Having to search out and then do follow-up with patients scattered in many different parts of these densely-populated slum areas can be quite time consuming, to say the least. Most these children live in poor slum-areas, where there is no telephone and sometimes their huts are not even numbered, making them very difficult to even locate in the first place!
So it's far from a case of following a map and just driving up to the right house in these slum areas. Visiting means to leave your vehicle somewhere along the main street, then continue on by foot into an area of sometimes 10-50,000 residents! Some lanes --space between one row of houses and another-- are sometimes not much wider than one meter (3 ft.). These lanes are also home to open water pipes and usually a drainage on the side of the path. Walking through such a labyrinth is sometimes like hop scotching through an obstacle course, while at same time guessing where to go!
Thankfully, after a few visits, people recognize us and are often very helpful in guiding us to where we need to go. Besides the obvious changes that we see take place before our eyes, another pay-off is the phone-calls we get every now and then of patients who have received treatment at some earlier date. They are so eager to share their good news with us: that they now working, have a better job and are learning something new, and leading an independent, useful and happier life.