Lakhmi returns to her home village. Photos: Fr Robert McCulloch SSC
Lakhmi Harchand has no idea she is a bridge builder, and I am sure she would not believe me if I told her she was.
Lakhmi is a first-year student at St Elizabeth School of Midwifery, attached to St Elizabeth Hospital in Hyderabad, Pakistan. I am chairman of St Elizabeth Hospital Board, which is responsible for the School of Midwifery.
Lakhmi belongs to the Katchi Koli tribal people, who live in the interior of Sindh province in Pakistan. She is 19 years old. Harchand, her father, is a “hari”, an agricultural manual labourer bound by debt to work with the other members of his immediate family for a landlord. Lakhmi was fortunate to escape from this by attending one of the schools run by the Presentation Sisters near Tando Allahyar, a small town about 100 km from Hyderabad.
I knew the Irish Presentation Sisters when I went to Pakistan in 1978. Many of us learnt Urdu together when we were new and fresh young missionary priests and Sisters. When I moved from Punjab province in India to the diocese of Hyderabad in Sindh in 1983 and was sent to the huge parish of Badin, I saw that only a handful of Christian children were attending school.
I began four village schools and managed to get one of them registered with the government’s Board of Education. This registration was essential to enable children to sit for school examinations recognised by the provincial government. The then martial law administrator was a friend, and he assisted in getting the registration, “but only for one school, Father.”
All the children from the four schools I started were cross-enrolled in this school. Back then, the Presentation Sisters could not get their schools registered, so our solution was to enrol the children from their schools in the one registered school in Badin and transport them by jeep or small bus or any way to Badin for end-of-year final examinations. No one asked any questions. That little school’s student population exploded once a year. The children were accompanied by their teachers and the Sisters to Badin on the other side of the Sindh province. They had an exciting holiday for ten days, and they passed their examinations.
Two outstanding Catholic high schools, one in Badin and one in Tando Allahyar, have since emerged from those “we have nothing but hope” village schools that the Presentation Sisters and I began separately in the early 1980s.
The first support I received for the four village schools I began came from people in Stella Maris Catholic Parish, Beaumaris, in the Archdiocese of Melbourne. By their generosity, the schools I founded on hope in 1983 have become a firm reality.
Lakhmi was able to go to the Presentation Sisters school in Tando Allahyar, which had links with the earlier village schools there. After completing high school, she joined St Elizabeth School of Midwifery in Hyderabad in September 2022, where she is enrolled in the two-year community midwifery course set by the Pakistan Nursing Council.
A warm welcome home for Lakhmi. - Photo: Fr Robert McCulloch
How has Lakhmi become a bridgebuilder?
Like the St Elizabeth School of Midwifery, St Elizabeth Hospital has a Mobile Medical Outreach Program (MMOP). I helped the hospital begin this in 2007.
Since then, it has provided free primary healthcare every year to more than 50,000 extremely poor and disadvantaged people, such as Lakhmi’s family and the 350 Christian, Hindu and Muslim families who live in her home village.
St Elizabeth Hospital’s MMOP is their sole means of free and sustained healthcare. The medical team comprises two doctors, one midwife, three nurses, and one student midwife on rotation from the School of Midwifery.
Lakhmi’s home village is Mohabat Solangi Machi Goth, near Tando Allahyar. On February 3rd last year, the MMOP team visited this village. When the February daily roster for the trainee midwives to accompany the MMOP team went onto the noticeboard, Lakhmi noticed that the MMOP team was visiting her village that day and rushed to the principal to make a change so that she could go there as a student midwife and as part of the team.
And so she went, and great was the pride of her parents when she arrived. She was and is an inspiration to the people in the village.
In Mohabat Solangi Machi Goth village, Lakhmi personally linked the work of the MMOP, of which she was a part for that day, to the healthcare education given at St Elizabeth School of Midwifery, where she is enrolled. Unexpectedly, she became a living bridge builder - both between the different works of St Elizabeth Hospital and between the people of her village and the hospital.
Columban Fr Robert McCulloch worked in Pakistan for 34 years, and currently lives in Rome.
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