In Their Hands

Greetings friends! I am writing to you from the steps outside the door to my room, watching the rain. The monsoons have finally delivered the promised rain and there has been steady rainfall for at least two days. You can feel the relief in the air. Every year, many farmers take loans to buy the supplies they need to plant each season and if the rains don’t come with enough force and their crops turn up short, many commit suicide as a means of debt relief for their families. This sad story is replayed year after year and this year, and tensions were high because it has been an especially dry monsoon season. There was talk about the farmers and what the villagers could do to convince them not to take their own lives. Thankfully, the skies have opened and I hope they stay this way so that no planter looses another wink of sleep. This will be my last blog post as an intern of Navsarjan Trust. My time here is coming to an end and although I am ready to come home, I have a melancholy feeling inside me. This feeling started last week when I went into the field to visit a Navsarjan boarding school in a village called Sami. These trips are always my favorite. The Navsarjan boarding school model is fantastic; children from ages 5 to 8 get a real education, which includes personality development and empowerment. Most of the children who attend these schools have dropped out of government schools because of abuse. When I visited with these children they told me about how at their government schools, they never learned. Their teachers were hardly ever in the classroom with them, rather they were outside gossiping with other teachers or never came to school at all. The illiteracy rates in government schools are extremely high and most of the time parents don’t think the school fees are worth it because their children aren’t learning anything anyway. India seems to be full of these catch 22 situations. But being at the boarding schools is like a breath of fresh air. The children are taught everything from Sanskrit to geography and their appetite for learning is truly inspiring. When I asked if they liked their school, they told me that they wish they had class on Sundays too, they would rather have 7 days of learning than have a free day. On the way home from this visit, I had the opportunity to speak with Preeti, the Navsarjan Education Officer. She is a wonderful woman who spends her time touring Gujarat and making sure all Navsarjan education facilities are running according to their mission. She is also the woman who organized the Patan Children Rights Rally, which was one of my first experiences with Navsarjan (described in “Spark in the Eye, Fire in the Belly” entry). Hundreds of children shared their stories of abuse in their government schools and Preeti and her team assembled a list of grievances and all of us marched together through Patan to the Chief Magistrates office to deliver the document. It was such an incredible day. The media coverage added to the empowerment the children felt; they were really doing it, they were standing up for their rights. I hadn’t heard anything about what happened after that day in Patan district, so I followed up with Preeti in the car. When I said the word Patan she looked as though she was going to cry. Apparently, due to the media attention the rally received, the Magistrate had to do something. He called a meeting with all the principals of all the schools that were named in the list of grievances and told them to “make the problem go away.” The principals in turn went into the communities and threatened the Dalit families whose children had participated in the rally. The families were told that if their children kept “acting up,” they would no longer be welcomed at the school, nor would any of their siblings. And so the complaints have stopped. The demands for rights have stopped. The children and families have been pushed into a corner and the empowerment has stopped. When I asked her why this was tolerated, why the families were scared of these men, she replied, “Because all the power, everything is in their hands. If a family stands up and doesn’t quiet down, they cannot buy milk. Then the next day they cannot get water. All the power is in their hands.” And so here we are, two months later, in a worse state than when we started. Something has to change.
And so with these thoughts floating in my head, I hopped on a plane to Bangalore to attend the National Conference of Women in Governance. Manjula is founding member of this network and invited Vivi and I for the second annual meeting to help with the logistics of the programming; little did I know this meeting would be a brain storming session on the same thoughts that were racing through my mind. For three days, I was in a room full of women who are active in politics and civil society and who represent marginalized communities. They ranged in age and every other possible difference you could think of, yet they were together to discuss how this network could be an agent for change. WinG (Women in Governance) seeks to assist in getting women in to leadership positions, both in their local Panchayat (village councils) and at the municipal level. We discussed human security, customary laws, personality development, and legal action that can be taken to get women’s voices heard. Over and over again we came back to the same problems of implementation. The laws are there, but access to them is make believe. India has been concerned about its image for sometime and has some very progressive documents under its belt to claim that it is a liberal, equality driven nation; the reality is quite the contrary. I listened and feverishly wrote down the brilliant words that flew around the room. I was in awe of these women and honored to be among them. I was even invited back to work with a few of them on future projects regarding womens rights. This interaction lessened my feelings of frustration and hopelessness. My heart is broken for the children of Patan who dared to speak out only to be silenced by fear, yet I met 40 women who had similar experiences as children and continue to fight as adults. The power may be in “their” hands as Preeti says, but “they” better watch out because a collective voice of discontent is growing in “their” backyards. The potential for change is great, and the personalities of the change makes are even greater.
On the 27th of July, Vivi and I will be embarking on journey across India. We have booked buses, trains, flights and taxis to assist us in our travels. I hope to see more than the tourist highlights of India, I hope to see the rich variety of people who call this home. Upon completing these travels, I will be retuning to my home and to all of you who make it that. I cannot wait to see your smiling faces and to tell you how I missed you! Stay tuned for travel highlights in my final blog entry!

Building People

Namaste friends! My apologies for not writing for awhile, I have been traveling and chose not to subject my poor laptop to any more hardships than I already have! But I am back now and ready to tell about my most recent adventures. During the Spring semester in San Diego, a colleague of mine at school, Upendra Malla, organized for Vivien and I to attend a week long conference in the capital city of Hyderabad in the southern Indian state of Andra Pradesh while we were here in India. Vivi and I didn’t really know what to expect from the conference entitled “Community Driven Sustainable Development,” but we took Upendra’s word for it and signed up. As the time approached for the conference, Vivi and I began looking into the city of Hyderabad in my trusty Lonely Planet travel book and we discovered that it is the official pearl headquarters of India! This exciting fact along with a significant list of other “Must See Sights” persuaded Vivi and I to leave Ahmedabad a few days early to explore the city before reporting to the conference. Our travel there was trouble free and we were instantly satisfied with our choice to come early just by the decrease in temperature. Central and Southern India are much more tropical than the north part of the country and we walked out of the airport to raindrops floating on a cool breeze. We were in heaven. We get to out hotel and dropped our stuff off and set out to explore.
Walking the streets we noticed that there were hardly any women and the ones we did see were covered from head to toe in black burkas (long sheet like coverings that cover the entire woman’s body except for a slit for her eyes). I knew that a few of the sights on our list of things to see were mosques, but that didn’t translate into me thinking about the city as Muslim. It is interesting because I had learned before coming here that India is 95% Hindu. I thought wow, 95%...I may meet a few Muslims or Buddhists, but they’ll probably be so few and far between that I wont even remember. Well 5% of 1 billion people is a significant population and I now know that Hyderabad hosts the majority of the Muslims in India…approximately 5.5 million. This was the first time that Vivi and I were traveling completely alone and I want to say that I realize the events I will describe could have happened in any city, in any religious context. I only bring up the religious factor because something very important about Muslim women became evident to me in Hyderabad. Throughout the two days we were there, Vivi and I regularly feared for our safety. We were followed by various men at various times; when we were in large groups we were pinched, grabbed, smacked and pushed around; the cat calls (or Indian equivalent) never ceased, the entire time we were in a public place. Overall, we stood out like a sore thumbs and the men of Hyderabad capitalized on our inexperience in this situation. The men of the villages we visit are intimidated by us, and rightfully so. We go there to talk to them about why their wives are forced to walk 5 kilometers to get water two times a day while they lay around and rolling tobacco. We are always respectful to them and they return the favor. The men in the city were of a different breed. I purchased a pashmina shall to cover my head with in hopes that I might receive less attention…I might have worked if the shall covered all the way from my ankles and wrists. As I walked through the streets of the bazaar, my shall and purse clutched to me for dear life and my eyes lowered enough that I would avoid eye contact with any voice hollering at me, I noticed a group of women walking in their burkas, all holding hands. I get it, I thought. At that moment I would have happily, thankfully even, traded my capris for their all-covering garb. People call it oppression, maybe. People call it fanatical, maybe. Women call it safety, absolutely. The whole argument of the burka was right there in motion in front of me. These ravenous men calling out to me and the burka women strolling the streets safe, unnoticed (except by me); it was a perfect explanation to a topic I have heard debated a hundred times. I wondered who decided on the burka, the imams because they knew what the men were thinking as they saw women, or the women because they knew what the men were thinking when they looked at them. Chicken or egg. Whatever the case, I learned more from the harassment I received on that trip than I ever expected to.
After our two days in Hyderabad, Vivi and I hopped on a bus to Warangal, a northwest province of Andra Pradesh. We were reporting to the Bala Vikasa People Development Center for our training. We tried not to talk about what we expected the conference or Bala Vikasa (the NGO hosting the conference) to be like; we have learned that the best way to enjoy India is to not have any expectations. Well it blew us away. The campus of the training center was large and pristine. Our rooms were air conditioned, equipped with wireless internet, running water and western toilets. I just knew it was going to be a good week! The conference was filled with mostly NGO professionals from all over South Asia. Vivi and I were the only two from the US…you can imagine the questions/stereotypes we faced throughout the week. We met in an actual meeting hall and sat at tables (unlike the other Navsarjan meetings I have attended that are conducted while sitting on the floor). The director of the NGO, Mr. Reddy, greeted us on the first morning and told us that we weren’t going to be learning about how to build buildings this week. Rather we would learn how to build people. Bala Vikasa has been incredibly successful in South India assisting communities in building different projects (mostly water purification plants) that are completely sustainable and revenue generating. They do this by only assisting communities that seek them out and by making the community raise at least 50 % of the total cost of the project. They host meetings and capacity building trainings prior to starting any physical work in a village and they require at least 40% womens involvment in all project planning and implementation. Very impressive. They told us the real story of their organization. About how they started with a needs based approach and would go into villages like a charity and give away money. But a few years later those people still didn’t have drinking water or enough food. They weren’t doing anyone any favors. So they switched to an “Asset” based approach, which focuses on the existing positives within the community to mobilize them into positive change. They build people’s capacity to change their lives. The weeks worth of lectures and discussions taught me incredibly valuable lessons that I think are topic neutral. Development in this manner is not just for NGO’s that focus on development projects, it’s for all of us that look at the world and see what it could be. The other participants and I sat around after class and talked about how exciting these ideas are. I, of course, was the least qualified person of the conference. I sat at a table of women who are human rights activist from Sri Lanka…talk about interesting conversation. More than half of the have been jailed for their work. One of them was the first woman to become a partner in a law firm in all of South Asia. They were acclaimed writers and journalists who enlightened me about their people’s struggles and the ways they found to cope with the sadness they’ve seen. I am forever grateful to Bala Vikasa and to my dear friend Upendra for giving me this experience.
On a final note, Vivi and I were able to plan for the rest of our time in India with the help of the Bala Vikasa wi-fi internet. On July 30th we will be leaving Ahmedamad (west coast of India) and traveling to Kolkata (east coast of India) by train. Along the way we will stop in Jaipur, Delhi, Agra, Varanasi, and Bodhgaya. Our last trip will be a flight to the tea-producing Himalayan town of Darjeeling (which I am most excited for)! There are many adventures to come, but the greatest of them all will be coming home to all of you! Namaste my friends!