More lively elderly people in two centres, a recitation in a school and some youth club boys.

January 12^th

 

We were up and off by ten this morning, in RUHSA transport, with an accompaniment of RUHSA staff (Rakesh, Surendar) and Anna-Lina from FOV Sweden, who is visiting for three days to see the projects her group support and to interview a selection of elderly people. She does this regularly as a way of monitoring the value of the project, and it struck us as possibly a good way for VRCT to monitor our Elderly projects too. We learned from her that she was one of the founders of FOV Sweden in 1980, after she visited CMC Vellore with her cousin, whose father, an Indian, had been a student doctor there. 

Women doing a dance to welcome us

First stop was the centre at Ramapuram, which has twenty elderly, again predominantly women. With their care-taker Bavani they had prepared a dance to her singing, which was delightful. This is the sixth year of the existence of the group, which started with forty members but was quickly reduced when the attendance was never regular and the group didn’t really gel. Anna asked how new members are chosen, (when one leaves or dies) and was told that it is the RCO (the RUHSA rural community officer) who decides, based on information about the need that person has in terms of being isolated, without much family support. After Rakesh told us that the song which Bavani sang was about being unhappy until being saved by the lord Jesus, we asked about how many of the group were Christians. Although RUHSA is an outreach project from CMC, the Christian Medical College in Vellore, nonetheless it has always been a strict policy that they are there to serve all the community who are of course predominantly Hindu, and that they are not there to proselytise to convert the people to Christianity. Rakesh is evidently a Christian himself. He said that there are a lot of Christians in this village and that is why there are so many in the group. 

We asked the group why they like to come to the group and one woman immediately replied with great enthusiasm and others then joined in with what she had to say. She said they like to come to get away from problems at home, that they are happy when in the group and enjoy the exercise and the singing and dancing. It made me think of our wonderful Arty Farty group near where I live in France and how we share problems as well as engaging in creative art and how therapeutic this is. Sudden light-bulb moment! What about introducing art into the centres for the elderly as an activity!!! Second light bulb moment, my ninety-six year old aunty Betty just loves those adult colouring-in books which are currently very popular. I have a bit of an allergy to such things, having had to strive hard in my time against the tendency of some nursery nurses in the nursery classroom to want to have the children use templates and colouring-in books, rather than allow them to be free and genuinely creative, but my aunt’s evident delight in the activity speaks for itself. 

I then asked them whether they like to get away from their family problems and to leave them behind, or whether they talk in the group and share the problems with their friends. My small Tamil vocab includes the words for friend, home, talk and problem so I was able to do a small piece of theatre, involving me having a problem, talking to Pam, my friend, crying, then her putting her arm round me and me  feeling happy. We all know the word for happy too, santoshum. The women all understood immediately and started turning to one another and saying – she is my friend, she is my friend and putting their arms round each other. A moving moment of communication across language barriers and cultures. Rakesh helped with translation too and said that they do indeed like to share their problems in the group, to ventilate (his word) and then they will forget the problem for a while. 

The SK Youth club young men

We asked how many of them get their pension from the government and most of them now do. RUHSA has worked hard with them to help them obtain the pension, which is now Rs 1000 (£10) per month. Anna asked why so many elderly do not get the pension, to which they are all entitled and Rakesh explained that 1) they may well have literacy problems which make the documentation a problem and 2) the official will expect a bribe as well as the documents. India in a nutshell I fear. They also get a ration of 4kg of rice from the ration shop with this pension. If they have no pension then they are entitled to 15kg. Of course many families do not like the quality of rice in the ration shop as it is not the best, but for the poor it is essential. Several of the people in the group depend utterly on the decent meal provided at midday and will eat half of it at lunchtime and take half home for the evening meal. 

Several young men then came in, members of the Youth Club (this one called the SK Brothers group) and were directed by Surendar to talk about the group, what they were studying, what their employment opportunities are etc. The group leader Satish who has a masters qualification in some kind of engineering (mechanical?) is about to leave his wife and small child of eighteen months to go to work in Singapore in a shipyard for two years. In that time he will not return to visit. He is excited at the prospect and will earn well, but of course sad to be leaving his young family behind. He has some family where he is going, at least. It then transpired that one other member of the group, who looked no more that fifteen, is actually twenty and recently married. It is a love marriage and an emergency marriage (as they term it here) as a baby is on its way.  Most young men in India would not consider marriage until their mid to late twenties. He and several other group members have recently completed the car mechanics course at RUHSA community college and should therefore have good prospects for employment. 

Time then to move on, after one last word from the most vocal of the elderly group women; please could they have egg with their lunch more often than once per month. Ah, I thought, at Pachaikili centre they have egg once a week. We need to run this past VRCT committee and hopefully this will be a wish granted. Their other plea was for a TV. Rakesh said at first they had resisted this idea as they thought that members might just sit in front of the TV and not interact. We explained that at Pachaikili they have one but they don’t watch it all the time, just for part of their morning. I think a TV is soon going to be provided, from what Rakesh said. At this moment, as the women were communicating that we must come back again soon to visit them and I was saying yes, of course, and next time there will be eggs and TV I suddenly became slightly overcome with hysteria at the vision of myself as some kind of latter-day Lady Bountiful, bringing happiness in the shape of TV and extra eggs. Wherever we go the people who are benefiting from FOV projects are always so full of gratitude and it makes us all feel very humble and unworthy, I think. What is just a small thing to us makes such a huge difference to them, and it is the unfairness of fate which makes that so, not anything that either of us has done to deserve a  better or worse life. 

The boy and the poem he has by heart

Next stop was at a secondary school in a village called Pallatur, where Anna wanted to see the site for a project FOV Sweden are funding. This is to install a toilet block of five toilets and a urinal. I do not like to think how they have been managing to date, with so many hundred students. This is all part of a drive to get more of the population to use toilets and to understand the importance of hygiene and cleanliness, rather than to use the fields around their houses as a toilet, still the custom in much of village India. As we were walking around the school we saw a group of lads, maybe about twelve years old, sitting on the ground reading their text books. They would be sitting an exam later that afternoon. I asked if any of the text was in English and one boy then turned to a page of English in his Tamil book and gave it to me to read. He then jumped up smartly and proceeded to recite from memory the very complex poem by Rabindranath Tagore which was set out on the page. Quite a feat even in one’s own language, let alone in a second language. 

We then had a brief meeting in a nearby government building which is used by many groups including the local Youth Club. Only a few young men were available to see us as the rest are all working, so we said we would return in an evening on another day. We had by now been joined by the RUHSA officer Jayaraman, whom I met first in 1996, when we were setting up a small preschool in his area. We talked about the teachers who ran those pre-schools at that time (there were four of them) and how lively and good they were and he spoke about the positive influence our play-method preschools had on the children who went through the schools over the dozen or so years that they existed. Rakesh, who is young and new to RUHSA, said he had heard from Matthew, (who is his mentor, training him up to replace him as Coordinator for the Elderly Centre projects), about my talk to the RUHSA staff back in 1991 about good practice in Early Years education in the UK and the ideas of child-rearing in our culture which underpin it. Matthew has told me in recent times how he changed his own attitude to parenting as a result of what we discussed then and Rakesh was now saying that, influenced by Matthew whom he clearly admires greatly, he too is going to adopt the same ideas. 

The garden planted and tended by elders in Panamadanga

On then to our last visit of the day, at Panamadanga, where there is a thriving Elderly centre run by FOV Sweden. We had heard that the   care-taker Lalita is very good. As soon as we arrived we saw a very pretty garden which the elderly and Lalita have planted in the front of the building. Apparently until the recent heavy rains there were vegetables there too, but the water rose very high- up to Jayaraman’s knee he showed us and he’s quite tall! The vegetables were all washed away.  He said there was ceaseless rain for a month. This group meets in the balwadi (government playcentre) building, a room having been given over for the elderly. Unfortunately by the time we arrived the children had had their lunch and gone home. There was no evidence of play materials in the balwadi room so I fear this is still just a typical balwadi, where the children come to be fed but are not given any stimulation by the teacher. Anna said however that there is informal interaction between the elderly and the children. One lady is blind and the children will help to guide her.

The elderly woman who has severe pain in her hip but who makes her way to the centre every day without fail

Another woman there, who is one of the group which Anna interviews, is severely crippled and walks with evident pain and difficulty. She broke her hip many years ago and it was never fixed at the time. She is determined however to get to the group so makes the painful walk with the help of a stick everyday without fail. Another man in the group, who wasn’t present today because he is ill, had leprosy many years ago. He enjoys coming to the group but insists on sitting in the doorway as he doesn’t want the others to worry about his leprosy. Another man recently lost his home in the heavy rains. He has a roof still, but the walls are destroyed (not sure how this can be, but it is what Anna-Lina said, having been to see it). Consequently he is staying at the centre, sleeping there. Another woman in the group used to live in a pump house- ie just a small building not designed as a habitation at all, but as Anna said, much better than being utterly homeless.

After a delicious lunch we left to return to RUHSA and I fell upon my bed for exactly 24 minutes sleep, before our meeting with Rita. More of this in the next blog!