I’ve been having fun cutting into some of my new hand-dyes and working on a number of small pieces, one of which may end up as my next contribution to the Twelve by Twelve Collaborative Art Quilt Project which is due to be revealed on 1 December US time.
I’ve been listening to Radio National while I have been sewing. If you ever have troubles keeping track of everything, spare a thought for the dabbawallahs of Mumbai. As highlighted in the Karma of Tin (a podcast that you can download):
Each morning 5,000 Dabbawallahs collect approximately 200,000 meal containers in the suburbs and deliver them to offices in the city centre. Four hours later the empty containers are collected and returned. It’s a delivery system that started in the 1890s to accommodate people from different ethnic backgrounds with strict rules about how food should be prepared. It functions without managers or supervision; most of the workers are illiterate and all receive the same wages.
And the remarkable thing is that it is estimated that there is only one mistake in every SIX MILLION deliveries. Wow!
Speaking of the Indian subcontinent, my sister Delia is off to Bangladesh to work at the LAMB Hospital in Dinajpur for 11 weeks. She writes that:
The maternity dept at Lamb is extremely busy, delivering over 3,500 babies a year, with a C-section rate just over 20% and a high number of complicated cases, e.g. eclampsia and obstructed labor. The Gyn dept is also increasingly busy, with a new fistula repair unit recently opened. LAMB Hospital has 5 recently graduated Bangladeshi lady doctors who work in the obstetrics department.
This will be Delia’s third visit to Bangladesh but her first as an active medical attendant. Godspeed Delia!
Kristin L says
Good luck to Delia and the GYN department. Sounds like they have their hands full!
The Dabawallahs sound fascinating. I’m assuming there must need to be someone at home to hand off the lunch and receive the empty dabba, otherwise, how would the delivery service offer anything better (fresher) than bringing one’s lunch with them?