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!