Call of the Bell Bird

by Jennifer Kavanagh

  We were treated as honoured guests, with garlands and ululations. No work. We tried to swallow our disappointment, understanding that our contribution was as an affirmation of the work that was being done by the staff. Also that by visiting the women’s self-help groups, we were confirming that the work mattered and the women mattered, in the face of belief to the contrary from the male members of the community.

  The houses comprised a bare whitewashed room; there were no facilities for washing or cooking – women cooked on communal fires in the street. Despite UN developmental aid to buy back land from moneylenders, the poverty of the land on the slopes of the hills and the shortage of water meant that it was hard to survive; it was a three-hour walk to market. There were few wells and those that existed were often polluted. The landless were looked after by the rest of the village; some could not even afford rice, but ate a poor substitute.

  We visited “innovative” schools, night schools for children from 6 to 14 who work during the day. With volunteer teachers from their own community, they learn with slates and by the light of lanterns – only two for a class of twenty-five. I asked what made the innovative schools innovative, apart from the fact that they took place at night. Not the teaching methods, it appeared, but the content which was related to the children’s daily lives, the geography of the region and so on. All very practical, but pedestrian: there was little to liberate their imaginations and creative abilities.

  The women in one village seemed passive, almost cowed, and Stephen and I came separately to the conclusion that domestic violence was at the root of it. The ISARA workers confirmed that abuse was prevalent in the villages; they hoped that once the women’s groups gained strength, they would increasingly feel able to fight abuse on a collective basis. In general, though, they were certainly stronger than the Muslim women I had met in Bangladesh a few years before. Here, when asked if the men minded them having the money, the secretary of one group said, “It’s our money. They had all the say before; now it’s us.”

  On the whole the tribal people did not look much different from other Indians though I gathered that the remote villages we went to had only mixed with other villages for a couple of generations, and still kept local customs. I would have liked to learn more about the different tribes, but there was an uncomfortable vagueness about it all at ISARA, as well as a language barrier. Uriya is the local language, but few of the tribal people spoke it.

  At night we chatted with the young ISARA staff, persuading them to allow us to eat with them off banana leaves on the floor. One of them had written a report on HIV/AIDS, which was prevalent in the region. I was surprised that in a culture which is so family-oriented and in which promiscuity is rare HIV should be a problem. Apparently men have to go far afield to find work, get lonely, have contact with sex workers, and return home once a year, infecting their wives. Sufferers become untouchable. We heard of a sick 17-year-old boy, who was put in a cattle shed outside the village, not even given food by his mother.

  The other project that ISARA and Vishy took us to was in a remote coastal area devastated by a cyclone a year or so before. It was in a village of 1400 people, isolated from their neighbours by being Teluga speakers, and driven from their previous village for opposing the pushing of liquor by their higher caste neighbours. ISARA were implementing a programme of building new houses, also advising and training eleven women’s self-help groups. Though there was no outside money to give them, the women themselves were giving out loans from their savings. We were moved by their determination and the altruism of the villagers as a whole. It was the village that decided who would get the new houses, a decision made on the basis of greatest need. We were followed everywhere by a huge procession and given the most beautiful garlands. The women sang; I sang “Blow the Wind Southerly”, and a little disabled boy in an immaculate white shirt was carried to the front of the crowd and sang to us in a high pure treble. He was their star. I was always the only woman among the visitors on these occasions and it was to me that the women came, asking for help. Being treated like the Queen, partly because of my age, didn’t make me feel any less helpless.

  Also from a tribal background was the head of the next NGO that we visited with Vishy. Mr Banja had had the good fortune to be educated at a Ramakrishna mission, and felt a need to improve the lot of his own people, and of scheduled caste people in the area of West Bengal where he lives. After nearly fifty years he still feels part of that excluded community and adheres to his old practices, sleeping, as he has always done, on the floor. Mr Banja is a plump and cheerful elderly man who talks with enthusiasm, particularly about Bakcha, the NGO that he started up from scratch in 1955. All on one site, a huge compound comprises paddy fields, a high school, a primary school and hostels for boys and girls. When international aid arrived after the cyclone, he collected the sacks and, by selling them, raised enough money to build the fabric of a new school. The doors and windows are yet to come.

  The playing field of the school is used by the local villagers, and the new water supply from a 600-foot deep tube well, funded by the Japanese, benefits the local village too. The impact of the project has reached every family in the community.

  All the children there are destitute or scheduled (untouchable) caste. As the young women grew up, Mr Banja realised that their chances of marriage were poor, and he started a training programme in weaving and mat-making. I managed to talk to a few of them in limited Bangla and discovered that each mat took two days to make, for which they received RIO (about 12p). I encouraged the staff to think about self-employment from which the women would gain much more.

  Midnapore is on the borders of West Bengal and Orissa, and often misses out on the relief given to either. Mr Banja has a considerable problem with the local Communist council or punchyat, who are jealous of his success. It is through them that the government money that he is given comes, and they try every possible ploy to deny it to him. Even when he gets it, it is always in arrears, and he is left fumbling for enough money to buy food for the children. Like Vishy, he has been threatened several times, once with a gun in front of the children. He will not give in to protection rackets or submit to corruption. When we gave him a donation for the school to cover the expenses of putting us up on site, he hastily gave the money to the treasurer. He did not want to get involved in the handling of any finances.

  Prayer in action is love. Love in action is service.

  Mother Teresa

  Birbati is the eight-year-old daughter of a prostitute, conceived in the line of her mother’s work. She has had polio and also has learning difficulties, and in the mid-1990s was living with a number of other street children on Howrah station, Kolkata (Calcutta). The children spoke English, and received a broad general education from the backpackers passing through, and from the television which blasts over the station.

  Our friend, Margaret, who was then working in Kolkata, came through Howrah station every day, and was appalled by the filthy state of these children. There was on platform no.1 a water pump that had been installed by the British in the days of the Raj, and which was used by many of the people on the station. She suggested to some of the children that they might like to have a wash, but the children explained that, being small, they could not break into the hierarchy that jealously guarded the pump. Margaret and a friend, however, muscled in, and to the delight of the children, gave them a wash. The women saw this as a one-off effort, but the children accosted them every time they came through the station to do it again. Now that the precedent had been set, they managed to persuade the children and their mothers to do it themselves, and a new routine was set up.

  In 1992 Margaret and some friends set up a charity called TRACKS, which included a station school at Howrah. The children were taught on platform 8, and the school books and charts were stored in trunks in the only safe place on the station: the shrine of the elephant god, Ganesh. As a result of the school, many of the mothers approached Margaret and her friends and asked
them to help with their children, look after them, even take them away. Margaret started up a mother and child project to try to educate the women in child care, but then came across Birbati, then aged about six months, whose mother was drug-addicted and unable to look after her. When the mother was run over by a train, Margaret and a friend actually carried her to the Sisters of Mercy in Kolkata, who were unable to take her in. They finally found her a place at Nirmal Hirady (the Home for the Dying) by pretending that the sisters had sent them. Meanwhile, Margaret had taken baby Birbati and placed her in the residential home for severely disabled children that she had helped start up. Some years later, when the school fell into difficulties, Birbati was rescued and taken to Mr Banja’s school – the first disabled child at Bakcha. And there she thrives as does TRACKS, now run entirely by local people.

  For the last two weeks of our time in India, we were in a project near Dharamsala. The overnight bus from Delhi was crowded, and the temperature dropped as the bus climbed into the foothills of the Himalayas. These buses stopped every few hours for eating stops – usually around midnight and four in the morning. This bus felt like a foreign country. It was full of Tibetans, for we were heading for the main community of Tibetans in India, and their New Year, not coincidentally at the same time as the Chinese one, in February, was nearly upon us.

  Nuns celebrating Tibetan new Year

  A few days later we got up before dawn to witness the New Year celebrations, in the village of McLeodganj, up above the snow line and freezing cold in the early morning. Though his residence was near by, the Dalai Lama himself did not attend, as he was recuperating from illness. The ceremony was watched by a crowd of Tibetans, and by a number of tourists. Monks with vivid orange headgear like mohican haircuts sat on the ground blowing six-foot long bass trumpets and chanting in a low rumble, accompanied by some of the elderly Tibetans in the crowd. It was a touching affirmation of their identity but was not aimed at entertaining an audience.

  The branch of Hinduism that runs from Ramakrishna through Vivekenanda, Ramana and Aurobindo is alive and kicking in the magnificent person of Kshama Metre and the charity she runs near Dharamsala. It is called the Chinmaya Tapovan Trust (CTT) and is one of some two hundred and fifty missions, schools and old age homes founded in 25 countries by her guru, Swami Chinmayananda (“ananda” means “blessed”). Guru Dev, as he is familiarly known, laid considerable emphasis on work as worship, an ethos that lives on throughout this centre where hundreds of young people work often seven days a week and late into the night either as volunteers or for very little money out in the field with the more disadvantaged of their community. The greeting at CTT was “Hare Om” (the word of God); the day started with collective worship, as it did at each of the projects, and the garlanded photo and influence of Guru Dev was always to the fore.

  The programmes in the rural areas of Kangra District involve 370 villages, and include primary health care services, women’s self-help groups, playgroups, literacy projects, adolescent girls’ and boys’ groups, sanitation, income generation and work with disabilities and alcohol abuse. The work affects several thousand villagers every year. Kshama, or Dr Didi as she is known, is a living example of all this NGO stands for. A large, statuesque woman with dark penetrating eyes, my first memory of her is as we were sitting in front of her in her study, awaiting instructions. A young woman came in with a tiny baby, a few days old. Kshama picked it up, examined it tenderly but dispassionately, said a few words to the mother and carried on with the rest of her business. She is a paediatrician by training and practises on the hop, as she runs the centre.

  At last Stephen and I were put to work. No nonsense here. As soon as we arrived, Kshama asked to us to write a little about ourselves so that she could decide which project would be suitable. I, full of confidence that at last my knowledge of microcredit could be used, was crestfallen when she said matter-of-factly that my Hindi wasn’t good enough. We had taken some lessons in Delhi, but then had been in states where the languages were Malalayam, Telugu, Tamil, Uriya – no chance to practise Hindi. India has 15 official languages – all on the banknotes. No wonder the use of English is so widespread among educated people. But here we were working with people with little or no education – indeed, even in this Hindi area, many only spoke village languages.

  Kshama preparing for a village celebration

  Stephen was asked to participate in a new project of resource management, and was in seventh heaven wandering round the small villages in the mountains, looking at the woods, water and grass and coming up with ideas of how to make the most of them.

  Kshama asked me to teach English to her assistant, Rajiv, who needed to improve his written English in order to take dictation from her. She also offered me either adult literacy –

  “But I can’t read Hindi!” “No, but you could learn alongside them” – or help with the kindergartens (bhalwaris) that they had set up in villages where there were no other schools. There were dozens of bhalwaris, but the two to which Kshama suggested I went were in the slums. I agreed with alacrity.

  Then followed two of the most fascinating, if exhausting, weeks of my life. I had done some work with homeless people in London, and as I got off the bone-shaker bus at the first slum, my feeling was the same. When I joined the young local teacher in wandering through the black plastic “growing frame” tents calling, “School, school, jaldi, jaldi” I felt a swelling of my heart, a lump in my throat and the conviction that these were “my” people. I am particularly drawn to excluded people, and this community, from another state – Rajasthan – speaking another language and living for 25 years on the edge of the town and of accepted life in this part of India, were indeed excluded.

  The “schools” were basic: in one case a scruffy little concrete hut at the back of a graffiti-strewn bus shelter type of building, reached by picking our way across broken glass and human excrement, in the other a black plastic tent like their homes; both dark with the door shut, deafening when it rained. And it was cold: we were just below the snow line, and it was winter. No light or heat. Fifteen children and three of us “teachers” sat on mats on the ground.

  The children were dirty little urchins with, in most cases, only one set of clothes, ranging in age from six months to about ten years old. There was a pump nearby, but perhaps they were excluded from using it. Nearly all were married, even the two or three year olds, and one of the big boys, who was very bright and should have been at school, was on drugs, as were all his family. There were a teacher and assistant for each school, with not much education and inherited methods of teaching, by rote, and with too much use of the stick. I tried to liven the mornings up with animal noises, songs and games – generally playing the fool. I loved it. At the end of some sessions I took them outside for Grandmother’s Footsteps, Hokey Cokey and Ring a Ring o’ Roses. There was great excitement and much laughter.

  Slum bhalwari

  On one occasion I took some rough paper and got them to draw. They had never drawn freehand before, only coloured in shapes stencilled by the teachers. We communicated in what the teacher referred to as “tutti frutti” English or in my case “tutti frutti” Hindi. I made them draw big, using the whole page, and sharing the crayons – taking only one at a time. I then asked the teacher to put their names on, so that they could begin to recognise them, and then they took the pictures home. Unheard of!

  There was a great sense of being able to make a difference: Kshama had the power to make things happen. When I reported back and told her of some of my misgivings, she said immediately that she would send a health visitor to train the mothers in hygiene, and asked me to hold a workshop with all the teachers, summoning them all to gather a couple of days later.

  Slum bhalwari

  I had never held a workshop or done role play, but thoroughly enjoyed the challenge. An Kush, one of a pair of brother volunteers from Mumbai, interpreted for me, and we asked the teachers to be children for the day, assigning roles such as
bully, shy child, baby, mothering girl, naughty child etc. We took the role of teacher, first disciplinarian (such as I had seen in one place) then laissez-faire. The “children” thoroughly enjoyed themselves, really letting their hair down for once. As one woman assigned the “naughty” role emptied a jar full of crayons on to the floor with evident satisfaction, I reflected that she had probably not been allowed have such fun even as a child. In the afternoon we explored more reasonable ways of dealing with their charges, with all those different age groups, and asked them to share their difficulties.

  I was anxious not to lose the opportunity of some interaction in the field of microcredit. Kshama agreed that I might hold a workshop for about fifty of the workers, also interpreted by An Kush. The session took the form of a sharing of information, since there was little that I could teach these young women. They were staggered that anyone in such a rich country as Britain should need microcredit. They could not imagine that we had poverty. I further shocked them by telling them of some of our social problems: broken families, isolated single mothers, asylum seekers, the benefit trap etc. I think they got a pretty negative view of Western society. They were surprised to hear that savings played no part in our scheme, that in Britain, as in other developed countries, it simply is not legal to lend from savings (except for Credit Unions).

  “So how do you make it work, then? Why would the women feel a loyalty to the organisation?”

  Stephen and I stayed at the connected ashram down the road, paying for our keep. It was a five-minute walk, and we were seriously warned not to go along the road alone at night, as leopards came down from the hills after dark. There had been reports of attacks on people, since food for the animals, as for the people, was scarce. Stephen, frustrated, as I was, by not having seen many wild animals on our travels, walked along the road at twilight calling “pussy, pussy”!