Meeting with Dr Rita

January 12^th, 2nd blog:  Meeting with Dr Rita

It was time to meet with Dr Rita, who had been on leave last week, to run past her a few ideas which have cropped up during our visits with RUHSA people. 

• ·        Firstly, this year’s outing for the children. As it’s in the annual budget we can plan for it during our visit. We think 22^nd January, to the same park as last year, and with one parent per child to accompany. We need to ensure RUHSA book transport.

• ·        The garden at Seetaramanpet (Pachaikili). Having seen what can be done at Panamadanga, I would really like to talk about this again. Dr Rita says it is the fault of the SHG at Seetaramanpet that they don’t make a success of it. Sekar says that they really have tried, put in extra enrichment into the soil, but vegetables just don’t grow well there. . We have always found that SHG to be excellent and enthusiastic. I think we need to try to meet with them again and see what ideas they have. We have ruled out keeping stall-fed goats there as yet- though it remains a possibility for the future. Keeping chickens Rita also thinks this might be too difficult. We once talked about the SHG loaning out vessels for large functions. We will try to have a discussion with the women to see what ideas they have.

• ·        I explained that I would like to do a training day for the staff at Pachaikili and that one of the main things I want to do is to develop a simple method of keeping observations of children, a way of recording their progress whilst in the school, for purposes of demonstrating the value of the school’s work and for reporting to parents. I have in mind something as simple as possible which won’t take up too much of the teachers’ time and perhaps will be based largely on observations of the children. We might think about getting them a camera so that they can include photos of the children in the record, which might be something like the Learning Journals used in pre-school settings in England nowadays. Dr Rita liked this idea but seemed to veer more towards some kind of tool ( which might easily become a dreaded tick-box sheet) and saw the possibility of it being used when students were visiting, as a way of them learning about what to look for in children’s development. I am hoping that this will emerge during our training day, now fixed for Saturday 23^rd.

• ·        The purchase of toys. I explained that we had £200 to spend on renewing equipment for the play centre. Rita explained in detail how to handle this. We are determined this year to have no repeat of the trouble we had last year with the purchase of saris… We must pay the money to Sanjeevi to put into RUHSA funds; then Vinoth will raise an order and Sekar can be involved in this purchase also, since he knows about play materials. Simple!

• ·        The possibility of some of the elderly centres also starting to have a part of the day when they might interact with children.  We have seen all but one of the centres and the slight problem is that the centre which immediately lends itself to this idea is the one at Kavanur run by FOV Sweden. I have talked a bit to Anna-Lina about this, about how both the balwadi teacher and the elders showed an interest in coming together, perhaps for twenty minutes per day. It is a new idea for her and she didn’t respond immediately. I am hoping that today she has visited the centre and seen the balwadi, and may be more enthusiastic. We might be suggesting that a snack for the children is made at the Elderly centre, and this would entail expense of course. Dr Rita said it wouldn’t be a problem to speak to the government official to get permission for the balwadi. She did say however that those who supervise balwadis are generally not good at picking up on new initiatives. We do know from our own experience in the past that this might well be the case. We once tried to get the balwadi organisers to be interested in the balwadi teachers coming to our play centre in KVKuppam to learn about the play method and we also suggested that we could help with them getting some of the locally-made toys, but nothing ever came of this.

• ·        Finally we had a long and very helpful discussion- and by now Rita had included Jeffers, John Peter, Vinoth and Dr Bishwara in our meeting- about our idea to start a group to meet at the Pachaikili centre after school closes. We have been so concerned about the incredibly high number of cases of suicide in the families whom we know, all by young men and women. We suggested that perhaps we could have a group for women, who could come to the centre to meet together, with perhaps a RUHSA staff member. During discussion Rita suggested a nurse at the hospital who is called Kavitha, and who has some experience of counselling. We thought that perhaps the group could officially be said to be for girls to come for careers advice. Hopefully the group would gel and then they would feel free to talk about family problems and share experience. If they wanted one to one conversation with Kavitha, then that could be offered too. Dr Rita said she would look at what training in counselling could be found for Kavitha. Dr Bishwara agreed with us that she must learn the basic guidelines for counselling ie, confidentiality, being non-judgmental, not imposing one’s own solutions, listening well. If the group is to work well it will also need to understand especially about confidentiality and about taking turns to speak and listen, so that group members can feel confident about sharing problems. Interestingly Dr Rita told us during our discussion that in 2004 she wrote a paper for the Lancet about the terrible problem of suicide in India and she said then that the age groups where the numbers are highest are 15 to 18 and the elderly. I said that it seems to me that suicide is not such a taboo in India, and that it is seen as the only ‘solution’ to their problems. She agreed and said that in fact sometimes families see suicide as better than the shame on the family if the young person is in a relationship with someone of whom they disapprove. This group would not be expensive, as we would only need to pay for staff travelling expenses and the cost of a counselling course.  If we can light just one small candle to give some support to the young women of Seetaramanpet…

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!

A real day of rest

January 10th

This is the life- keeping cool by the pool

 

Today really was a proper day of rest as we took ourselves in a taxi to Vellore, to the luxurious outdoor swimming pool. We hired the driver for the afternoon and evening so the poor chap had to hang around quite a bit. He gave Pam his card showing that he has a BSc - but finding professional jobs in this area is not easy. He took us on a route that goes past the Golden Temple, which has only been constructed in the last fifteen years and was the vision of a poor local boy from Vellore who somehow managed to get people to buy into his vision. It is now a huge tourist draw and the razzamatazz that has grown up around it is extraordinary. The whole area teems with cars and people and the road is lined with new shops, cafes, hotels and guest houses. It is quite an amazing phenomenon and so very very Indian. When we returned around eight thirty it was even more bustling with life and there were long queues of people waiting to go in. 

We spent a happy afternoon lounging at the pool, doing a few leisurely lengths and watching a group of middle class Indians who were having a celebration of a 60th birthday by the pool side. This meant tinny music, the sudden appearance of enormous amounts of food in large stainless steel vessels and general jollity. 

From here we went to supper with Dr Rita, the RUHSA head of department. She has had a beautiful Keralan style house built in the same leafy suburb of Vellore as the pool and even since we were there a year ago I can see how well the garden is developing and greening what was a brown field building site when she first moved in. Dr Rita comes to her house every weekend after work finishes at  midday Saturday until Sunday evening, and for the rest of the time she lives on the RUHSA site. She had invited two friends, a doctor who was her ' batch-mate' - ie in her year at CMC when she trained as a doctor, and his wife who is a nursing professor at CMC. They had lived for a while in England and we had a very interesting hour or so of conversation, with the lovely Keralan meal that Rita had had prepared. Home again, and, perhaps thanks to Ganesh, or Hannuman on his birthday weekend, nothing too dire on the road home.

A restful weekend. How on earth can it be only a week since our arrival?

January 10th 

Yesterday, Saturday, was a much quieter day after the busy schedule of Friday. We were invited to lunch chez Balaji and family, then were going to Poonsollay to see a family  whom Pam and BrIan befriended during their original visits in 2004 and 2004, and finally for supper with Selvi, who has been an old friend of visitors from Bishopston since the Link began back in 1978. Since it would be dark as we left Selvi's we knew we couldn't risk cycling along the terrifying road back to RUHSA, so we did the whole day in taxis, largely  auto-rickshaws, which buzz along the pot-holed back roads to the villages, and will dice bravely with the fast and furious traffic of the high street also. Best to avert the eyes and pray. Ganesh idols are often handily displayed in the windscreen..

Balaji had honestly admitted that if he had his way he would give us lunch every day at his home, so anything less than this is a disappointment to him. This was our second meal in under a week, and whilst we are delighted to go there, his family being so very warm and hospitable, and their food quite delicious, nonetheless we have a real dilemma because this family has a very restricted income (Balaji does not have work every day, his father is now an invalid, his brother has a temporary contract only, having lost his job in the closure of the Bishopston Trading company). So making special meals for us is a real imposition for them economically, but they will never give us anything less than the warmest welcome. Pam has adopted a kind of Mary Berry role, I notice. Perhaps her transformation into Domestic Goddess, affected over a delicious Christmas cake, large slices of which we have consumed with our evening cuppa, has gone a bit to her head. At any rate she announced during our delicious spread that Santa's wodday (lentil cakes) definitely win first prize amongst all the many we sample in different venues, as we eat ourselves to Jumbo size in and around the villages of KVKuppam. The rest of the jury of greedy English visitors all agreed readily wtih this verdict.

Santa handing out her prize-winning lentil cakes.

From here we went to Poonsollay, a village perhaps one kilometre away. We had a rendez-vous with Selvi, who was going to help interpret for our conversations with the families here. Pam and Brian met several families in this agricultural village when they came out for extended stays in order to write an education pack/ website on aspects of life in an Indian village, for use with the National Curriculum, in primary schools. These families, particularly one woman, the matriarch, were extremely helpful and let Pam just watch them going about their daily lives. Pam had seen one couple from the family at the hospital with their son, who has problems in his urinary tract and had been an inpatient last week. When we got to the house we found the father at home with the young boy, but all of the women had gone off to the temple. Selvi said that it was Hannuman, the Monkey god's birthday and this might be why they had all gone. The father, Suresh, cut us down some coconuts and made a hole for us to drink the coconut water. Then he cut the nut in half and revealed a tiny coconut under all the husk- evidence that in recent years the coconuts have not had enough water.

Pam with Uma, and more women toiling under a hot sun in the paddy fields

Then we saw another woman from a neighbouring family, Uma, who was busy transplanting rice seedlings. She greeted us warmly and emerged briefly from the  muddly paddy field to say hello. She pointed out her daughter, who is doing her first year of a Chemistry BSc course,who  was helping out with the work. It is clearly all hands on deck for this mammoth task, being performed in so  many fields in the area at the moment. Again a delight to hear of another village girl doing really well academically. So much has changed and continues to change in villages in this state, with regard to cultural attitudes to girls. Educational success is now increasingly prized for girls and mariages are being delayed until after qualification. Santi, Balaji's sister in law, who has two small girls, told us that the Tamil Nadu government gives a bursary to parents who have a second daughter, which they can access when the girl turns eighteen. This is in acknowledgement of the expense that a girl will bring (at marriage, when she has a baby, - all the expenses have to be paid by the family of the girl). Such a bursary is to encourage parents to see a girl as a positive, and to discourage female infanticide/ termination of female foetus. 

We fixed a date to return with Selvi to this village next week, when hopefully more of the family will be available. We then went with Selvi to the nearby house of a business man called Ravi. Next door to his house is his factory for making milk products, particularly something called Cova- sweetened boiled milk products  for making Indian sweets. Ravi was just a local lad  from a poor family, and has made a very successful business through very hard work. He has built himself, his wife and his family of four children a huge and very showy house. We have seen many examples of these palatial residences going up over the last few years in the area. There are still a lot of unresolved problems regarding the closure of the Bishopston Trading company - which is a sad and complex tale- and Selvi most certainly wanted to offload to us about them. We continued to her home in Tuthitangel, where she lives with her mother, a lovely lady whom we have known for many years and who is always so delighted to see us all. Second delicious and huge meal of the day was served up here, of course. Selvi and her mum are superb cooks, and Mary Berry decided that Selvi's mum must be awarded first prize for her dosai- a kind of rice flour pancake. She is not wrong in this judgment! 

Assorted livestock and clubs for elderly, farmers and young men...

January 9^th

 

A full schedule today so we were at RUHSA office early to meet with Jeffers – a training officer, who also takes responsibility for the stall-fed goat project. He turns out to be a very enthusiastic and informative chap who communicates well in English. He showed us the goats, a group of about twenty, housed in a hut which is raised up from the ground and protected all round (previously two goats found a way to escape and got bitten by dogs and one of them subsequently died) They were busy devouring leaves from branches of bushes grown specially for this purpose by the Self Help Group (SHG) women who have the care of the goats. Jeffers explained about the mixed diet they are fed. Two nanny goats and their two kids were being kept in a separate stall – until the kids are big enough to survive the rough and tumble of the group. It is not the wide open countryside, but we felt that nonetheless they do have room to move about and their conditions are very healthy. 20% of the profit from this project, which is supported by FOV UK, goes towards paying for the centres for the elderly also supported by this group. 

Curry dinner for the pigs

Jeffers then took us to see three very pretty Jersey-cross dark brown cows which the SHG have bought and are rearing as their own initiative. They have also recently started with two pigs, and they have a large batch of small chicks being reared. The pigs were deeply unattractive, I have to say, as they were desperate for food and squealing loudly because they could smell it on its way. Intriguing to see that their meal was scraps left over from our delicious rice and curry meal eaten yesterday in the canteen! Would the pork taste of curry we wondered…

Time then to mount our trusty old bikes (saddles not getting any softer with each passing day) and wobble sweatily over the railway level crossing to Kavanur. Here there is a centre for the elderly which is funded by FOV Sweden, opened in 2014. It has twenty members, of whom seventeen were present that day, sixteen women and one chap. We were met there by several RUHSA staff including Dr Beshwari, Dr Rita’s deputy, because it was the day for giving out the Christmas gift of saris/ dotis, from the CMC staff charity fund ( see above re our Pachaikili centre gifts) They seemed like a very lively bunch we thought, full of chat and smiles for the camera.

 Ellamma

We were introduced to Ellamma, who for fifteen years was the ayah to Daleep’s children (Daleep was the first Director and the inspiration behind RUHSA) With his family she travelled to Nagpoor then to Delhi and Geneva, as he changed jobs. I have heard Daleep and his wife Azra talk in glowing terms about her and his children loved her of course. She has had an extraordinary life (like a novel, I think). She was married at 9 to a man of 50 and had her first child at 13. The marriage lasted thirty years. Then after rearing her children she became ayah to Daleep’s family. In her old age Daleep was anxious to provide for her (she had four children one of whom took his own life) so he bought a house for her in Kavanur, her old home. However, she lived there with her son and his wife and the wife disliked her very much, so wanted to get rid of her. In order to do this she threatened suicide many times; so that in the end Ellamma left the house and now lives alone in a small rented place. Daleep still sends money for her each month, and Matthew at RUHSA ensures that she is given it. 

The brand new balwadi building

There is a government nursery (balwadi) next to this centre, and we are wondering if they might be able to begin to interact, maybe just for a fixed time each day. When we suggested it to the elderly they were immediately all smiles. We then walked over to see the new balwadi (the Tamil Nadu government has recently provided a new building here as part of a programme to improve all balwadi provision in the state). It looks lovely and bright and airy and there were some playthings in evidence. The new teacher is young and keen and has been given 25 days of training by the state. I began to see great opportunities for this teacher and others in the area coming to see the work of our Pachaikili teachers and learning from them; and maybe the development of better toys and materials. We had this dream years ago but it never came to anything. However the time may now be ripe for this. We mentioned the possibility of mixing with the elderly and again the response was very positive. Go on Sally, said the RUHSA man, Matthew, you must speak to Dr Rita, get her permission and then we must speak to the district collector to get their go- ahead too. Mmmn, I thought, well we’ll see how that goes…Turns out some people from FOV Sweden are also due at RUHSA next week, so we can chat them up about this too. Matthew suggested that we could think about providing snacks for the children and elderly to share. Andy started doing big rupee money sums…Incidentally when I mentioned to Dr Bishwara that they seemed a happy and engaged group of elders, he said that he had been present when the group was inaugurated and this was far from the case at that time. They have observed, at RUHSA, that in all the groups there is a real improvement in well- being that membership of the group and being able to interact every day with others brings. 

 Grateful for sari gifts. Don't you just LOVE this lady's face!

Next stop on our progress this hot and busy day was Kavasamanpet, about a kilometre further on from Seetaramanpet where Pachaikili is, for a centre for the elderly which caters for 25. This one is funded by FOV UK. We arrived just in time to delay their lunch, poor things, but they were very welcoming nonetheless. Again there were only four men in the group. Matthew suggests that the preponderance of women in the groups is because the women bear the brunt of the emotional burden in the family, so are the most grateful to get away from the family for a time to be with peers. (So that’s the same the world over, I guess) Also statistically of course women live longer than men. Here the group grow some vegetables at the back of the building- we saw a large pumpkin patch; but green beans have been less successful because the monkeys have stolen them! They showed us some of the traditional games they play. When asked about activities they said they began with a prayer, then did some exercises, then played games and sang songs/ interacted/ had arguments!

 A traditional game

One of the men who was very lively told us that there is a problem with water supply and therefore with toilets. There is a pipe and a tap to the building but the water from the village supply does not reach them. This is because other families have attached motors to their pipes, further up the line. So they will have to have a motor too. We need to flag this up to RUHSA/ FOV. After they had eaten, and we had said no no we would not be taking their rations, thank you (again the imperative to give us hospitality), one of the men started to sing and drum and do a dance. He used to be an actor/ performer. He was still very full of beans and very enthusiastic. Then another chap started to sing and bang the tambourine and the other chap danced whilst all the women joined in singing and clapping. A very jolly farewell to a jolly visit! We were at last able to cycle off, because the puncture which had afflicted Andy’s bike en route had been repaired by a helpful man in the village.

On the way out of Kavasamanpet Sekar stopped us to show us where a group of men were feeding sugar cane into a machine before putting the crushed pulp into a hot vat, to make the sugary jagaree sweet. I am always terrified of the boiling sugar, but we were given a taste of jagaree fresh cooled out of the pan. We kid ourselves we need the sugar for energy in the heat, but plainly this is nonsense!

Cooled Jagaree rolled into balls. It is sold by the growers for sweet- production in the nearby town.

 

After too little time horizontal on our beds resting, it was 5 o clock and time to set off for a village called Nagel, to meet with a farmers’ club and a boys’ youth club. At least it was too far for the bikes so comfy RUHSA transport was arranged. When we arrived the group of farmers were waiting for us and had brought their cows to meet us too! This is another FOV UK funded scheme and so far has had some excellent results. Farmers have to form the group first of all- all of them must be depending on agriculture and have only a small amount of land, so that they are the most needy. They have to prove over several weeks that they do meet regularly and keep good accounts and only then is the loan for the first five cows given. Originally they were given Rs 20,000 each, but then they had to borrow a further Rs 10,000 from elsewhere as a good 3 year old cow costs around Rs30, 000 (approx. £300); so now the loan is Rs 30,000 per farmer. Within a fairly short while, with the regular income from milk, they are able to repay the loan which is then handed on to the next farmer in the club. They are also then likely to have a calf (which hopefully will be a female!) The government provides a service for insemination and it is only Rs10 per insemination. Again, as with the goat project at RUHSA, 20% goes back to FOV to help fund projects for the elderly. Since this project started in 2012, there are six Farmers’ clubs and 55 men have had loans for cows. The women may, incidentally, do a lot of the looking after of the cow, but there are no Farmers’ clubs for women as yet. Culturally it would never be acceptable to have women and men together in a club, of course. 

Us with the Farmers' club in Nagel

After lots of posing for  photos of beautiful cows with their proud owners, we were introduced to the Boys’ Youth club, also based in Nagel. The group leader turns out to be the son of the leader of the Farmers’ club. It is called the Abdul Kallam club, after a former president of India. The idea behind the project is to gather groups of young men who are in their mid-teens and to offer them a club where they can play the sports which they really love (cricket, volley ball and the traditional Tamil game of Kabbadi). Then when they are gathered and the club becomes a real group with some cohesion the leader introduces discussions and speakers, who are trying to motivate the boys to continue in education, to see the value of planning for their futures rather than just taking any job to earn money but which won’t give them a secure future or any kind of satisfaction. We had a lively conversation with these young men and Serendar, the RUHSA coordinator for the group, asked us to say something to them to give them some inspiration, so we did our level best! Two of them are keen drummers and they gave us a very loud and energetic performance. Time at last, after some ghastly ‘selfies’ with the handsome lads, to say thanks and farewell and climb back into the vehicle for the ride home. All in all, an eventful and very inspiring day. 

After many years of drought locally the recent torrential rains have made it possible for the farmers to plant paddy again. Everywhere we see women toiling, bent from the waist, transplanting seedlings in the muddy water.