Dusty day

Hello to all of you out there still with me on my not so adventurous Indian Adventures!

I’ve started to get really excited about coming home, I’ve started to think of all my friends and family that I will be seeing and the yummy food I’ll be eating every day! Things here are ok, I’ve been left alone though for 2 weeks now as Terry has gone back to the States. But that’s ok, I needed a break from him anyway, but this is the first time I would have lived completely alone. It’s not that bad, as we have moved into a house next door to the office of HRFDL. We have a massive house, for 2 people anyway. The house is a little strange, in that it is 2 complete flats, with a door to separate, we have both flats, so we have 2 kitchens, 2 bathrooms, 2 bedrooms and 2 living rooms. We also have a flat roof with a giant thatch structure on top to keep the house cool. Oh, we have a small garden with 4 banana trees, but I think the growing bananas are property of the landlord, not us. We have a good deal on the house, it is common here that if you rent, you either pay a monthly rent, or you pay a lump sum at the start of your 1 years contract, and get that same amount back at the end. At first I didn’t know what the benefit would be to the landlord if she had to return our Rs 100,000 (£1300) at the end of the year, but interest rates here are high, and Rs 100,000 is 1/10 the value of the house. They use this money for investment and get a much higher return than they would if we were charged the Rs 2000 (£25) a month rent. We are pretty set up now, we bought a new TV and have cable set up for a mere cost of Rs 100 (£1.30) a month. The picture is not very good though and neither are the American channels we get, but I guess it’s better than nothing. Our house came with ceiling fans in each room and an a/c unit, which we don’t use. We bought 2 chairs made from cane, mine is a swinging chair which is cool as there are many hooks on the ceiling. It’s also nice that we are next door to the office, it cuts down our chances of road accidents and saves petrol money. We have a contract on the house for 1 year, so to answer your questions about when I’ll be returning home to England, apart from my break, I may be in India for at least another year.

This does depend on a few things though. I am not so sure about working with HRFDL and Terry for 1 year more! I try and take one day at a time! Still we have to push hard to get things achieved, but we are now volunteers directly for HRFDL and Project SEED, the organisation Terry and I formed as gone into the background. This means that we can push the agenda better and demand time from the seniors. But nothing really has changed. I found out that many staff members are not highly motivated and that their capacity is much less than what is needed to tackle such a big problem. Knowing that I will be here for some time I have stepped up my Tamil learning, but still people don’t understand me when I speak. Tamil is one of those languages that a subtle difference in pronunciation of a word can make it totally incorrect. It’s very hard to learn a language when you can’t even hear the differences after you directly repeat from someone, let alone when you try and string a sentence together at another time!

So what work has been going on? We ran a survey to characterise the social scene of the Dalits, as well as what affect on different aspects of their life the tsunami has had. Using 50 student volunteers we went to about 5200 families in 46 villages. Only it wasn’t done very well, and there was a lack of organisation in the office. It seems that the volunteers didn’t even go to the villages they were supposed to, and some even went to non-affected villages. Also there was no checking system as the surveys came back in, and no designated place to store them. So I hunted round the office to try and find these surveys. I found some in a cupboard, some in the back room, some on a shelf, some on a chair and some in a box, along with other old surveys covered in lentils! From all those I could find there was only 2000 returned. I had a look through them, obviously not being able to understand the Tamil, but can see whether the information has been collected in the right way. It hasn’t. We want to scrap this and start again with a new and improved survey we have designed, but the volunteers are not willing to go back out to the villagers, and it seems the people of the villages are now expecting something to be coming their way seeing as they took the time to be interviewed. So these surveys are sat on the floor of our house, with no real useful information in them. I am going to push the staff here to try and salvage some information from them, which can be used in showing need when writing project-funding proposals.

The Indian government has actually hampered our efforts. When Terry and I first hooked up we were working with a coordination centre in Nagapattinam, the most affected district in Tamil Nadu. At the time we didn’t know that the government set up this coordination centre. They asked us for a list of all affected Dalit hamlets in Nagapattinam as they were to collect GPS coordinates to feed into a Geographical Information System (GIS), basically a computerised mapping programme. We told them we would give them the list of hamlets if they would give us the coordinates in return, as we have another organisation (Auroville) willing to do GIS for us. The agreed, and ever since have been putting us off and directly lying to our face saying that they will and that they have already sent these coordinates to us. It’s very frustrating when organisations can’t work together for a common cause. This same coordination centre that we are still waiting for coordinates from as said that they want the information from our survey, but they have lots of money and are not even willing to give 1 rupee towards expenses incurred when collecting the information.

Blah blah blah, anyway, you may have noticed that my writing has slowed down considerably, and that’s because there’s really nothing to report. My days are spent working on various projects, my evenings spent cooking, reading and watching movies and the national geographic channel on the TV. There are 2 new workers with the organisation who speak good English, so that’s good. One is studying to be a pastor the other is here to design a website for the organisation, so will only be around for a few weeks.

I apologise that me e-mails and blogs have become boring, but I guess it’s a bit of a reflection on what’s going on here! I am generally fine though, as long as I am busy and feel we are making some kind of progress I shall stay.

I hope that you are all doing fine. I will try and organise a bbq for either sun 31st July, or 6th or 7th or July and hope to see as many of you UK guys there. It’ll be at my parents place in Burford, Oxfordshire and you are all welcome to stay the night. I have to see with the dates, I have to attend a wedding on the 30th, and don’t know if the party will span over to the following day. If this doesn’t work out I’ll be coming to London for a couple of days during the week so can see you Londoner’s then. A cool thing is I have a cousin from Quebec, who’s living now in Montreal, who I haven’t seen since I was 11. He’ll be coming to England for a couple of weeks when I’m home.

So signing off now. Counting down the days until I holiday in Sri Lanka and then come home!

Byeee Big love to you all
Ruth xxx