Left: Her fingers gnarled by leprosy suffered as a teenager, Sakubai Gite examines a two-year-old girl she delivered and still cares for. Right: Brooklyn College Professor Patricia Antoniello of the Health and Nutrition Sciences Department. She edited the National Geographic article about the Jamkhed project.

In 2004, Brooklyn College Professor Patricia Antoniello, director of the Shirley Chisholm Center for Research on Women, joined Raj Arole who, together with his late wife Mabelle (deceased in 1999) established the Comprehensive Rural Health Project in Jamkhed, a rural community two hundred miles east of Mumbai. The Jamkhed project, started by the husband-and-wife team of physicians thirty-five years ago, is now the subject of the National Geographic's December issue.
    “The Aroles' goal was to train women in villages of about 1,500 people to become health care workers who can help their community,” Antoniello explains, adding that Mabelle Arole unfortunately passed away in 1999. Although Antoniello originally went to collect ethnographic material about the women in these communities, she ended up focused more broadly on health issues, matters of development, and, recently, on ways the villagers seek to create ecological stability.      
    According to Antoniello, the Jamkhed project’s achievements are more than remarkable.
    “Many of these women had to marry at age twelve, had many children, and often lived through physical abuse. The project allowed them to gain a respectable status in their villages, so much so that some have been elected mayors,” she says, adding that such a development was previously unthinkable in the stratified society of rural India.      
    As part of her research, Antoniello has been taking BC students to Jamkahed during the summer and winter breaks for the last three years. “Macaulay Honors and medical students have been joining me to help with this research,” she says. “This winter I’ll be taking another group, but not to do research—just to observe closely how change, albeit in a small scale, is actually possible.”

To read the National Geographic story and see the photos, please visit:

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/12/community-doctors/rosenberg-text
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/12/community-doctors/johnson-photography