Touching the untouchables

So it’s been a little while since last writing, and the reason is I have actually been busy and having a good time. I officially left CARD a few days ago to focus all my time and attention on working with Terry. I felt pretty bad about doing this but after the boss came down for a few days I felt I could no longer work for them under his leadership. We were in the car and he was talking to me about how he was going to change the world, and how he is the only person working on poverty alleviation. He was sounding so full of himself. I was telling him of the work that Terry and others intend to do with the Dalits, and he tells me that when his law degree is finished he’ll submit a paper to the courts telling them how NGOs are discriminating against Dalits, and how it is supposed to be illegal, then only after this will discrimination stop. As if this hasn’t already been done, there are loads of people working for the rights of Dalits and he says that only he can be the one to bring these millions of people into the focus of government and NGOs. Well, what exactly is he doing for these people? Absolutely nothing. Has he even considered the Dalits along the coats line? NO! And also he’s supposed to be all about equality, hew even named the campus of the head office “A place of equality”. What crap! When we had group meetings in the villages, the men and women don’t sit together, that’s their choice, but when holding group meetings he addresses only the men, he hardly looks at the women at all and these are the people we are supposed to be focusing our attention on. I had enough, also the new worker cum translator girl came, but when it came down to it, she didn’t really want to translate for me, and started throwing her weight as round and telling me what to do. She ordered me to go to a village with two of the non-English speaking members of staff, it’s absolutely pointless for me to do this as communication is essential, I’ve been working for 6 weeeks and know this, she’s been working for 3 days and all the new power has gone to her head. I decided I’d leave and packed my bags that same night. I then went off with Terry the next day to visit some of his Dalit villages about 50km south of Chidambaram and begin my new work.

I did feel a little bad about leaving as it was explained to me that CARD has spent a lot for me, but at the end of the day I need to do what’s right for me, I need to learn as much and be involved as much as possible in my time here and CARD were definitely not the organisation that was going to be providing that for me.

So I also left the house, I am still living in Chidambaram, in an apartment with Terry. A friend of mine here, my Singapore born friend has 2 spare apartments under his house, so he’s giving one of them free of charge to Terry and I! He said that he can’t charge us rent seeing as we’re both foreigners helping out his people, he’s extremely generous. We spent yesterday doing house things. The place hasn’t been lived in for years and it was pretty mucky, so we were scrubbing hard at the floors with brushes made from bundles of very thin twigs, and buying things like a worktop gas stove and a mattress. It’s now really comfortable for our needs. We are thinking about painting the place as a way of saying thanks, but that will have to come later as fornow we’remuch too busy! The flat is about 1.5km out of town, but Terry has a motorbike so it’s not a problem. I think because I’ll be working closely with Terry there’s no need for me to get a bike, it’d be too much of a luxury, so I don’t think I’ll bother. I could pick up a second hand bike for about £100 which is really cheap and I love riding, but I don’t like other road users here. Terry has a lot of riding experience so he’s fine. I mean I would avoid cities during the day, mmm...I’m undecided on this right now!

You may have realised that it’s been a long time since I last wrote, well long compared to the length of time between previous blogs / e-mails, and that’s because we’ve so much to do. We have to submit a report to the government in 2 weeks time stating exactly what we’re doing. So what exactly are we doing I hear you ask? We’re working purely with Dalit (poorest of the poor) hamlets and villages to provide them with micro-enterprise opportunities. Previous to the tsunami these people were landless agricultural labourers. Since the tsunami many of the fields they were working in have become so salinated that crops can no longer grow and they are out of a job. Also many Dalits would assist fishermen by launching boats and carrying nets (only a handful of fishermen are back out fishing, 3 months on after tsunami and progress is really really slow). Dalits have extremely low wages and suffer exploitation in most spheres of life. Terry has a business mind and will pitch our development idea as a business plan. It’s a very comprehensive approach he’s taking, so that all holes and queries can be filled. Most NGOs don’t do any market research, but because we’ll be working with NGOs as well as American and European corporations we need to have a top quality business plan. So first we need to do an assessment of the market, what products are selling and at what price, what’s missing and are there and niches? Our approach is for the Dalits themselves to come up with the ideas (fully participatory), we are to be just the facilitaors. We want them to come up with entrepreneurial ideas, we will help them learn how to do this, although they already have many many ideas of their own. If a person comes up with his own ideas and manages it himself he will take much more pride and care of it, it’s much better than us coming in and dictating what the villagers should do. So when we visited a few villages last weekend, we asked questions, and got the people to come up with ideas about what type of business they l like. I use the word business, but it’s a micro business so something like ownership of a couple of chickens would count. It’s preferred that people work on co-operatives, which again, they will organise themselves. It’s a real bottom up approach. We will do feasibility assessments of the ideas and scrap ideas that just won’t work. For now we’re focusing on villages on about 100km of coast line, but as of yet it’s still early days and we haven’t identified all villages, info is still being collected. We will work with other NGOs and after we’ve set up the project will hand it over to a Dalit sensitive NGO to manage.

The Dalit villages are quite different from the fishing villages. For the first time I saw terraced temporary houses. They basically look like big corrugated sheds, that have been divided in to 20 living spaces. There’s loads of them all lined up, all dark brown in colour and with little ventilation. They do have electricity however, although a constant supply is not managed. Water supply is also limited, one village we went to the water is only available for 2 hours every 2 days. It is common to only have about 10litres of water per family available daily for absolutely everything. People living in the Dalit villages have no access to heath care. They also have very little food, and what food they do have is pretty much just rice. Many children are mal-nutritioned and have pot-bellies. Also because of the heat many children developed a kind of skin rash. There are not enough clothes for these kids. These remember are the villages that got left of distribution and even other villagers (like the fishermen) stopped aid from reaching them. Most children have only half an outfit to wear, although you see many naked children as they have absolutely no clothes. For the children who perhaps have one piece of clothing, it is dirty and torn. It’s really very sad to see. They are such warm people. Terry and I went to one village and everywhere we went children would follow us around, each holding onto a finger or trying to get lifted into our shoulders. I let one young girl do my hair and make up, and tried to give her 1 rupee for doing it. She wouldn’t accept it, so I gave her my pen instead.

Anyone who has given me money, this will be spent on Dalit communities. I want to spend some of it on relief as these people need food and clothes now. If anyone is still wanting to donate all money will go to the people. Terry and I are paying our own expenses.

For now Terry and I are the only full timers, we have people who are social lawyers and corporate members who are volunteering on weekends for us. We also hope to involve volunteers from the university. I have a Kenyan friend in town that’s doing a business masters at the uni here. We tried to get him to do a market analysis project for us that he could also use as a uni project, but he has exams at the time we need him. Tomorrow we’re going to a town called Nagapattinam as there is a tsunami coordination centre there and we want to see if other NGOs are working in the villages we want to, as there’s no point to do work that has already been done. And on Sunday there is a meeting in Chennai to discuss what has been done and it will be to try and coordinate NGO’s effort.

Some NGOs have their heart in the right place, but not their head. One NGO gave a village Rs 10,000 (£125) to buy watermelons to sell, without actually providing any means for sales to take place. In India £125 buys a lot of water melons and it is expected most will rot before they can be sold! I mean what’s the point of this!? What we’re doing here is pretty unique. I was very naive of the NGO world before entering the field. I thought because they were people driven they’d be doing the best practice that they could to help the needs of the people. It’s not like this at all. NGOs and managers have their own agendas, they do things just to get funding, people are also too scared and afraid of the challenge to stand up against the system when something is not right. Often work is half-arsed, and will only be done if it will promote the NGO.

It was last night that we heard of the second earthquake. I had just turn bed off my light to go to bed and my mobile rings. It’s a friend from USA who’s working in a different village, she has just heard from her boss. The info I got was that another earthquake in the same place had just happened, and it’s possible another tsunami could be coming in the next hours. I discussed with Terry and made a few more phone calls to spread the word to other tsunami workers who might not know and went upstairs to the house owners place to ask to watch the news. I was holding back the tears and shaking as I explained to him that there’s been another earthquake and tsunami might strike again. If this were to be the case we’d have a lot to do to get people away from the coast. However, it’s something that can’t be rushed. There’s no point for already frightened people to be even more fearful, especially if nothing’s going to happen. We watched the news for about half an hour, and the advise was to contact the local gov to see what their decision of action is to be. However should a tsunami strike it would hit Indonesia first, so we’d at least have that as a warning. We then went to bed after knowing there was nothing we could do, although I really didn’t sleep well last night at all.

I’m so glad that I met Terry. He’s a pretty amazing guy, with so much passion and dedication. He has such a thirst for life and really stands up for what he believes in. He’s also really funny. Even when I wake him up for snoring, which he’s only done once, he cracks a joke. He’s really focused and knows what needs to be done, he likes to have brainstorming sessions to get lots of ideas from people. He can take an initial idea and add to it in ways I would never think of. He knows a lot about good work practices from his past experience at Genentech (possibly spelt wrong) where he worked for many years as a researchers and manager of the resource centre. He’s managed budgets of millions and millions. He’s on part of a 2 year Asia Australia trip and he cycled from Sydney to Bangkok. He was previously working in Cambodia making an assessment of poverty’s environmental impacts and when he returns back to USA, which he’s really not looking forwards to, thanks to Americans, he wants to open up his own NGO consultancy firm. This would enable him to travel and thoroughly go through under performing NGOs to find out how they could improve their practices. This is something he’s done before and has a lot of expertise on this. I’m really very lucky to be working so close to him. I’m for sure going to learn a lot. Terry talks a lot, which is fine as most of what he says is either really interesting or funny. He’s done a hell of a lot with his life and can talk for hours non stop. It’s really good entertainment for me! His down side, and only one that I can find so far is he only has about 3 sets of clothes, and lets them get a little stinky!

E-mails from me or blogs will be reduced and personal e-mails too, so I’m sorry about that, but because I’m not living in town anymore, I have to go with Terry and he doesn’t like to sit for too long in front of a computer, and I don’t want to make him wait.

My in-box is looking a little empty by the way. Somebody must be doing something interesting, and if not why not!

Write to me, and I’ll write again as soon as I can.

Love to you all

Ruth xxx

My new address is

V V Apartment
56241 Manalur
Lalpuram
Main Road
Chidambaram
Tamilnadu
608602
INDIA