If Vandana Kolhe had not been irritated by the continuously buzzing phone, she would have died. “I picked up the call, and someone was speaking to me in an extremely calm voice,” she recalls.
“I am far from you but just a second away on a call. Don’t cry,” she heard the stranger say. Kolhe stepped back and slowly began walking toward her hut in Lonhar village of India’s Maharashtra state. “I was about to attempt another suicide, but something stopped me,” she recalls the challenging moments from 2021.
The calm voice on the phone was Accredited Social Health Activist, or ASHA, worker, Netradipa Patil.