The photos below are of 1) a little girl very happy to be on our school admission list 2) Pam with another lively little girl who hopped onto her bike as she arrived at school 3) The six teacher candidates with us Wendy, Sally and Pam and 4) The two successful candidates Rani and Padmini enjoying make- believe play in the home corner, Rani having a moustache pencilled in!

Blogpoem Painting India

Painting India

First spread the canvas with cow dung
Wet, to shine
Now with chalk make a Rangoli border
Pattern echoing pattern in terracotta and white
Next hang garlands of jasmine and roses
Deep pinks, acid yellows that nimble fingers swiftly tied
Have jacaranda and bougainvillea spill exuberant
Oranges, shocking pinks, a million paper butterflies
Splash here a field of bright green paddy
Women in saris, bent gracefully at the waist, toiling
Before the sun grows hot.

Cast shadows from fanning branches
Under the elephant legs of coconut trees
Paint the crowded road, a slow cart lurching
The bullock pair with matching horns
Decorated for Cow Pongal
A hen fussing her tiny cream powder puffs
Scattered in the dust
While on a straw hill the flashy cock struts
Here’s a whole family on a bicycle, baby fat brown legs
Poking from mother’s sari, and a yellow auto putters by
Brave in the monstrous crush of motor lorry, bus and bike.

And now the village weekly market
Tomatoes onions brinjal plantain garlic
Spread in the fly-specked sunlight
Small round lemons and limes in heaps
Green bananas still clustered on the stem
Picture postcard shots amidst the squalor
Rubbish gathered and scattered, people and dogs scavenging a life
Crow upon crow upon crow lordly squawking.
Winding through the scene, pencil in five strange figures on bicycles
In stately procession past fat gaudy Ganesh and his puja gifts
Add the flash of white-toothed smiles, hands raised in ‘Vanicum!’

Frame upon frame snapped and stored in the mind’s eye
Precious memories held in the heart
Until we come again.

Blog 21 Proud to be called ‘ Masala Grandmother’

I’m writing this from the comfort of my daughter’s computer in England, so hopefully no sudden cut-off of internet, and certainly no heat and crow racket and mozzie assaults, so no need of ‘Quaker who swears’ as husband has named me. Back to cold and sleet and grey in England and, as we had predicted, it’s already hard to imagine us over-heated and hiding in the shade at Mahabalipuram, on the coast where we spent the last two days before flying home.
During our last days in the village we keep busy to the end. We appoint Rani and Padmini as our teachers- two outstanding women in an impressive group. One is from Sitaramanpet and the other from Kamanchemanpet, which works out well, these being the two villages served by our playcentre. They had also chosen each other to work together during training and make an excellent pair, both being calm and yet enthusiastic. Because we have managed to evolve a sort of mixture language, part my limited Tamil, part English and part British sign language which I taught them, for use when Sekar is not there to interpet, Padmini describes me as ‘Masala grandmother’! On the next day, Thursday, we take names of children who wish to come to the centre. Only a small number have managed to bring birth certificates, as though they are required in India nowadays, many families seem not to have them. It looks as though we may start in a week’s time, once the fans are in place, the electricity joined up, an water available in a tap in the street, with around a dozen children. Seems the local balwadi teacher is already expressing complaints about us. She will be nervous that if her numbers go down, she will no longer get her money from the government. Sekar and Ganeshan will have to go and talk to her and calm her fears.

For lunch we finally make it to Balaji’s house. They have been inviting us repeatedly but we have had so many commitments all month. The meal they have prepared is a real feast and we know that this is a real compliment to us because this family is not at all well off, being dependent on weaving, mainly for BTC. It is frightening to think of the future for this weaving village, who have just begun to feel the benefits of being organised in Self Help Groups, and being associated with BTC, who have been delighted with the quality of their work. If the world economic downturn is alarming for us in Britain, how much more serious will it be for them?
We had decided to offer a small money present between the five of us to Balaji, as a way of thanking him for his tireless help to us in so many ways. I try to offer this to him, after our lovely meal, but the look on his face is pure horror, as he backs away from me. Without the language it is difficult to explain that we only want to thank him, but he makes very clear that he wouldn’t dream of accepting. He doesn’t have much English at all but he says ‘Only love, only love’ as he shakes his head at me. I feel that I have insulted him, but cannot really apologise for this. As we leave the house pretty much everyone is crying- certainly he and his father and mother are. It is so rare to encounter anywhere such good people and we feel so privileged to have been able to get to know them much more during this visit. I think all the tears are because we truly will miss each other.

The next difficult farewells are with Mr Immanuel, RUHSA administrator and chief fixer as far as we are concerned. I promise that some of us at least will be back to see him next year, and he in turn seems to be promising that he will take some time out to address his own health issues. I hope that Daleep’s strongly expressed concerns for him will make him realise that all of us, his old friends who love him, really do care about this.

We spend our last weekend in the Golden Sun hotel in Mahabalipuram, on the coast. Since we were last there in 1996 the town has become much more of a tourist place and is now full of the Kashmiri traders whom one sees in Goa and Kerala. Whilst eating our first non-Indian meal in a restaurant there we bump into George and Lee, whom we last saw in the guest house at BTC. They are about to fly home to Bristol and we chew over the whole experience with them. Never easily pinned down I’d say sums it up... This coast was hit by the tsunami in 2004 and we see that the fishermen’s boats have the name of a German charity written on them. A German woman, Karin, who is staying in the Golden Sun whilst working in Chennai, has been very moved to be thanked by some fishermen for saving their livelihoods. The charity also paid to have homes rebuilt for the fishermen. As Karin says, it is good to see the practical results of the donations which were made by so many countries in the wake of that horrific Boxing Day disaster.

I hide from the hot sun in the shade around the pool, trying to find a peaceful enough place away from the large influx of affluent Indians who are having a great time, noisily, away from Chennai for the weekend. Below is the poem I write, my last words for the blog. Apart from telling you the journey home is much improved by Pamela having acquired us an upgrade to World Traveller Plus ( Respect, Pam!) I’ll sign off. More to come from this blog I think, once I have given some thought to where we go next ( serious fund-raising to be done for one thing).

Blog 20 Many tears, much laughter.

As we begin to think about the end of our time here and tying up as many loose ends as possible, I’ve also been reflecting about the whole experience of this month’s work. This week we are training our six candidates for the teachers’ posts and it’s proving emotional and exciting and hilarious. When we plan for the training we hope that participants will be open and generous in sharing of their own lives and beliefs and feelings. This group are showing themselves to be extraordinarily open to working like this and are all throwing themselves into activities which they have never experienced before in their lives. I have been asking them to use all the different play materials and then to talk about how they feel whilst playing like children. In British culture we tend not to have much scope or time for play after childhood, but in India this is certainly even more the case. The women have been screaming with laughter whilst throwing water over each other, whilst dressing up as ‘daddy’ for home corner play and serving tea to me, the visiting granny

Publish Post

. They have joined in with mad story-telling about the magic orange which ran away through the streets of their village, pursued by all the village leaders, until it arrived at K V Kuppam high street, when I took the story back from them and had the orange squashed by a passing bus and turned into, as Wendy muttered, ‘marmalade’! It is always good to share a humour with a group of people, but somehow even more wonderful when the sharing crosses cultural and language divides.

At such moments I recall the story of the creation of the Bishopston-Kuppam Link, back in 1978, when I was a young mum, the age of my youngest child now. Carolyn suggested the idea as a way that people from two very different cultures could come together and learn to share the triumphs and the tragedies of each other’s daily lives, and in so doing would learn about their common humanity. My goodness has the link accomplished that as an aim, so many times over! The creation of the One Candle Fund, by Pam and Brian Morris in 2004, has brought us all into contact with so many stories of success and striving for education within families. They are so very grateful for the small bursary they receive from the fund, which enables them to continue with their education. Pam received a moving letter from Balaji, who has never received anything for himself, but who has seen his friends benefit, in which he spoke eloquently of their gratitude for the chance to follow their dreams. Every day we have been at the playcentre Balaji has been available to us, mending Brian’s innumerable punctures, shopping with Andy and Brian so they don’t get fleeced, bringing us our coffee/ extra chairs/ water etc etc. Nothing is too much trouble for him. You may imagine how Pam cried when she read that simple but beautiful letter.

On Saturday Pam met with the villagers of Seetaramanpet to try to establish how many of the One Candle bursary-holders needed continuing support. She learned that one girl on the list had died this last year. She had, it seems, very much wanted to train as a nurse after college, but her parents did not support her in this. She became very depressed and took her own life. This dreadful course of action still continues to be taken with appalling frequency by young people in India, perhaps because their culture often does not give them much control over their lives. In poor families problems of affording schooling or a daughter’s marriage can seem insurmountable.

Later in the weekend we went to visit the people of the village of Poonsoli whom Pam and Brian got to know really well when they were gathering information for the educational website (www.kvkuppam.info) Since we last saw them in 2006 one of the families has grown considerably, with several marriages having taken place and many young children being in evidence, the youngest of them a baby of only one week old, the child of a ‘love marriage’ between the son of the family and a Moslem girl. They all welcomed us eagerly and wanted to show us the crops in their fields or their new half-built house. Then Pam asked after the children of one family, the son and daughter of Selvi, and we received the devastating reply that both of them are dead, having committed suicide within a year of each other, both of them only in their late teens. We then realised that the enormity of the tragedy was written on Selvi’s face. Others in the family said ‘ she does not eat’. We did not have a translator with us, but of course Selvi was able to understand our expressions of shock and dismay and was bundled into Pam’s arms whilst we all cried with her.

So as I say, many tears and much laughter this visit. The more often we come the more real friends we have and the more we care about how they and their families are. One of my own saddest moments was at the elderly people’s day centre where everyone seemed to be enjoying being there with friends, chatting and playing games, watching television. This is what we plan will happen, once our playcentre is up and running, in the other half of our building. My sadness was because I was thinking of the day centre which my father attended for a brief while and which he hated. The simple small local group which we plan will be much more likely to be what the elderly would enjoy, we think. It will be supported by the people of the village too, who will be on the management group of our joint centre and will make sure the building is cared for. We know this will happen because Balaji has promised us.

Over discussion at the end of our day’s training today one of our candidates, a young woman of 30, talked about the needs of young people in the community, many of whom become overwhelmed by family problems. She suggested that they might have group meetings for – separately of course- young women and young men from the local villages and that these might happen in the evenings in our Pachaikili centre. Sekar said that RUHSA would probably be able to support these groups with some expertise in counselling. So we could be talking a really innovative new model, integrating work with the very young and their parents, with the elderly and with the youth. Amazing!