Every month there are thousands of Somali new patients coming to Hyderabad- India for medical treatment and there are many more Somali residents in the city including university students, all those people travel through the guidance and the consoling of friends and relatives who preceded them in the city.
They come without having any insight and awareness about the living standards in India and without any further enlightenments about the medical facilities available in the country they have travelled to, than they face a lot of challenges including language barrier and the adaptation of the new environment which makes them vulnerable for any kind of incitement and provocation from the locals.
Shelter
All the Somali community in Hyderabad came for either of two reasons, the majority comes for medical tour and the rest comes for higher education, they all stay in one area called Tolichowki-west zone of Hyderabad especially in paramount colony, they stay in furnished apartments which is mostly composed of 3 bedrooms one hall and kitchen, each furnished room costs around $250 whereas in the other areas the same empty room costs around $80, the sanitation and the hygiene of the flats they stay is very poor because there is no regular cleaning and maintenance,
every newcomer uses the same old bedsheet and pillow cover the last person who vacated the room has used sometimes without even washing.
Food
The vast majority of the Somali community in Hyderabad eat from restaurants and local hotels, the kind of food cooked in the area they stay(Tolichowki) is very famous among the local inhabitants of Hyderabad for the lack of hygiene,
it is unhealthy and its more expensive than home cooked food, every single person spends $300-$500 for food.
Most of the Somali people who came for medical treatment in Hyderabad go to 3 to 5 hospitals which they believe they are the best in the city and those hospitals are little far away from their homes which also requires daily transportation of around $10 per day.
Translators
For the last three years I was working as a translator and mediator between the Somali patients and the Indian doctors because more than 2 third of the patients who come from Somalia don’t speak English, this is where vast majority of the senior Somali students obtain their livelihood, patients pay $250 to $300 to their medical tourist who guides them everything they need from the city which means they are overburdened of what they have been paid.
there is no timeline in which this payment will be valid and there is no clear statement that declares the responsibility of the translator, the students go with the patient to everywhere he wills to go, in addition to that the small amount that’s paid to them is not monthly payment rather its onetime payment that doesn’t expire till the client boards on his go home flight and for some it takes not less than a year to go back, the massive effort paid by the translators are overlooked and it is exchanged with an insult and disgrace.
The loyalty and the trustworthy of the translators are doubted for no reason because most of the clients they are dealing with are illiterate, uneducated and the country they came from is in the first position of the most corrupted countries in the world which is why most of the Somali people are skeptical and doubtful due to the corrupted environment they live.
The students also provide housing to the patients by taking empty flats from the local landlords and re-renting each room in the flat separately at a price equivalent to the price of 3 empty rooms but after fully furnishing it.
Organ transplantation
Almost 10 to 15 percent of the Somali patients coming to India come for organ transplantation like kidney and liver transplant, under the legal framework of India’s national organ transplant ‘transplantation of human organ act (tho)’ which was passed by the parliament in 1994 states “no human organ removed from the body of a donor before his death shall be transplanted into a recipient unless the donor is a near relative of the recipient”, and the relativity of the donor and the recipient can only be confirmed by the country of origin which also a very big challenge because there is no acting body, consulate or embassy-envoy functioning in Hyderabad, fulfilling and completing such legal documents takes approximately 3–6 months.
Attenders
Most of the patients are accompanied by one attendant who is closely related to him, this person has to take care all the necessity of the patient i.e. meals, cleaning and hospitalization and he/she has no substitute and has to be in full standby 24/7 for any emergency, they left far away from their families and friends this loneliness is very depressed to patient and very stressful to the attendant, the efforts given by those attendants are mostly neglected.
The journey from Somalia to Hyderabad takes long time to process, there is much waiting time for the visa and there is no Indian embassy in Somalia, all the people who are willing to acquire Indian visa must travel from Somalia to Nairobi or they have to go through an agent/broker who charges huge amount of money for the visa, after receiving the visa the flight has to be scheduled accordingly which also takes long transit because there is no direct flight from Somalia to India, the full duration of the journey is approximately 18 to 20 hours.
FERTILITY
15–20 percent of the patients coming from Somalia to Hyderabad are fertility patients who were unable to conceive naturally in long marriage life, some of them come too late which will be very challenging for them to conceive even after trying multiple times because the success rate of such treatment is affected by the age of the woman who is trying to undergo the IVF (In vitro fertilization) procedures, some women come when they are very close to menopause.
The most common type of assisted reproductive technology is IVF, which is a process they first retrieve an egg from the ovaries than develop in a lab after ejecting into it with the sperm of the husband, after it develops into an embryo then they shoot or inseminate the fertilized embryo into the uterus of the wife, this whole process takes 3 weeks but the preparation might take months.
The remaining 60 percent of the patients are composed of different categories including cancer, orthopedic, pediatrics and many others.