I am so happy to write to you again after a few weeks of "work". Life here in Gadchiroli District, Maharashtra "chalte" (goes on) quite well. I have begun work in earnest on my project and have a much clearer mental picture of what I will be doing this year. I hope to share that with you now. Tomorrow I am headed to Mumbai for the Diwali break. After that I am headed to Ahmedabad where I will be reuniting with all of the other Indicorps fellows, where we will relish in speaking the English language and sharing with one another all of the triumphs and difficulties of the past 6 weeks. I am highly anticipating this trip, for it will take me out of the area for almost two weeks. And it couldn't have come at a better time, as I think I'm spent for a while. The past two weeks have been quite hectic as far rural life is concerned.

Today, my most exciting news to report is that I delivered my second speech in India, this time in English, to the newly formed English literary association of the local college. The story goes like this: last Sunday I went to a nearby town where there is a church and met a bunch of Malayalees (Keralites) who were so excited to have me at church with them. One of the men there is an English teacher at the local college in my town, his name is Joseph. He took me to his house and I met his family and ate 'cuppa' (tapioca) with them, which is a Kerala delicacy. It was wonderful. I attempted to speak some Malayalam with them, and enjoyed the company of a Malayalee family for a little while. Joseph then invited me to come and play volleyball with him and his students at the college one day this past week in the evening. I went on Tuesday and met up with Joseph and the boys. When I got there Joseph introduced me to the college principal and they informed me that they were going to have the inauguration of their English literary association and they would like me to speak on Saturday. I replied, "Sure! how long do you want me to speak for, like five minutes?" they insisted that they would like me to speak for half an hour about America and my impressions of it. Ha! what a riot. I made my speech a bit controversial, because as I told them, I did not just want to describe life in America, but wanted to make it relevant to these students, most of whom are Adivasis who come from the local villages. (Because it's quite a long speech, I'm not going to send it out to the list, but if you want to read it, just ask me to send it.) I don't know if they fully understood me. Dr. Satish, who accompanied me, and translated a little bit of my speech afterwards, said that they must have understand about 50% of my English. I would guess that number would be closer to 30 percent. I guess the point of the speech was to prove my mettle a little bit with the principal, Dr. Satish, and Mr. Joseph, who understood the full message. I think in the coming weeks I will go and meet with these students and they can ask me more questions about America and my views, and this time there will be full translation given. So why have an English literary society for students who do not understand English? This is the earnest attempt by Mr. Joseph and the Principal to raise the English learning bar for these underachieving Adivasi students, to encourage them to enjoy English so that it will be useful for them when they try to get jobs in the city or wherever. I hope it works.

So in the last email I promised that I would describe more of my project here. Now I will do that. When I signed on to this indicorps project I thought that I would be doing something called "Community Resources Mapping", which is a form of participatory development called PRA, or Participatory Rural Appraisal, which aims at gathering people together to make maps of their village to uncover the realities of social stratification, resource use, and the politics within the village. It's a very interesting technique and I was able to do it this week with a group of NGO workers who accompanied me to my project village, Ranvahi. My project has now become much larger than just PRA techniques, but now I will do a total village microplanning which aims at building village participation in development planning, as well as building the village's capacity for self-governance. By using PRA techniques such as microplanning, focus groups discussions, and by taking a household survey of the village, I hope to build a database of current knowledge about the village, about its economics, environment, social dynamics to then work on ascertaining the needs of different sectors of the village as well as the village's resources, to compile a comprehensive plan for development.

Because that is all very vague, let me give a better example. So a group of us went to Ranvahi this week to learn about PRA techniques and we had a group of three trainers from a nearby NGO accompany us. We stayed in the village for two days and had meals provided for us. It's great because now the villagers know me as the American kid who carries around the green Frisbee. Due to my still-abysmal Marathi skills, or perhaps my fear of being embarrassed, my technique for rapport building with the villagers has basically devolved into throwing my Frisbee at them and smiling. This works well most of the time. occasionally I get the one unwilling man who refuses to catch the Frisbee and goes back to his conversation. The children love it of course though. They all know my name now and I've begun to learn many of their names, and they always ask for the Frisbee. It's genius I tell you. If you ever want to jump-start the rapport building process in a rural Indian village, remember to bring your Frisbee.

So back to PRA. On the first night we met with a bunch of village men, by calling them out of their houses and gathering in the street under a street light. We asked the men to draw us a map of their village and their jungle and label the different locations and important features, such as their water tanks, rivers, farms, mandir (temple), school, etc. after they finished this map, which involved much discussion and participation from those gathered, we asked them to draw another map, but this time just of the village, showing us all of the houses and the water sources, such as wells and hand-pumps. Our goal is to return some time later and have a discussion using the map. Hopefully the discussion will draw out issues that the villagers are facing, in managing or cooperative use of their resources in the jungle or in the water sources. I was not completely satisfied with this exercise though, because no women were involved. The next morning, however, were able to sit down with some members of the mahila mandal (women's group) because they were already meeting. We asked the women to list all of their jobs, the amount of time they take, how far they have to walk to do them, and how many times per week, per day, per month etc. they have to do them. The types of jobs they listed included: washing clothes, cooking, cleaning the cow's dung from the front yard, collecting and carrying firewood, working in the field, cleaning the children, cleaning the cows, cleaning the house, etc. etc. in total we got about 28 jobs listed. Then we attempted to calculate their average daily labor burden, and it came out to about 17 hours of work, which provides for 7 hours to sleep or breathe. My goal next time we go back to the village is to do the same exercise with the men and compile all of their jobs and the hours and distance they must walk to do them. I will then hopefully do some comparative analysis of men's and women's work and provide this to the villagers during our discussions. For instance I would like to make pie graphs depicting how many hours in a day women and men are doing different tasks, and how many hours they have for free time or sleep. I would also like to monthly and yearly aggregate figures to show how many thousands of kilometers the men and women are walking each year and how many thousands of hours they may be working in a month or a year. I am not sure exactly which things I will do, and this will arise out of discussion with other members of my newly formed PRA team in the NGO ( i.e. the other staff members who accompanied me on the training), but I would think this would provide for very fruitful discussions with the villagers.

The goal of these discussions is not simply to criticize men for being lazy, for this would prove highly unproductive in the end, as men's and women's gender roles in village society are not going to change overnight, but will take a long time and involve much internal change, such as increased education for the women. The goal of such comparative studies in my mind is to highlight in the process of microplanning which problems are given priority and which problems or needs go unaddressed. When thinking about what the village's most critical needs at the present moment may be, if only men are present during the discussion, then they are much more likely to list problems that they face and suggest solutions that would make their lives easier. For instance, a huge problem in these villages is that there is high unemployment for the men, especially during the lean season ( i.e. after the planting is done and before the harvest, you know… "the in-between time." gosh I'm becoming so rural!) and they would like to undertake new economic opportunities such as candle-making, chappal-making (sandals), honey production, all of which are possibilities. But what about the women's needs? By taking and compiling all of the women's work we can easily see many hours each job takes and then start to ask the questions of how can we make the women's work burden lighter?

We learned from our exercise that women spend two hours a day just collecting water from the well. It also turns out that the school has a system of collecting rainwater in a tank that the children use for washing. Well, why can't the houses also start collecting and storing this rainwater for daily use, thus lessening the women's burden somewhat? In a non-participatory development planning method this problem would probably not even arise and its solution would not be considered because the women's needs were never heard.

This is just one of the examples of the microplanning methodology, but I hope you get the idea of the type of work I'm trying to do here. Basically, I want to spend the next year working with all the different groups in the village, the youth, the children, the women's self groups, the mahila mandal, the men, and the gram panchayat members (local village governance) to discuss village problems and come up with potential solutions. These solutions will primarily focus on utilizing the resources already found within the village, both in terms of natural resources and social resources, such as the knowledge and skill base present. This is called using an asset-based approach to planning, rather than a needs-based approach. After exhausting the resources found in the village we will then turn to outside help, such as the NGO and the different government schemes that the village is eligible for. Another interesting note is that we are trying to avoid NGO programs or government programs that are only for select individuals rather than the entire village, because this often creates discord and ill-will. Any program that the village takes should be meant for the upliftment of the entire village.

If any of you are interested in this subject I highly recommend you start reading Gandhi's thoughts on this, part of his Swadeshi philosophy. Basically Gandhi envisioned an independent India as one compsed of autonomous "village republics" that were completely self sufficient and only looked to the outside world for things that could not be supplied by the village itself. In many ways we are trying to replicate that idea in our assets-based microplanning approach.

As part of my real attempts at building rapport with the village I am going to start teaching a computer class to some of the young people. This arose after consultation with the villagers in which some of the youth said that they would like to start learning how to use a computer. The NGO will provide the computer, but first the village has to pay to get an electric line installed in the NGO's school building the "jeevan shalla" (or life school). In this way the village is also invested in the project and it is not just a one-way giving process. Hopefully I will begin teaching them after the Diwali break, as they have been promising to get the line installed for a few weeks now, but it has not yet happened. This too, is part of the process.

I hope that this email was not too boring for those of you who are not so interested in the technical/theoretical details of my project, but I thought it would be good to share some of this aspect of my stay here with you all as well. I hope all is well in your neck of the world, and I look forward to hearing back from you when you get the chance. If you are interested in sending me mail here is my address:

Sushil Jacob
C/o Dr. Satish Gogulwar
Amhi Amachya Arogyasathi
At: Post: Tal. Kurkheda
Dist.: Gadchiroli (Maharashtra)
PIN: 441209
INDIA

All the best,
Sushil
--
Sushil Jacob
Indicorps Fellow 2005-2006
Community Resources Mapping, Maharashtra India