“It’s the only livelihood around here…”

“I ask for a moment’s indulgence to sit by thy side.
The works that I have in hand I will finish afterwards.

Away from the sight of thy face my heart knows no rest nor respite,
and my work becomes an endless toil in a shoreless sea of toil…”

-Rabindranath Tagore

Tagore is a Bengali poet, but his words often resonate with me and with the work we do here at Dasra, in Mumbai, in the South — anywhere. I read this poem of his, “A Moment’s Indulgence,” after I got to Bombay, which was directly after a week spent with ROSE, an NGO that forms federations of fishermen in eastern Tamil Nadu, and more recently, have been helping the fishing communities of Nagapattinam rebuild their livelihoods after the tsunami.

It’s a long road. Most of them lost everything, including their ration cards, the official documents that qualify them for government aid, and their registration cards as legal fishermen. ROSE is working on re-registering them and getting them access to government schemes.

Some of these people have been living in corrugated tin shelters for over a year. The shelters, donated by NGO’s and in some cases, government agencies, look like this, and sometimes house up to 12 families:

On the beach, you can still see the workings of the local fishing economy. The men go out for prawns at about 4:oo or 4:30 am, and are back by 11:00 or 11:30, and they spend the rest of the day selling their catch, napping, playing cards, and in the case of a few, building new structures to replace the damaged ones in the community, or serving on the local panchayat council and meeting with NGOs.

The women are the ones who buy the shrimp from the fishermen:

All of the women from Chinnanguli, where most of these pictures were taken, sell to a conglomerate called Nila Seafood Private Limited.

The women get Rs. 120 per kilo (about $2.60) for small prawns, Rs. 150 (about $3.20) for medium, and about Rs. 240 (about $5.10) for large prawns. Here’s a woman showing the difference between small and large prawns:

That’s actually relatively good money for this area, and the prawns are marked up a lot when they enter the consumer market. The problem is mostly the limit on how many kilos the fishermen can catch. Most of them lost boats and nets in the tsunami, and are still building up their damaged houses.

This fisherman, in Tranquebar, lost two children in the tsunami. His description of that day is below the photo…

On a normal day of work, Mr. Mariappan, a fisherman and father of two, drags his nets for prawns three times before going back to shore. On December 26, 2004, he remembers, his first two casts were normal, but the third time, his nets came back oddly twisted. Puzzled, he looked landward at his village of Vellakoil, a tiny fishing hamlet in the Nagapattinam district of Tamil Nadu, and realized that his house no longer there. It had been swept away by three massive waves that didn’t distinguish between houses and trees, animals and human beings.

He rushed in to the shore, where he found his sister-in-law, holding her two children in her arms, one of them already dead, and the other struggling to breathe. “She gave me the child, and I pressed its stomach to pump the water, and I saw that mud and water together were coming from the child’s mouth,” he recalled somberly. “The child lived, but so many children died and we were helpless to do anything for them. The only skill we had before the tsunami came was that we all knew how to swim.”

Here are some more faces of the fishing community in Chinnanguli:

(showing me scars from when the tsunami dragged her over 100 meters through a patch of thorn bushes)

 

 

 

“I was born in the village and I would have died in the village…”

One of Dasra’s many projects is working with a women’s organization called SEWA.  SEWA originally began as a trade union for poor self-employed women. It has expanded in the last 34 years to include a variety of services geared towards working women. One area in which they focus attention is on providing day care services, which allows women to work a full day, knowing their children are well taken care of.  Dasra was brought on to help develop a strategic and sustainability plan for their BalSEWA programme (child care).

Deval and I took the train up to Ahmedabad, Gujarat to see the day care centres and meet with the senior management of the programme. Prior to our arrival, the BalSEWA programmes had been hit with a funding cut due to factors beyond their control. They used to recieve funding that paid 50% of total costs for 36 of their centres and 100% of 69 centres. As you can imagine, this came as quite a shock to management, realizing that they no longer had funding for the majority of their 132 Ahmedabad day care centres.

When we arrived in Ahmedabad, BalSEWA staff were in the middle of talks with the women teachers from the 132 centres (there are 3 teachers at each of the centres).  In light of this, we were taken to see some of the urban day care centres, as well as the rural centres in Kaira district.

We had a great day being taken around by Sonalben to see the centres.  Some of the centres were located in teachers’ homes in refurbished slum communities, while others were located on busy streets right outside of slum communities.  The teachers and children were welcoming to both Devalbhai and myself. It was a bit sad for me to see some of the children cry when they saw me, but its happened to me before in China, so wasn’t completely unexpected. I can only assume that I was the only foreigner they had ever seen or I just really am scary looking! 

We were able to have discussions with the teachers and in some centres the parents of the children.  These discussions gave us quite a bit of insight into how much some of these women rely on these services.  The women that use these centres make 30 rupees a day working in tobacco fields, beedi factories, construction, etc. (46rupees =1dollar). These women make almost nothing and then pay the centers 30 rupees a month to take care of their children and feed them 2 nutritious meals a day and a good snack. (This is one of the biggest parts of SEWAs model – serving wholesome well balanced meals that the kids would not normally get).

After two long days of visiting the rural and urban centres, it was time for us to meet more of the BalSEWA staff.   We were told in our meetings that SEWA had decided to let go of 69 centres (the ones funded 100% by the govt) because they did not  follow the SEWA model – these centres operated for only 3 hrs a day while SEWA centres are from 9-5 (enabling women to work all day).  It was a tough decision for SEWA, but they felt they had no other choice.  Now it was time to decide what to do with another 36 centres.

The biggest moment in our trip was when we were allowed to sit in this meeting with over 100 teachers from these 36 centres.  The purpose of this meeting was to give the teachers a choice in what to do, as SEWA fully believes in letting their members participate in their future. Their choice: stay with SEWA and face NO salary indefinitely (until SEWA can find a way to fund these centres) or have their centre run by the municipal corporation and earning a maximum of 1000 rupees per month.  Additionally, if they chose to go with the municipal corporation, one of the three teachers would be fired as the government run centres would only accommodate 2 teachers. 

 It was so moving and humbling.  The teachers at these centers make 500 rupees (11 dollars), 1000 (25 dollars), or 1500 (35 dollars) per month based on seniority. The women who are the teachers used to be “daily wage earners” and were completely uneducated. But now, because of SEWA they have been educated, they are given access to health care, insurance, support groups, ongoing training, etc.

So the meeting…. basically these women came together to figure out what they are going to do.  SEWA told the women that the donations that parents pay (30 rupees) will have to go to feeding the children first and then anything left over will be used for the teachers salaries. This is an enormous decision for these women. Some knew right away, some were very upset and not sure what to do. The women got up one by one and starting talking about what was going through their mind. One woman said “I was born in the village and I would have died in the village if it wasn’t for SEWA. Now I am educated and all 4 of my daughters are educated and have hope for a better future. I have no choice but to stick with SEWA. I am willing to work indefinitely without any pay”

Another woman got up, this lady was probably in her 60s or so.. “I use my whole salary to pay for my grandson’s medications. He is very sick and without my wage he may not live. I have been with SEWA for 25 yrs. When i first started I worked for 2 years with only 1 or 2 rupees donation a month as my salary. I was able to survive then and SEWA helped me through everything, so now I must help SEWA through this. I will work with no salary” She said all of this while bawling crying (and of course me sitting up front with tears rolling silently down my cheeks)

Another woman got up and was really torn. She said her family would not support her working for no salary and that she did not know what to do. She said she didn’t want to leave SEWA, but she didn’t know how she would feed her family if she didn’t make money. She said she really wants to go to the corporation, but that there is no job security there and there is no real indication that she will even have a job after they take over, so she will stay with SEWA. She said she can’t afford to not get paid, so she will knock on every person’s door and beg for donations so these children can eat and so her family can eat”

Another woman said she was willing to sacrifice feeding her family, knowing that she would be helping 30+ other children/families make a living and eat. It was so moving and upsetting. I wish i could have videotaped this.. i feel like if people saw this with their own eyes they would whip out their checkbooks immediately and give as much as they possibly could.

It just kept on and on. These women are so strong. They made these decisions, knowing that their families would not support them in this and that they would have a fight waiting for them at home. But they so strongly believe in SEWA and know that as soon as SEWA can afford to pay them, they will.  I just don’t if I have ever believed in something so deeply that I would be willing to sacrifice feeding my family for it. It was truly an amazing experience being witness to this. 

After one of our smaller group discussions with SEWA staff, the women said thank you to me and Deval for being there, listening to them and being there willing to help them in their plight. And all the women started clapping. I was fighting back tears, chewing on the inside of my mouth, knowing that I could not break down when these women were so strong.. But all I could think about was how they could thank us, when what we do is so minute compared to the struggle they have and what they will be facing. I was filled with guilt about the meals and hotel that SEWA was providing for us, the payment they are making to us to do our work, etc. But Deval said that what we will give them will enable them to raise 10 fold and that we should stay focused on that. SEWA will come through for these women and we will be there to help it happen as well.

And now, sitting in my plush apartment with all of my amenities, I wonder how these women are doing and if their children will be fed next week. But I am also feeling so inspired and empowered by the strength of these women and the empowerment that they have. I look forward to being part of their future, seeing how the progress and how the BalSEWA programme fights through this and continues with their mission.

“Too far from town to learn how to read or write…”

“I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone…”

-Robert Frost, “Birches”

There is nowhere, as far as I know, in India that is too far from town to learn cricket, but I was reminded of this Frost poem as I visited “Children’s Resource Centers” in Sivagangai, near Manamadurai, because there are plenty of villages that are too far from town for the kids to learn how to read and write. This area, in particular, is plagued with horrible roads, an insufficient number of schoolhouses, and a deep-seeded tradition of child labor starting around age 12. 

The Children’s Resource Centers were set up by B.S. Vanarajan (Dasra’s Tamil Nadu project coordinator) and his Manitham Trust, a relatively new NGO that does non-formal education programming and forms “Child Rights Clubs” in the villages surrounding Manamadurai, to bolster what the children learn (or don’t get the chance to learn) in class, and to teach additional lessons about the environment (hygiene, water resource management, etc) and human rights (child labor, abuse, etc). The idea is to make the children into concerned community leaders, to help them help their villages.

All of the children in these villages are of the Dalit “untouchable” caste, and most of their families live on less than $1 a day. Vana’s mission through Manitham is specifically to focus on Dalit and Tribal (“Schedule Castes/Scheduled Tribes,” or “SC/ST”, which is an official government designation) children. Coming from a Dalit background himself, he felt it was important to emphasize the imporance of education among this particular community.

Most of the children in the CRC paid rapt attention to their lessons. They chanted the words of their readers in unison, with a low hum that sounded sort of like koranic or talmudic chant — fast, blurred, with rigid intonation. One little girl read me a story from an English children’s  book about a mouse who mistakes salt for sugar, gets a stomach ache, and has to drink curd to cure himself, but also, learns the inevitable heart-warming lesson. It was cute.

At a training session for a different NGO in Rameswaram last week, Vana asked the group of “Task Force” members what the challenges were for increasing awareness and emphasizing the importance of education among their fellow villagers. One response that came back was “There are no incentives for going to school. You don’t get a better job if you have an education.”

In saying so, this man from Rameswaram sort of summed up the plight of the children Manitham works with. Too far from town to learn how to read and write, but too far from the middle class to hope for a suitable job.

“Now, no man will ever take hold of my wrist again…”

Ms. Mutupechy, a 70-something woman from Meyyanampatti told me this as we sat on the rooftop terrace of her adult education teacher’s house. What she meant was that before, when she was illiterate, she didn’t know how to sign her name, and the only way she could vote in local elections was to stamp her thumb print on the ballot. A man would have to take hold of her wrist, dip her thumb in the ink, and press it on the paper. In her old age, she finds expression for her empowerment in the physical act of voting. She can sign her own name now. She will vote on her own, thank you very much.

I’ve been visiting villages lately in the panchayat of Usilampatti, meeting with women from the sanghams, which are self-help groups set up by the Rural Rehabilitation Center (RRC), one of Dasra’s partners. Since 1989, they have been setting up sanghams and encouraging them to talk about female infanticide, to try and prevent it. Their activities have expanded, and now they have adult literacy classes, sewing and embroidery classes, and a savings program that gives women access to a communal bank account and small loans from the State Bank of India.

With their loans, they buy milch animals, like this one.  Now, they’re making money, before they had to depend on their husband’s income to eat. Their husbands generally make about 75 rupees ($1.25) a day and spend about 50 rupees on drink. One woman told me that before she raised the money to buy a milk cow, she ate ragi kanchi, a thin porridge made of wheat flour and water, for weeks at a time. Now that she sells her milk, she gets 3,000 rupees a month and eats chapattis and vegetables every day, and meat about once a month.

 That’s enough for my first post. More faces of South India coming soon.