Water...and the Ted Lasso effect

I never thought I would get so excited about a borehole.

The video showed a skinny Indian man leaping down from heavy machinery. He peers under it to inspect the narrow, rotating shaft drilling into the ground.  And then, whoosh, there it was. Precious water bursting forth over the parched land. And on the video soundtrack, the satisfied shouts of the workers, and ophthalmologist Dr Samuel Murmu and his team at Bamdah Eye Hospital.

We whooped with delight in London, Devon, Surrey, Singapore and Mumbai. There was an exchange of excited emojis on WhatsApp. Disparate group that we were, we had all played a part in sinking that borehole. Without it, the hospital’s entire work might have literally and metaphorically floundered.
I was reminded of an episode in the TV series Ted Lasso that is currently attracting huge audiences and stimulating much discussion about how we human beings behave towards each other. The series revolves around the eponymous main character, a US sports coach hired to manage a professional English football team. Ted’s prominent character traits are an unwavering optimism and an inability to act with meanness or resentment. Ted Lasso has been called a feel-good series. More accurate would be to call it a Do Good series because, from what I have read from research done on its impact on viewers, people go away after each episode wondering how they can be better people in their specific work/life situation.

Anyway, the episode I recalled whilst feeling good about Bamdah’s borehole went like this.
The character Sam Obisanya (a talented midfielder in the AFC Richmond squad) owns a restaurant. Just before his Nigerian father visits London, Sam criticises a politician on Twitter. The next day his restaurant is vandalised, a message scrawled on the walls warning him to keep his mouth shut about politics. Mortified, Sam nonetheless takes his father to see the wreckage.
He finds his entire football team there, cleaning and repairing the premises.
This demonstration of collective kindness and timely, practical support is a thread that runs throughout the series. Originally stemming from Ted himself – who demonstrates that acts of kindness come naturally when you really listen to people, understand their predicament and care about them – kindness is the hallmark of this funny, emotional, issue-addressing and entertaining programme. What’s more, team spirit built on kindness brings success. In the most recent episode AFC Richmond made it into the Final of the Premier League.

It was empathy and kindness that brought the borehole to Bamdah.
Hardly a fortnight ago, Dr Samuel messaged to inform me that, for the first time in the hospital’s 130 year history, the main well had run dry. All over India and with alarming speed, climate change has brought higher temperatures earlier in the year and unpredictable monsoons, resulting in massive and rapidly worsening water shortage.

Wrote Samuel :
‘We are using bucket water in the operating theatre. Two of my staff are doing this work morning and afternoon. It is affecting the functioning of the hospital very badly. I have already found a place for a 500 foot deep borehole in the grounds near to the operating theatre. This will work throughout the year.’

He said that contractors with the necessary equipment were in nearby Jharkhand state. They could come and do this work at the end of the week. It would cost around £1500 to pay for equipment and labour.

I forwarded Dr Samuel’s message to two people – Horace in Mumbai and Rajesh in Singapore, both with quick access to money in India.
From Horace : ‘It's been unbearably hot in Mumbai where we have the luxury of A/C and water - I can't imagine how difficult life must be in Jamui district where the basic necessities for supporting the very existence of life are in short supply. Give me a few days.’
From Rajesh : ‘I am sending some money. If you have no other donor I will give the whole amount.’

In the end, together, they made up the money and the contractors did the work last Sunday.
Acts of kindness go a long way. They are after all Actions. Not mere utterances of concern and sympathy. A small number of people, even one individual, can tip the balance of a catastrophic situation into a manageable one with a timely act of kindness. To quote Ted Lasso – ‘doing the right thing is never the wrong thing.’

So let’s hear it for the staff and patients of Bamdah Mission Hospital, for Rajesh, Horace and friends and, most importantly, for Baijun Marandi and Upendra Kumar Gupta, the two drillers who worked in sweltering conditions to get the job done.

Sadly, not all the messages I received this week from Bihar reflected the Ted Lasso effect.
The belief in collective kindness as the core of humanitarian work seems to have been displaced by a belief in ‘spin, hyperbole and the fetishization of performance metrics to project success’ .
(This quotation taken from a critique of the language used in 21st century global health discourse  https://www.bmj.com/content/379/bmj.o2932)

We received an invitation to a new hospital inauguration in Saran district, Bihar. The existing, already huge AJEH eye hospital is to be upgraded to ‘one of the world’s largest eye hospitals…possibly the first Centre of Excellence in Eye Care in a rural area.’ The email was replete with stats, targets, and predictions for the AJEH management’s Vision 2030 agenda. It came from the AJEH boss.
We were truly puzzled as to why we were invited. It is such a well-known fact in Bihar that Second Sight does not believe in the model that places eye care in the hands of one huge behemoth hospital that is supposed to cater for the diverse, scattered and extremely impoverished rural population. Excellence in eye care is provided by people : good eye doctors and their multi-skilled teams. There are many such teams in Bihar. Mega hospital complexes are just bricks and mortar.
I do believe, however, in everyone doing their bit to prevent and treat blindness. And I believe in team spirit, on and off the football pitch. So I asked myself, what would Ted Lasso’s response be to this invitation?

I racked my brains, delving into my memory banks to find a relevant personal interaction within the series that might give me an answer.
And then I had it.
Footballer Jamie Tartt is the most talented player in the AFC Richmond team. He is also a troubled soul and uses his star status to undermine and bully other players, even encouraging others to act in this way. One day manager Ted says to him:

‘Jamie, I think you might be so sure that you’re one in a million, that sometimes you forget that out there (on the pitch) you’re just 1 in 11. And if you just figure out some way to turn that ‘me’ into ‘us’..the sky’s the limit.’

Perhaps I should send this Ted Lasso quote to the AJEH boss. It might make a team player of him yet. On the other hand…this is real life not fiction.

Lucy Mathen

#TedLasso   #kindness  #teamspirit  #climatechange  #watershortage