.

“Nothing could have prepared me for the shock of moving from the UK to a totally different life of poverty and deprivation,” she says. “Health provision was totally inadequate and often non-existent.”

What Sylvia saw might have been overwhelming, but it was exactly the reason why she had come. In a place with limited electricity, where water came from open wells and where many of the locals held superstitious believes about the cause and treatment of illness, she felt her own Western training might affect real change.

Spending some of her savings on a van, Sylvia, equipped it with medicine and set up her very first clinic treating people spread across six villages. The hours were long and often meant working after midnight six days a week, with the seventh reserved for training her own team of medical staff.

Those early days were tough, but 30 years on the impact is clear. Sylvia’s first small hospital, which she opened in 1985, was replaced 10 years ago with a new 220-bed facility which treats 80,000 out-patients a year. Before that her free boarding school for profoundly deaf children was already up and running and in 2004 she opened two day care centres providing play and physiotherapy for disabled children and crucially respite for their parents.

When she returned to Britain to receive her much deserved OBE in 2008, she said she had dreams of opening her own nursing college. Four years on, that’s another ambition she can tick off the list.

“It is still an incredibly deprived areas and with no real industry to speak of, most people work the land,” she says. “However, when I first arrived in 1982 the health care was fairly haphazard, the infant mortality rate was high and life expectancy was low and that has improved

“In the last 10 years the IT revolution has come to India and it has created a new middle class. However, the change has largely been confined to the cities and there is still much to do in rural areas. Change doesn’t come overnight, but the number of children dying has decreased and life expectancy is now around 60-years-old. The school for deaf children was incredibly important because a large number of babies are born with hearing impairments. No one is entirely sure why, but it may be due to the prevalence of inter-marriage.

“Disabled children don’t have great life prospects and the school shows I hope that they are valued.”

Sylvia insists hers hasn’t been entirely a one-woman mission. Shortly after she left friends back home set up the Sylvia Wright Trust, which she describes a ‘simply wonderful’ and it was money raised by the group which paid for the building of the new college. They’ve also been vital in raising awareness of her work, but it is Sylvia herself, who successfully convinced the Indian authorities that she wasn’t some interfering Westerner, but a woman who genuinely had the people’s best interest at heart.

So much so that she now works regularly with government officials on health and education programmes, which have seen the number of new diagnoses of HIV cases drop significantly. It’s those kind of breakthroughs, greater than any financial reward, which keep Sylvia going.

“I don’t draw a salary, although after all my years in nursing I did discover I was able to draw a small pension,” she says. “It’s not a huge amount, but it’s a little pocket money which allows me to buy things for the school or the hospital. On my birthday the students give me presents of clothes which they have knitted and those gifts mean more to me than anything money can by.

“Occasionally we do get visits from British nurses and people often say I have created a little LGI in the middle of India, but what really makes it all worth it is when one of the patients say they feel they have been treated with love.”

Sylvia is currently making a brief visit back to Yorkshire and will attend a special thanksgiving service to mark her 30 years in India at St Anne’s Cathedral in Leeds this Sunday, but before long she will be heading back to Thiruvannamalai where there is still much work to do.

“People tell me I’m 74, but I don’t feel it,” she says. “I still work from 8am to 6pm and while I may get a little more tired than I used to, I still feel that I have a lot to give. Who knows, maybe in a few years I will feel like I ought to retire, but as long as I’m needed in India I won’t be making any plans to return to England.

“I’ve always been very adaptable, so whatever happens I’m sure I’ll be just fine.”