Education and Alternativ​e livelihood​s

Education and Alternativ​e livelihood​s

21.Feb.2005
 
After having found over the last weeks that there are some issues regarding relief material reaching dalit villages all along the coast, we had already planned to concentrate on those. Additionally, the dalit villages consist of landless labourers, who have no way of going back to their livelihoods, since the lands they worked on were salinated. Therefore, we have been concentrating on related issues.
 
This weekend we were only 3 to finally leave for the coast.
 
Our Agenda
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We reached Thirukkadayur on the 19th of February. We had two major points on our agenda for the weekend:
 
- Check a sample of the night schools being run around the area and find out:
    * If the enthusiasm is long-term/still ongoing;
    * What the needs/requirements of the teachers are;
    * What the requirements of the entire initiative are.
 
- Check for alternative livelihoods for the ag-based villages, specifically with reference to micro-enterprises:
    * What are the possible small-scale industries/business that can be set-up;
    * What are the activities the villagers are interested in;
    * What are the business and market feasibility issues.
 
The villages around the Thirukkadayur area are now being addressed by no NGO in particular but by the Democratic Youth Federation of India.
 
Since we had a DYFI volunteer, Mr.Selvam taking us to a set of night-schools in the evening, we first started off with a few ag-based villages to find out about the small-scale business possibilities.
 
Dalit Villages
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We visited 3 dalit villages: Pillai Theru, Chinnamanikkappangu and Karan Theru. We spoke to the villagers and found that there is this organisation called EFICOR which is providing labour temporarily to the villagers, 4 days each week. They get to work in the salinated fields, clearing debris there and also in the streets of their own village, making water-ways, etc. EFICOR has told them that there
would be work for another 3 months at least.
 
There are temporary shelters in all the three villages. Chinnamanikkappangu even has had thatched houses and toilets built by either EFICOR, SDC or some other organisation. This is better because the government-built houses are of some rexin kind of material which practically cooks the inhabitants, even in the February Sun.
 
Complaints
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The dalit villagers are full of complaints about the fishermen who live in the adjoining sea-side villages. They say that they (the fishermen) think they (the dalits) should not be entitled to relief material, compensation, etc. since they did not have much, or in some cases any, loss of life. Also the dalits think that the fishermen are getting overcompensated for the loss of their
boats, nets, etc. (we know this isn't the case).
 
The dalits (SCs) also feel that the BC-people do not allow NGOs to bring relief material to their village. In one instance, they said that some vehicles were forced to go back for fear of getting stoned. In another, they claimed that relief material was getting diverted and the fishermen were selling rice "in the West".
 
There were bitter complaints in Kumarakudi about the village officer who hasn't visited vadakku theru since a day after the tidal wave.
 

Micro Enterprises
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The micro enterprise idea was Terry's: he had already contacted a friend of his who has been involved in such activities in Bangladesh. This person: a part of the bank called "Gramin", had sent us a set of tips about how to start off this process and the first step was to ask the villagers what they wanted.
 
The villagers were rather enthusiastic about the idea of starting small-scale businesses. We told them to have a meeting, get a list of activities that they think are feasible and are interested in and let us know the next day.
 
I should say that there were really some great ideas. The most preferred idea was to rear milch-cows or goats. The argument was that they have been farmers all the while and would be comfortable. They were ready and willing to form a society and share the work and profits between them.
 
Many of them also claimed to have lost cattle to the tidal wave and not having been compensated for it, although both those claims probably need to be confirmed.
 
Quite a few of the women either claimed to be already trained or wanted to get trained in tailoring and to be given a tailoring machine and a ladies' bicycle each.
 
Many people also wanted to do retail vegetable/fruit business, either from a small kiosk or using a bicycle.
 
Some very valuable and out of the way ideas were: arranging for a brick-factory which would employ 300 people; auto-rickshaws for some; diesel mechanic shop; computer/internet-browsing centre; making thatches using coconut leaves; making and selling ceramic/cement vessels; soap manufacturing and sales.
 
We have a list from each village with suggestions from each family/individual which we propose to use as a first step to talk to banks/organisations who can come forward with small, repayable loans to these people. There is, of course, a lot of groundwork to be done and support to be gathered before this heads somewhere, but we think we have taken a small step in that direction.
 
I also tried to make it abundantly clear to the villagers - their enthusiasm for this was unbounded and I didn't want to give them false hopes - that this might be a lengthy process spanning months and they shouldn't expect something the next weekend.
 
Night Schools
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Mr.Selvam, who seems to have played, and is playing, a huge part in the night-schools initiative, took us to the various centers in Kumarakudi. Kumarakudi, consists of various parts: vadakkuth theru(North Street), therkkuth theru (South Street), mEla theru (High Street), the rather creatively named "pudhu roadu theru"(New Road Street), etc.
 
Each of these areas has two or more teachers identified and these people get all the kids together and teach them sometime between 5pm and 8pm. We found that the classes went on for at least 2 hours. All the teachers have either finished 10th standard or 12th standard, in some cases they are doing their 11th or 12th standard right now and they prepare their evening lesson hurriedly after coming back from school themselves everyday!
 
Apart from this, they have classes from 10am to 1:30pm and again from 4pm to 7:30pm on both Saturdays and Sundays.
 
The kind of initiative and enthusiasm these kids, for they are all nothing more than kids themselves, show in teaching the children has to be seen to be believed. Most of the teachers are girls, some of them have their own child or children sitting in the front row of the class. One lady, having no other place to conduct the class, takes it in her own front-yard.
 
Requirements
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When asked, all except one who has done his DMIT, said that they didn't care about getting salaries and they just want the children in their village to do well in studies (doesn't mean that we have to stop thinking about salaries for teachers already!). DYFI seems to have done a wonderful job in spreading the message about the importance of education.
 
Sadly, none of the classes have any of the basic necessities required for conducting lessons. All the teachers expressed the need for:
    - a shelter for housing the students
    - a tubelight for the shelter
    - blackboards, chalk-pieces and dusters
    - notebooks, bags, pens/pencils (one village had them)
    - slates for the younger children
    - a water-tank next to the class
 
Of course, they did ask for a lot more, viz., tiffin-boxes, but the ones above are priority.
 
Shelter
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We started enquiring about how a shelter can be built. We found that the village-heads in Kumarakudi vadakkuth theru were ready with the land for it.
 

Finally, after going through a learning process, the price of the shelter turned out to be a little more than Rs.3800. However, the material is ready, the construction has started and the children would have a new school-house this week, which is what is important.
 
The driver of our taxi, who was just that to begin with, got converted into a volunteer by the time we had our initiation to the night-school. As soon as the teacher, Arulselvi, a 12th std student, pointed out the near-darkness of the place, he promised to get the tubelight for the class on his own.
 
On Sunday he bought the tubelight set and installed it himself in the village. Now he wants to donate tubelights to the entire set of 34 night-schools in the area! He has also said that no matter what the size of our group over the coming weekends, he would arrange for a suitable vehicle and either find a driver or drive it himself.
In any case, he would accompany us as one of the volunteers.
 
All the 34 night-schools in the area have these necessities. To get these, it would cost about Rs.1,70,000. If you are willing, you can consider this as a call for donations for this purpose. From what we have seen, we can say that there is enough drive in these people to keep the initiative sustained. However, some basic things are needed. We will show accounts for each paisa spent on this.
 
Higher Education
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There were a few people who came to us and asked for help for their sons or daughters who were studying and there is a fear of their studies/higher-studies going to be stopped because of the loss of crop or arable land.
 
We saw the fields more than 4 km away from the shore and we also saw the salinated fields. The paddy, which was nearly ready for harvesting and would have produced a neat crop in mid-January and early-February was washed over by the sea. Now it looks as though burnt! People who were relying on the 30 to 40K which would have come from those crops in order to keep their son or daughter in their MSc course, nurse's course, etc., are now left with the prospect of having to stop their studies.
 
For one or two people we have taken all the details of the college, course, etc., down. If anybody is interested in sponsoring people's studies, we are willing to collect information about more such people so that these can be verified with the colleges/institutions and something can be done. Let us know.
 
Another Baby-81 Story
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While in Kumarakudi, we visited a baby. His dad was visiting somebody on business and lost his life while on the beach in a different village. He (the baby) and his mom were visiting his aunt in another village when the waves came. His mom pulled out a wooden draw of a cupboard, put him in it and held the draw on top of the cupboard. Both she and her sister got washed away and lost their lives. The draw floated along on the tidal wave until it hit a thorn-tree and broke. There he was found an hour after the waves receded, by his cousin (the aunt's son), partly inside the broken draw, partly hanging by his sweater from the thorns.
 
After the cousin admitted him in the city hospital and visited him the next day, he informed an aunt on his father's side both that the parents had died and that the baby was alive. When they rushed to the hospital on the 2nd day, he was missing!
 
They talk of an ordeal after which they traced the baby who had been 'sold' to another couple. Then after petitions, intervention by local politicians and 3 days of running up and down, the baby was returned to them.
 
Since then they have had offers of adoption but they have staunchly refused saying that the baby belongs to their family and there he would grow-up. Though they seem to be not that badly off, they did complain that though there was widespread coverage, including by Sun-TV, they hadn't got a single paisa. We bought a box of Cerelac, a
couple of Johnson's Baby Soap and a bottle of Woodward's Grip Water for him.
 
Though he isn't named yet, Selvam wants him to be called "Alaiarasan" since he escaped the waves.
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Well, that was all we were able to do in the 2 days that we had. We're hoping to progress on some of the ideas we collected in this trip before we head out again the next weekend.
 
best regards,
Sundar.

When the sea was boiling hot

When the sea was boiling hot.

Dated: 18/Jan/2005
 

"The time has come", the Walrus said,

"To talk of many things.

 Of shoes and ships and sealing-wax

 And cabbages and kings.

 Of why the sea is boiling hot

 And whether pigs have wings"

 

- Lewis Carroll

The Walrus and the Carpenter

 
We can talk to a small child of many things. The debate on whether pigs have wings might bring much mirth to its little heart. Games and competitions keep it busy, smiling and energetic for a few hours... but when the Sun sets, when the darkness approaches, to the hearts of the children of Chinnangudi village, and many other villages on the Coramandal coast, there comes a fear.
 
A fear, which they are now, 3 weeks since, after counseling by physicians, psychologists, monks and others, only beginning to get over. It is the fear of the sea boiling hot. It is the daunting question of why it boiled hot on that fateful boxing day in 2004 and why, after some idiot astrologer went on TV and announced it would come again on the 26th of January, others try to assure them that it won't. (Ok, I didn't really hear the astrologer myself, but some villagers told me they did, in the small TV in the tea-shop)
 
AID India
 
After the experience of two weekends, we had decided that just going to an NGO and saying that we want to help and doing piecemeal work for 10 villages in 2 days isn't really worth it. We needed to be able to take up a set of substantial activities in one village and follow them up to conclusion. Fortunately, AID India operates with a well regulated process.
 
So two of us set off on Wednesday night and reached Thirukkadayur on Thursday morning. It turned out that one AID volunteer, after spending 7 days getting a wonderful rapport set up in one village, Chinnangudi, was leaving that very evening. So we went to this place with him, there was a survey going on from AID (the voluntary organisation we have been associated with these 3 weeks) and we joined it. We found that there were plenty of things to be done.
 

Misconception
 
There is a general rumour going around that there is no more need for volunteers. As long as people just land up there and do odd-jobs, it is very easy to think this is the case. The necessity is for people to go there with a group consisting of Tamil speakers, get information about villages from AID etc., walk around and look themselves, find their own work to do, plan it and see it through to a decent level of completion.
 
If you take a close enough look, there is a lot of work to do.
 
The situation in Chinnangudi

We surveyed 44 houses that first morning and I heard 44 different stories. I surveyed 10 houses the next day and it was even worse.
 
I'll never forget how the man with five girl children, who had lost his wife to the waves, ran inside to get her photograph on her voter's id card, to show to us how beautiful she had been! I'll never forget how the man who was borne more than 2km by the waves, thrown on a tree of brambles and spent a week in hospital, could barely speak, for his emotion was choking him.
 
These guys go fishing at around 3 in the morning. At about 5:30 they are deep inside the sea. At pre-dawn, around 5:45, the sea becomes silvery, the fish are attracted by the colour and the glare is too much for them to spot the cords of the net. This is when most of them get caught.
 
On the morning of the 26th, the fishermen reached back the shore between 8 and 8:30, removed their motors from the catamarans and laid them out to dry in the Sun, and were sorting out their catch on the beach, when suddenly they looked up to see a wall of water which swept everything in its path before they could even think!
 
A few of these people don't own boats. They fish using others' and get a commission on the catch and/or salary for helping to vend the fish. A very few of them owned fully-equipped fiber-glass boats. However, most of them had catamarans. We found the boats, some of them broken, in all parts of the village: one was stuck between huge bramble trees. We found catamarans well over two kilometers from the shore, beyond the village!
 
Need of the hour
 
Rescue was done and dusted ages ago. Relief is going on rather well, with both the government and private organisations making sure that the entire village of 541 families get enough food. They have been given clothes and they seem to have enough of them. Temporary shelters came up within 3 days in front of our eyes, such is the speed of government contractors. The allegedly temporary shelters are better than the original huts some of the villagers used to stay in!
 
All the 40 families have received the compensation for their deceased. Everyone, just everyone in every village has been inoculated and all of them have been educated about drinking boiled water etc. Most of them are following the instructions to the letter. They also get a liter of milk per family every other day.
 
The need for the hour is neither clothes nor food. The operative word is rehabilitation. The perpetual questions on every villager's lips is "How long will this go on? How many days will we sit around and eat relief material? How soon can we get back to the sea where our livelihood is?".
 
They need boats/catamarans, nets, diesel-motors. That's expensive stuff. The collector openly agrees that the compensation won't be near enough.
 
"seekarama enga pozappukku edhaavadhu vazi paNNa sollunga", lots of them told me this. (please tell them to do something about our livelihood soon)
 
I heard a lot of "collector ayya kitta solli marathukku valaikkum Erpaadu paNNa sollunga". (Please tell the collector-sir to arrange catamarans) Lot of them really believe this man is their deliverer.
 
"eththana naaL ippadiyE kadalukku pOgaama irukkaradhu? naalu padicha puLLainga vandhu kELvi kEtaangaLE, avanga kitta solli gavarment kitta manu kudukka sollEn", said an old lady with thick glasses to her daughter, within ear-shot of me. (How long can we not go into the sea? Some educated kids had come and asked questions in the morning. Ask them to submit petitions for us to the government)
 
These are the questions that AID India is trying to answer, not only in the 9 villages it has taken up in and around Thirukkadayur, but also in various other parts of the state. These are the questions some other NGOs are trying to answer too. There are other NGOs, really amazingly rich ones who just bring material and distribute them. These too are needed to do exactly that until the rehab is complete.
 
Planning for tasks
 
Our predecessor, had been trying unsuccessfully for days, because of some logistics issues, to conduct some games for children.
 
The children sat around all night and wouldn't sleep a wink for fear of the waves coming back.
 
Even though people had been treated for injuries, they were following it up neither with the local Primary Healthcare Center, nor with the various private ambulances which come to their village once in a few days.
 
AID volunteer, American ecologist and social-worker Terri (the brains behind most of the things we did) and his selflessly striving enthusiastic wife Jennifer (bosom buddies for 4 days and I didn't even ask them their last name!), were monitoring all the stagnated saline water to see if mosquito larvae had formed.
 
AID volunteer Stephen, a Frenchman, was trying to make a soak-pit toilet all alone and had been rather unsuccessful since he doesn't understand Tamil and nobody understands him.
 
Terri, who was trying to get the villagers to tether together loose logs to form their own catamarans, was facing the same problem.
 
It was a sad, grim village staring at us with hopelessness.
 
Fact is that the village elders and everyone else, very reasonably too, are scared that the government isn't going to compensate them for their boats, motors and nets if they try and repair the ones which are lying around. They needed someone to assure them. They wouldn't open out to anyone.
 
Our Tasks
 
We spoke to the collector, a very reasonable and unassuming man, and he came to their village and gave them this assurance. He told them that no matter whether they had managed to repair their boats or motors, they would still be compensated. This was, of course, after much pleading on our part with the villagers and also a long session by the AID coordinator, with the village-council.
 
I just heard from Terri 5 minutes back that he got one guy to make a catamaran, repair his motor and get the thing into the sea. That should make the others sit up and take notice.
 
Our guys helped Stephen (or Tintin, as other volunteers/village kids had already named him, due to his hairstyle)  to not only complete his original soak-pit toilet but also to get two more done.
 
We got the women of the village together, who had never used a toilet before, but were willing to do so (the men, after a week, returned to the sea-shore for their morning trip), we told them how to maintian the toilets by sprinkling bleaching powder, they assured us they'd somehow get their lazy men-folk to build more toilets for them.
 
Under Terri's architectural guidance, we dug a neat canal behind the school building to eliminate the awful smell due to water-logging there. Another of Terri's ideas to get a trough built outside the school where the children can throw the remains of their lunch got implemented somehow at the last moment.
 
We got an Indian-American physician, Dr.Gurbani, who had postponed his and his son's return to the US in order to come and help, to come to Chinnangudi and look at all the people who were hurt.
 
A Buddhist monk, Daniel, Belgian by birth (imagine M.Hercule Poirot with a clean-shaven head and face and wearing a saffron robe and coolers), came around and had a calming meditation session with a section of the villagers who we though were the most scared still. This was really effective.
 
We went back to the village one night and slept on the beach, about 15 of us, so as to assure the villagers that the sea will not raise against them again.
 
We had all the children together for a painting competition, a colouring competition, skipping games, running races, a cricket tournament, all the kids screaming and laughing and having a wonderful time.
 
We got all the youth of the village to form 4 kabaddi teams and conducted a full-fledged knock-out tournament!
 
We got the local police inspector and the village president, a nice old lady, to give away the gifts and shields we had taken with us for the winners.
 
These were only the few things that we managed to do in the village we chose for this weekend.
 
The undercurrent of sadness will be there until time heals it. The fear of the government ditching them will be there until they get their money, and since they will surely not get enough to buy them boats and nets anyway, it will turn to disappointment. The children will still take time to recover from the nightly fear. Some lazy men would still rather sit around and play cards with the Tsunami as an excuse. Nobody would forget their deceased loved ones. Nobody would every forget in a hurry, how the wave had gone high above the electricity pole and how they had to drop everything and run...
 
Other Volunteers
 
Many people come from Mumbai, Bhuvaneshwar, Hyderabad, Chennai, Bangalore, etc. and they do a lot of work, as AID volunteers, in the 9 villages in the area.

There are Canadians, Austrailians, Britishers, Germans, people who have cut short a holiday elsewhere in India to come to volunteer, people who have extended their trip in order to volunteer, students who lead a hand-to-mouth existances but do whatever they can in physical labour... many many more stories of volunteers!
 
We didn't do anything great. We acheived whatever little we could. There are some people who spend 10 to 15 days in succession, take a two day break and come back! We can barely spend our weekends there. Still we did a little bit of what we could and we are hoping that Chinnangudi was that little bit happier and a little more hopeful for those 3 or 4 days of our stay.
 
Associates of AID
 
AID is associated with the Tamil Nadu Science Forum, the Pondicherry Science Forum (who have created a wonderful system of Participative Survey, which all other NGOs can usefully adopt) and the Democratic Youth Federation of India.
 
These DYFI guys are simply amazing! They are the localites of Thirukkadayur and surrounding areas. They have been working since day 1. They are still kids. Starting from boys in 10th standard. They tell stories of how they rescued people in their own village when the waves came. They removed nearly 120 bodies in 8 villages on the 2nd day when voluntary organisations hadn't even started thinking of their first moves!
 
Since their families didn't get affected, they have come to help other villages. There are two guys who have been cooking (delightfully tasty) food for all other 100 or so volunteers, everyday since the 26th of December.
 
Future volunteering from our group
 
In the last few hours before our return we found that there are still villages which haven't got all the wonderful luxuries that Chinnangudi has!! We visited a single-street hamlet of 83 families who are all landless labourers. Their lands have all been salinated and nothing would grow there anymore. The collector did assure us the ICAR is having a close look at it but nobody knows how long it would take. They're trying some experiments with cashew-growing and also there is something about gypsum soaking-up the salt. Meanwhile the dalit villagers end up not getting the milk that comes to the village. No idea how and where that gets diverted. Work on their temporary shelter is dead-slow and they are all living in tents provided by some Church in Chennai which is barely enough to hold those huge families.
 
(Amazingly, in nearly all the villages, each couple seems to have 4 children on an average! We found one couple who had 10 children!!)
 
Then there are other villages, and we can always go back to have a look at how over beloved people of Chinnangudi are going on. It does look like there is enough work for us to do in the coming weekends. We'll have to see how many people have the time this time.
 
Please contact Abhishek HK or Vishal Raval on the 1st floor of the main building, in case you are interested.
 
thanks,
Sundar.