27 May 2020  |   04:06am IST

Samaritans of Goa put together their heads, hearts & hands to keep migrant’s miseries at bay

From managing online labour directories to secure employment for migrants, to packaging relief material, tor even sending taxis from Anjuna to Navelim, with sanitary pads for women migrants, Citizen’s Volunteer groups of Goa have been hands-on, not allowing society to wash their hands off stranded migrants in the time of the COVID catastrophe. Cafe salutes these quiet heroes who shun the limelight just to give solace to fellow humans

Nadia Menezes

Nupura Hautamaki’s pretty little home in Anjuna wears a distinct “wholesale warehouse” look these days as sacks of grain lie in the veranda and boxes of food crowd every corner of the house. For the Goa Humanitarian Helpline (GHH) volunteer, this food bank is a lifeline of the cause. 

In Salvador do Mundo, Nandita Deosthale’s The Learning Centre is experiencing a novel element of “hands-on education” as volunteers—friends, family members and strangers—sort and pack thousands of relief packages and cooked-food packets for stranded or travelling migrant workers.

While in Dona Paula, Miriam Koshy Sukhija and volunteers are transitioning the COVID Outreach Goa (COG) initiative from feeding migrant workers to empowering them through an Cogold online labour directory on that allows potential employers to hire them. 

As Goa struggles with its own share of the all-India, heart-wrenching plight of migrant workers left jobless, homeless and starving in their adopted states and walking to homes thousands of kilometers away, citizens volunteer groups that sprang up across the state in the early days of the first lockdown, have found themselves unable to leave their posts, despite lockdown 4.0 being less restrictive.

“We still respond to SOS calls for food and aid,” says Anurashi Shetty of COG, as Sukhija answers an emergency call for food for the migrant workers camping at the stadium in Bambolim. Hautamaki says GHH’s cluster operations—distribution of relief material on specific days at specific locations—will stop on May 30 

in view of the upcoming monsoons. “Our distribution work is carried out in the open and we won’t be able to manage it in the rains,” she says adding, “We will, however, continue to respond to SOS calls.”

While COG has shared with the state government the extensive database of migrant workers collected through its own and other groups’ relief work, many of its volunteers have stuck around as they’ve noticed the state machinery stretched and struggling to cope with the sheer number of migrant workers still around despite the thousands who have been able to take trains home.

“Apart from the migrant workers who are from states that have yet to send trains to take them home, there are many who have settled in Goa and who are looking at uncertain employment in the immediate future,” says Shetty, explaining the idea behind Cogold. 

Hautamaki says that apart from migrant workers, the GHH has been receiving SOS calls from many locals, including senior citizens living alone. Her tryst with this volunteer work in fact began with a request for help on her Facebook page for a Goan senior citizen couple from Mumbai who were stuck in a hotel in Panjim and who had not had food since lunch the previous day. “I contacted a friend who lives in there and he was able to get food across to them,” she recalls. 

Since then messages for food volunteers to distribute food or food tokens at railway stations or stadiums and even a request for transportation or payment for transportation of “2-3 boxes of sanitary pads from Anjuna to Navelim stadium” have been sent out by COG or GHH.

“Very early on we realised that there was a need to coordinate with all those doing the same work so that there was no duplication of effort,” says Hautamaki of the volunteer groups’ success at reaching out to migrant workers. 

Incidentally, volunteers have also been facing flak from some locals in some villages. “They don’t like migrant workers queuing up outside their gate, they ask us in Konkani why we’re helping these ghatis, 

they accuse us of making a mess even though our volunteers clear up after distribution, and in many cases we’ve seen how not just migrant workers but even local Goans settled in villages that are not their home villages are discriminated in ration distribution because they don’t have voter cards. The lack of basic humaneness in some instances is appalling,” says a volunteer, adding that it often leaves them very disturbed. 

Another points out to corruption and appalling incompetency in the state-run system but says there are also “many government officials and even police personnel who are hardworking, diligent and who have gone out of their way to help and are doing their best”.

For Ishita Godinho of Goa Outreach the take home from the volunteer work has been the positive support from friends and family, while Deosthale feels the smooth functioning of her “organically-formed” group of artists, teachers, musicians, etc, could well be emulated. With no leader, specific tasks are allocated to one or two people with “complete trust” and these people, in turn, get the job done through their own teams. 

“You don’t need an MBA degree or a corporate background to do this, you just need to understand what’s happening, learn fast from the mistakes you make and keep your system simple,” she says.