Vonnie was very impressed by the hospital and financed five people to have the eye operation there, to restore sight to them all. *“I also visited the small hospital about an hour out of Delhi with the very special person who now manages the organization. They have also established a small school for children who would otherwise have very poor chances of education,”* she says.

Whereas it’s usually the big budget schemes that are reported on in the media here is something that has value beyond its scale and to hear how the hospital was built we can harken to the touching words of the chairman, Patwant Singh (Founder of Kabliji Hospital and Rural Health Centre and Kabliji School):

“A confluence of an external event and a personal experience can often generate an incredible amount of energy; instill a sense of purpose, and fuel a desire to reach for impossible goals. In my case, the event took place at the start of the ‘70s and the personal experience nearly seven years later.

“I would occasionally drive out of Delhi in those days, to that stretch of the stark but beautiful Gurgaon-Sohna Road which has the Aravali hills on the right and farm lands on the left. Not very productive farmlands but with a rugged, determined character of their own, as if they refused to give in to the brackish water, the inhospitable soil, the blazing summers of that region.

On this particular day I saw a small group on the side of the road trying vainly to stop a bus. As I stepped out of the car, and saw a young woman in labour, it was obvious she was in need of immediate medical attention which no village midwife could offer. There was a tragic desperation in her family’s efforts to get her to a hospital in time.

We succeeded in doing that, but the images stayed. The dusty landscape, the desperate look on the father’s face, the unconcern of those who pass by with unseeing eyes, the fragility of human life.

These impressions lasted long enough for me to resolve to build a hospital there; to prove that private initiative can help in filling the unconscionable gap between the facilities that are accessible – though not necessarily available – to the twenty per cent of our urban people, yet denied to the other eighty in rural India.

I persuaded my fellow-trustees in a Trust we manage, to agree. Then asked the Haryana Government to donate us land, which it did.

Then in January 1977, on a bitterly cold night in Delhi, I had a major heart attack. I was lucky to get into the intensive care of a hospital in time, but as the shock of my illness washed over me, and my life passed before my eyes, the image of the group on the side of the road kept recurring. And I could feel a new determination growing, to put my despondency behind, and to battle for the resources needed to give physical form to the resolve I had made in the aftermath of my experience on the Sohna Road.

The hospital stands on that stretch of road in testimony to the drive that can be generated if the determination is strong enough.”

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Kabliji-Hospital-and-Rural-Health-Centre/

Concerning the Ladakh organisation, Vonnie Boston says: *“It is bent on improving the lot of children and underprivileged by creating schools and community centres in Ladakh and the Northern Himalayas. They also have an organization – Live to Love – with worldwide following which focuses on environmental issues and helps in many ways to show care for people and the environment – in this instance [of my trip] by picking up rubbish and moving among people everywhere just to encourage by example – as we did on the walk – rather than preaching about it.*

http://www.drukpa.org/index.php/News-in-2012/better-late-than-never

*“The trip itself was all most heartening and beautiful to experience and surely the spirit that needs to be ignited on a much grander scale to reflect how great the human person really is. And it has nothing to do with wealth but genuine appreciation and care – for how marvellous one example as we walked through a small and very simple, and no doubt very poor community-village. There, as we passed on our trek was a family with a giant sized teapot and all the locals helping to give us a little glass of tea and waving us to take it and move along with it as they had arranged for people lining the roadside well ahead to collect the glasses from us as we finished our most uplifting draught. It was totally astonishing, it moves me still to think about it, as we were a slow flowing river of 400 pilgrims moving single-file to cater to… what a beautiful gesture from people who seemingly had nothing compared to those in the Western world…but they had that beauty of humankind I speak of, and so wanted to show their appreciation too…”*