Swoosh!

Things here with me and work have slowed down to an Indian’s pace. It’s now been 3 weeks since leaving CARD and working for Dalit peoples. We are Project SEED, basically free lance workers joining with different organisations giving our expertise (well, this is more Terry than me!) to make them more efficient and fight government and NGOs to provide support for the marginalised tsunami victims. It’s highly frustrating that more than 3 months on after the tsunami basic needs still haven’t been addressed for ore than 200 villages (that’s more than 75,000 people [exact figures in next update]). The Dalit people who lost their sources of income after tsunami, were exploited marginalised workers anyway, earning around Rs. 50-80 (60p - ₤1) daily to support an average of 3 children. Immediately after tsunami those whose homes and possessions washed away went to live in camps. They left these camps on 2nd Feb and went into varying quality temporary shelters. I haven’t been to many Dalit villages yet as it’s not good for their morale to have 2 white faces show up (well, you’d all say I have a brown face, but compared to the locals I’m still undefined white!), and although we are working for them, they can’t see this, besides it biases them, when they think they have foreigners working for them, they just see big opportunities and things here are very slow, and we can’t offer them what they want anyway.

Anyway – the Dalit issue, because they haven’t suffered the same type of losses as the fishermen it is considered by most that their need is not as great. This of course is totally unfounded. At present we are working with an NGO called Human Rights Forum for Dalit Liberation (HRFDL). They are a grass-roots organisation run by Dalits for Dalits. Their hearts are totally in the right place, but their practices always seem to just miss the mark. They are an advocacy group mainly, trying to rally the government into making positive changes for the Dalits. The have 175 smaller NGOs working under them, these too are grass roots organisations. Terry and I have been working with them for 2 weeks and have been once or twice a week. It’s pretty frustrating working with them, but it’s vital that we do because of their established network, rapport with the villages and knowledge of the political situation.

Organisation is such a major problem with grass roots organisations, and HRFDL is no different. They have collected over 12,000 surveys, which are hand written, the information from these haven’t been put onto any kind of computer system. They waste so much time going back to conduct surveys for information they probably have, or should have collected at the same time as collecting other info. They don’t even have an index of questions and only sometimes you’ll be ale to find summaries for the masses of data sets already collected. So this is one problem, stacks of useless data. Another is attention to detail and unawareness of the importance of good data. For example at present …oh, and this brings up another point… sorry, for example we are putting a proposal into the local government to finance a food / cash for work programme for 25 villages in critical need. These villages have only received 25kg of rice since leaving the camps on Feb 2nd. It is estimated that a family (average 5 people) needs 70kg of rice per month ( I know this sounds a lot, but as I’ve sid before, about 95% of their diet is rice, it’s not ideal, but when doing heavily labour work in 40C heat, you need something to keep you going. It’s actually a worry of mine how unvaried and nutrient deficient their diet is, but this will be addressed later). Food / cash for work is a programme where the villagers are paid Rs 54 per day and given food for themselves and their family. The work undertaken is usually manual and will help the community. The projects we are running involve road repair and draining and of salinated ponds and digging of new ones. Terry and I wrote the letter to the government, explaining the critical need of these people, and HRFDL were supposed to supply the supplementary data required to substantiate our request. We went through it today (mon 18th)and there were so many mistakes made. The format used for the table of information was also not the most intelligent. But big mistakes were made, such as adding an extra 0 onto populations, but not consistently, so a village with 70 families for example, might then have in the box next to it a population size of 3500, rather than 350. Totals were even added and massive mistakes like this weren’t picked up. If you go to the government with a report with mistakes in the data, there was even one value missing in the village total population, and although not filled filed in, a total had been calculated anyway. If you go with flaws like that in your data your integrity will be questioned and the likelihood of you getting the project money even more unlikely. Corruption here is such a problem that the more transparent we can be, the more likely we’ll get money. (Just as a note for interest, a friend working on another Dalit food / cash for work programme has told me they have secured Rs 720,000 (₤9000) from the local government, but before the money reaches them, about half would have made it’s way into the pockets of government officials!).

Another point of our frustration relates to communication. We went to see HRFDL last week, and they told us “it’s all well and good you guys wanting to do micro-enterprise with the villages, but these guys have a critical need now. They have no food, no clothing, or supplies. Kids are dropping out of school and illness becoming common. There’s a more urgent need that needs to be addressed. We should do food / cash for work.” We absolutely agreed with them, our micro-enterprises won’t be getting started until June /July, if the people are starving now, let’s look at the short term in how to feed them. SO we start our letter to the local government, hearing from the guy who’s got Rs. 20K for programmes, the government’s interested in supporting programmes, but you have do do the ground work and come up with ideas.. Today when we go HRFDL (their offices are about an hour away (32km)), after having e-mailed a copy of proposal letter to them at the weekend, they tell us that our letter is ok but that they have actually already requested the programme for the 25 villages in March and again in April. So our nice introductory, what we thought first letter was a total waste of time, (as I believe their previous 2 requests have been) as it really should be a follow up, - hey, guys, this is serious, give us the money now, kinda letter. Communication here is such a problem, and there is only one guy in the organisation who speaks good, almost fluent English. Problem is, is t’s one thing to understand the words being said, it’s another to understand their value and the real meaning. Things are misinterpreted so easily and things we say with importance aren’t taken in that way.

Also, Indians are very positive optimistic people, actually, for now let me just say Tamilnadians as I don’t know enough to make that statement. We need to get hold of maps which mark on them location of all the Dalit villages, other villages and towns. For a week now, it’s always, ‘yes, we’ll be able to get it tomorrow…tomorrow…tomorrow”. We need to know the truth for things, as they only serve to slow us down in the long run. Oh, as if enough survey’s haven’t already being conducted, the survey of all surveys is hopefully going out at the weekend. And it seems we came in just the right tie too. I saw a copy of the survey they wanted. It had quite a lot of information on it, but seeing as every family in every village was going to be asked it was important we got details of all questions we wanted answered. So I re-wrote it! It was very disorganised with questions relating to the same topic being in a completely random order, also the lay out was all messed up. We have a team of 50 volunteers going to conduct the survey, there will be over 15,000 recipients. HRFDL think it’s ok to keep this information in paper form, in un marked files in a random order. We however want to create a data base so we can make sense and use the data. We will design the database, actually, someone in our team who lives in Bangalore will design it, and we’ll then get other volunteers to do the data entry. We still haven’t been able to convince the top guy at HRFDL the value of doing this. He’s happy with his stacks of unmarked paper. I thin the director of the organisation actually doesn’t do them a lot of favours. He’s totally stuck in a box and can’t get out. He just likes to shout demands at the government, which doesn’t seem to do much at all.

There’s a slight ibalance with us working with HRFDL, we want to have an equal partnership, but I think that for whatever cultural reason they can’t really put their side of the argument or discussion across to us. Because they see us as foreigners coming in, and working at a much faster pace, more comprehensively and with a lot wider organise vision, they feel subordinate. That’s not how we want it to be at all. We need their expertise, we just need to know the right way to get it out of them. Oh anyway, that’s our problem. We’ll keep struggling through, it’s just so frustrating to be working in a place that has it’s systems set up all wrong, as the result is people starving and eventually dieing. The government here is so messed up, and there are many bogus NGOs, no one trusts anyone, and no one wants to work together. And as always the poorest of the poor are the ones living a life of absolute struggle.



So other stuff with me. We’ve bought a fridge!! Luxury or what! It’s second hand and the guy who sold it to us said we can sell it back to him (for about 1/5of the cost I’m sure!). We paid Rs 2800 (₤35) it seems pretty good. It’s so nice being able to have cold drinks and keep veggies for longer than a day. At first I didn’t want to get it, as I thought it was an expense I and my budget could do without, Terry even said he’d pay for it all himself (his main motivation was for beer and milk for coffee!) but I don’t feel I can let him do that (even though I know they guy is pretty rich, don’t know how rich, but he must have been making a very comfortable salary before leaving as he is just more than one year into what could be a 4 year travel and work (unpaid) trip). Mum had told me on the phone she thinks I’m subjected myself onto the poverty line. We are so far from it. The poverty line here is defined as earning less than Rs 7000 (₤87.50) per year. The value of our apartment is Rs 2000 per month, not that we pay it, and we have a gas cooker, fridge, poor quality floor mattress (with uneven stuffing) and motorbike. We live quite comfortably when compared to India as a whole! We don’t have toilet paper thou – and I won’t say what we use instead as I think the majority of you would be pretty grossed out, but for those of you that know or could guess - it’s really not that bad, you get used to it!

Oh, and we both could have died the other week!! Actually, anyone who travels on Indian roads increases their daily chances of death at least 10 fold! But this time, it wasn’t anything to do with the death defying other road users. Let me point out first to those of you that don’t know Indian workmanship is of such poor quality. In every sector people are trying to cut corners, so products aren’t well produced. Our mode of transport here is a refurbished 500cc Enfield, 15 year old police bike Terry picked up in Hyderabad for Rs 7000 (₤8.50) when it was scrap. He then spent Rs 33,000 (₤412.50) doing it up, and took 5 weeks learning how to do it (it would have taken much shorter, but as mentioned before nothing happens terribly quick in India). He had to get one with a big motor to go climb up mountains in the Himalayas once he’s done with the project. Anyway, travel speeds here are slow, about 50km per hour on an open road, you have to because of road conditions, obstacles, heat and vehicle capacity. Most motorbikes here are 100cc and Honda Heros are most common. Anyway, as we were riding to Pondicherry the back end of the bike starts to swing violently out of control. Thank God Terry’s an experienced rider or else for sure we would have gone down (oh, I should also point out, but don’t really want to as I know it’s stupid, but it’s so nice, and probably not available anyway, wearing a helmet isn’t the done thing. Terry does have one but doesn’t want to wear it if I don’t have one in case anything happens). The tube of our back tyre detached itself as the metal bit where the air goes into ripped, leaving a hole about the size of a flat bit of a screw for the air to come out of. And unlike a puncture, the air came out quick, destabilising us. We were lucky nothing was coming the other way or trying to overtake us, as when this happens there ain’t a lot of room! But all was fine, we didn’t crash, we just had a flat in the middle of rural lands. There’s no AA or RAC here, we would have had to push the heavy bike about 4km to the next town, in the mid day 40C sun! But hurray, Terry had a spare tube. It took about an hour for us to be on our way again, by which time we’d build up a fair size an audience, one of which came in pretty handy.

We finally made it to Pondicherry, an ex-French colony about 70km north, but it takes 2 hours to get there! The reason we’d gone was to meet with guys from Auroville, a big spiritual / eco / natural living commune regarding a map they had, and we wanted. It was Tamilnadu new year, so no one was working. So we went shopping instead. We went to a bakery and got good coffee and pastries. We also bought 3 loaves of whole wheat bread to take home. We splashed out in the supermarket too (most towns don’t have a supermarket, just small shops selling a few things) buying olive oil, white wine vinegar, olives, more Tropicana, butter, Terry suggested we make Pondi a weekly trip. I’d definitely be up for that!! I totally forget I’m in India when I sit up on the roof at night, looking out at silhouetted palm trees eating whole wheat read and butter and a dressed salad sipping my Tropicana orange with bottled water ice cubes! That is until a truck or bus goes by with his manic horn, reality soon sets back in!

Oh I should go to bed and stop wittering on. I’m in the house writing on the laptop, it’s 2am and we intend to leave at 8:15am tomorrow to go back to do more work with HRFDL. I can write at home and transfer this via USB to a pc with internet, pretty convenient.
I’m sorry for those you you who check my blog only to find it not updated. I can always e-mail you as I do to a handful of people anyway. If anyone’s interested to see Terry or know more about him, he actually has a trip website it’s http://www.bergermanadventures.com I haven’t yet had the chance to see it yet thou, but it should be interesting as he’s quite a story teller and rode his bicycle from Sydney to Bangkok!

Love you all. If what I write doesn’t make sense or misses out anything you think should be shared please let me know.

Until next time…
Ruth xxx

I forgot about these from Bryson...
1) Depending on the age, your pillow may be home to 40,000 microscopic mites. A clean pillowcase doesn’t make much of a difference, low temperature washing just makes clean mites! If your pillow is 6 years old it is estimated that 1/10 of it’s weight will be made up of sloughed skin, living mites, dead mites and mite dung!

2) Your personal creation - going back about 8 generations to the time of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln 250 people would have had to meet and copulate at the exact right time for you to have been born. Go back to the time of Shakespeare and you have no fewer than 16,384 ancestors. At 20 generations ago the number of people procreating on your behalf has risen to 1,048,576. Five generations before that and no fewer than 33,554,432 men and women do you owe your existence to. By thirty generations ago, your total number of forebears is over one billion (1,073,741,824 to be precise). Going even further back to the time of the Romans the number of people on whose co-operative efforts your eventual existence depends has risen to approximately one million trillion !!! We may not like to admit it, but actually we are all most like children of incest!

3) You have as much as 20 million km of DNA bundled up inside you, enough to stretch to the moon and back several times!

4) How fast a man’s beard grows is partly a function of how much he thinks about sex, because thinking about sex produces a testosterone surge.