End of Term 1

20 September 2011

    

The children have gone off. What ever we do we can’t beat the joy of going home. The rain and wind have gone too. Silence is all around us. Even the bright multicoloured cosmos flowers, thin and elegant, cannot fill the silence with all their colours. The birds too seem to have quitened. The first term is over.
   
    



      Kamal has finished college and taken a drop of six months on our advise to roam around the country before he applies for MA Economics somewhere, which is before he sits for the IAS. He has long plans. We are looking for suggestions for a good college where the atmosphere is not laden with too much English and neo-liberal economists. He volunteered in a school run by a people’s organization and of course Adharshila where he has been brought up. He is going to spend some time in Bihar with Arvind an old friend and activist of the once famous Vahini group.

    We feel this is a natural extension of our work, to place children in good institutions in the fields of their interests. We have made a list and will try to seek admissions for higher studies for our and other deserving students.

  
      A small cat has come into our house. God sent. Freedom from rats. But she is all over the place now, only decent looking and loveable.

    We went to conduct a 5 day Education Skills course for the IIIrd year Bachelor of Social Work students at the TISS campus at Tuljapur, Maharashtra. It has about 160 students, 130 staff and 100 acres. The amount of resources pumped into an institution doesn’t necessarily mean quality education. One thing for sure, it means lot of wasteful expenditure and no use of creatively using resources. So the lesson learnt outside classrooms is of a wasteful, extravagant living with others doing all your labour work. How so ever much they may debate on the caste divide or factors of poverty and equality and other big words inside the class room. Routinizing such words is dangerous. It just might prove to be counterproductive. Words lose their edge when overused.

     We have 100 children, 10 staff and 6 acres. Every day we are thinking of improving our farm production or when will we become self sufficient in fuel wood. How can we reduce costs and improve quality with minimum resources. How will we fight these resource rich guys ? This keeps coming up again and again.

Read More

The pedagogy of social studies

     Sayonkia and Kuldeep, two master of elementary education students from TISS-Mumbai, each spend 2 weeks with us for their field attachment part of their program. Both of their backgrounds are in the social studies- history and geography, respectively. They stayed and documented projects, taught classes, shared their skills, and got a small taste of Adharshila life.

     Sayonika taught ancient civilizations to the elder students, engaged the Krishna-Brahmputra groups in a local and family history project, and documented some of our history modules. She is also a talented artist, and took some drawing classes focused on developing perceptual and observational drawing skills.

Jewelery Artifacts

The 'dancing girl' of Mohenjo Daro

Indus Valley Civilization

      Kuldeep engaged with the students over Project Map- which involved students learning about direction, space planning and measuring, map reading, and local, national, and global geography.

Students observing and drawing a
brick-made floor plan map

 Using maps and atlases
to understand where we are

A student's rendition of their own house
with accurate measurements and direction.

Read More

New Meaning of Faag

25 March 2011

One
      Faag maangna is a wide spread tradition in North India. To ask for grains is almost a traditional right of dalits in many states. In the western Indian districts of Alirajpur, Jhabua, Dhar, Barwani, Khargone etc.,five days after Holi is bhoor or gaanda dahda, literally translated – crazy days. It is adivasi tradition that groups of people dress up in interesting attires and go from house to house in villages and ask for Bhangoriya. People give grains or money or whatever they have made or brought for the festival. After five days of collection, the team has a joint feast (funded from the collections) where the whole village or hamlet eats together. Small groups of children also do the rounds. It’s generally fun time. Many teams block roads with boulders and logs and ask all those who pass by – on foot, cycle, jeep or truck or bus. Some teams of Alirajpur and Chota Udaipur and Dharagaon districts are so beautifully dressed that they are a big tourist attraction too.


Two
     People’s movements and activists have always been wary of funding agencies. But funds are needed. There is always an impasse. Ultimately many bow to the Funding agencies, taking indirectly, through agencies who are friends or not that bad etc. and keep nurturing a guilt complex at having succumbed to making a compromise. They try to work, mostly in donation mode. In spite of this having been a very important issue with activists, they have not been able to work out ways of reaching out to ordinary people to raise funds for their work. Many times they don’t have the time. Basically fund raising has to be seen as part of the political activity and politicization of people.

One plus Two
     There is no dearth of creativity and spirit at Adharshila. And being part of the Khedut Mazdoor Chetana Sangath tradition we are diehard about combining fun with politics. Jayashree decided to take to the streets during bhoor, after Holi with Adivasi Mukti Sangathan activist Bijoy bhai, a leading Congress leader Mr. Motiyani and a band of enthusiastic students and ex studs of Adharshila. A pamphlet was printed highlighting the state of the country due to the policy of liberalization. They distributed the pamphlets and explained the issues to the people while asking for faag to support various struggles taking place all over the country against land acquisition by highways, SEZs, mining corporations and the likes.

     It was also a great public relation exercise and there were some interesting interactions with people. Some reacted with much empathy like the police commissioner – who told us how alarmed he was at the 165 Adivasi suicides that came across his desk in rural Sendhwa Thana in the past year alone. Others reacted with less emotion – like a hardware store manager who didn’t see the point of what we were doing with the flyer, as all the information could be found daily in the newspapers. And others with questioning minds – What you’re doing is fine, but is it really going to change anything? I mean, if people, just planted trees that would be more change than anything. Our response to this last comment… You are so right! Come to Sakad, and see our school. What was once barren land is covered with greenery because of our students and teachers planting and raising trees.
    
      We hit everywhere we could from chai-walas to local public offices. They were people we had pre-existing relationships with, and many new friends were found.
    
     The money collected from the faag is to help people doing this kind of consciousness - raising work and to take forward the work of people’s struggles. Though our team was small (as most of our students were on break), our presence was definitely felt and appreciated.


We hope to do it even bigger next year ……….

Read More

End of year goodies!

2011 is winding down...

but we have a few posts to be back-tracked.


 Enjoy.

Read More

Diverse Actions all Around

Once again we have a small poultry with seven hens and a cock. The hens have started laying eggs. A new platform is being made to put the hen cage. The platform so the rats and snakes don’t dine on the hens. Shanta our nursery teacher has found a new passion, doing masonary work almost everyday. The cock crows regularly at 5.45 am and everyday the kids visit them and watch them eagerly, jumping, fighting and contemplate.

Shanta and others working diligently to construct the hen cage

          Sowing is complete. The amazon group had an English lesson on the farm and are trying hard to remember words like sorghum and millets and ploughing. Study has become regular for everybody. The water project is over and we are thinking of preparing a play on the theme of independence or more aptly - in dependence. The senior students said that they want to observe the weather but chickened out when they realized that it meant recording a lot of things everyday. Does anyone know where to get a hygrometer to meausure humidity ? Also they want to know how the groundwater got collected inside the earth. They also calculated the volume of a drop and the amount of water wasted in one hour from the water tank.

learning is live...

 There was a lot of frisbee playing in the week with the visitors Adam(Canada) and Nihal(Bangalore) and the INSPIRE group – 9 NRI children from the US, spending a month in India visiting NGOs.

fris! fris!

 Pumpkins, beans, gourds and ladyfinger have grown. We have planted about 50 papaya plants prepared in our inhouse nursery. Lakhs of subabool plants have grown every where. Our weeding strategy is to first weed around the vegetable plant. The rest of the space will be weeded after about 10 days when there is one or two leaves in the subabool. This will provide precious nitrogen diet to the plants. Right now we are preparing the flower beds to add a dash of colour to the green.

There was a random guy from Rajasthan, from some company who came and showed paper cutting techniques and croche work. His prize was that he sold off a few needles to the kids. It seems they are a group of about 50 young boys going around the village schools.

One of our bulls was not well. He had stopped eating. Now he is allright and is grazing. The other bull banged his horns into the cow’s head (his mother), breaking a horn. This led to much consternation as the cow is due to deliver in a month.

  Finally after a month the climbing ladder for children has been made. ..and three snakes killed.

Read More

The Beginning - July 2011

Well, finally the year has started at Adharshila.

All the rooms cleaned, most things placed in their places. Teachers know where to go when and the children too. How fast they adapt to a system, poor chaps. We have started knowing them a little, which ones come near and the ones who change course on seeing elders.

Initially we were sceptical about the number of children. Though 35 parents got there children registered in the meeting for new admissions, they did'nt turn up till one week. It was getting late and late. The monsoon was just not coming, just strong winds. People here, first think about the farm and then the children. As they have to take credit for both the ventures and of course the farm is more important. As the there was no sight of the monsoon the money lenders had stopped giving credit to the farmers not even after keeping silver. Every year at this time we think about good, free education for the poorest section of the people but stop short, thinking of fund raising as we are not into the institutional funding mode and rely on friends for support.

With no kids and no rains around we started dissecting the whole project of education, schooling and the uselessness and all the negatives and started wondering what we were doing here.

Eventually the rains came and the children too and ended all the conversations and rubbished all theories. About forty new faces, mostly boys though. Now we are around 80, twenty short of last year. Most of them are below 12 -13 years. Two have come to study for the 10^th open school exam and help in the school.

Our house too, now has a semblance of order. The rats have come down to a tolerable number. The plumbing line damaged due the uprooting of a tree near our water tank has finally been repaired and we have water in the one and only kitchen tap. Removing the tree was a very arduous task requiring hard labour of senior boys for almost six hours, done over two three days.

There is electricity, touch wood. It can come and go in a snap - very erratic like the rains this year. Actually this time of the year the demand for electricity is very less but the excuse for not coming are lightening and strong winds which damage the long wires and transformers. Valid excuse they say but we shell out for the burnt out laptop chargers and inverters. (inverter blown twice and one laptop charger gone in the past 15 days, we don’t count the mobile chargers as they are just 80 bucks).

But all this was not as easy as writing this paragraph. It took us and everybody here about two weeks and still we are on our toes. But the great thing is that we can do our own plumbing, and electricity repairs, and battery maintenance, in- house.

The children have been divided in three groups. Those who don’t recognize the alphabets and numbers, those who know all this, a little and the elder ones who have been here. There are two elder boys 8^th pass and 9^th fail, are training to help small children and about organic farming and whatever else goes on here. For starters most of the time is taken by singing and playing and vocal exercises and exploring the campus and surroundings. The main themes are rain, farming and water. So we have on the menu lot of songs, folk mostly, and exercises with water – words related to water and rain, why does water rise in a brick, which one is faster, sounds produced by water, how many drops of water my bottle can take… it will go on for almost twenty days.

And yes, we have set up our music room with two each of harmoniums, tablas, guitar and a small casio and dholak. Only thing lacking is a teacher. Please forward this to aspiring volunteers. Four children have started on the tabla and violin.

The best news at the end – Jayashree’s new venture this year is the poultry, so we have acquired three hens and cock which is crowing right now. This is being taken care of by Abhishek who went to an exposure visit to Ratnagiri, Maharashtra, to learn from the work of ANTHRA, an NGO.

Second, Majli a girl from the first batch of Adharshila has done us proud by helping Manish, in starting a new school in a very remote village with no electricity and road. The community had run a school for two years with our help but it had stopped. This year it’s on, again. Let’s see if Majli can take it forward. There are around 40 children there. She needs all support from all of us and friends.

Manish, will also be helping at Adharshila this year, while seeing the new school with Majli.

And thanks to Adam (a student of Environmental Science, Toronto, Canada) and Nihal (engineering student from Bangalore, India), who visited for a few days, for the pictures.

Bye for now. Hope to connect again soon.

Read More

New Blood in Old Huts

Since last two years it has become a tradition ( i think two years qualify for a tradition in this fast paced world) that as soon as the hostel children leave for home on holidays the children from the Achchaliya hamlet of our village take over the campus.

They had been eying the huts for a long time, while passing this way, going to their fields or grazing cattle. Yesterday the school children left and today the Achchaliya kids came and promptly asked if they could also make huts. Yes of course, you can !!

Immediately they started repairing, making new rooms - walls and roofs and floor. They got a place to live of their own. They will happily water the tomato plot, trees, draw, learn a few English sentences. We couldn't take them beyond this last time. Lets see what all they do now.

One thing is that they are going to have a haircut. This costs 15 rupees in Chatli whereas they can learn to do it themselves here for free, here. Maybe we will take a nominal cost to get new scissors.

No they don't go to school but they come to Adharshila in the holidays. Once we named this place -Pooriyaan Jaaga, meaning children' s space. It is now.

Read More