Christmas in Koraput

On Tuesday I attended a public hearing in Koraput.  This was facilitated by SPREAD and was a platform for some of the adivasi people that SPREAD works with to present their cases in their quest to attain their right to land.  Although I did not understand the dialogue it was interesting to see the dynamics of the meeting and compare it to a similar event in the UK.  I don't think many British public hearings start with a song.

The mood seemed to be quite buoyant with smiles from many of the participants and the District Collector.   It will be around 6 months before decisions will be made about the cases presented at the hearing but such delays are common with most public hearings

Christmas here in Koraput was quiet.  My son arrived on Christmas Eve on the overnight train from Bhubaneswar.  It was easy to spot him amongst all the other passengers who disembarked, he being the only white man!  This being rural India, Christmas is not a big festival although there is a public holiday on 25th December.

We went for a walk out of the town on Christmas morning, strolling through a small village where we were greeted by people that I see regularly on my walk to work who were curious to know who the new white people in town were.  Despite feeling slightly uncomfortable as it felt a bit like walking through someone's back yard there were cheery waves and smiles coming from all directions.  We wandered back into the town to go to the market.  I've visited the market most weeks since I arrived here in Koraput and have got fairly accustomed to the noise and bustle but I'm not sure my visitors found it quite so easy to walk around.  We had a fun evening round at our fellow volunteers' house, all of us contributing something to the dinner.  Tomato soup was carried up the road from my house, somehow surviving the trip in the kadei without sloshing overboard.

The next day we were taken out into the field to a remote location somewhere near the border with Andhra Pradesh as guests of a Women's Convention around 80km from Koraput.  This was organised by the adivasi women with the support of SPREAD to discuss the rights-issues that they face and what is being done to address them.  As ever, I could not understand the speecehes but it was a great privilege to have been invited and to have everyone's permission to take their photos as the SPREAD photographer.

The kids seemed to have fun, the older ones playing outside the tent where all the activities were taking place,  peeping in to see what was going on.

We stopped for a cup of cha in the village of Padwa on the return journey and were interested to see just how many people you can get into one auto.  We think there were 20 in this one but were not entirely sure as they were jumping in, on the roof and spilling out the other side.   I didn't realise that auto engines could pull that much!

I didn't try to count how many were on board this vehicle

All in a morning's work

I sat in my house eating my breakfast this morning being entertained by the sight of a flock of around 7-8 crows  fighting over their breakfast in the yard at the front of my house.  Their chosen meal was a dead rat which they were attacking with great gusto.  It was lovely to watch them having a tug of war with the carcasse to see which crow could get the biggest chunk.  Nice way to start the day, a dead rat is much better than a live rat when it's near my home.

The trash collector came round a little earlier than usual today so I was actually in the house at the right time.  I don't put the bucket of rubbish outside the gate for for the man to empty into the his bin as the dogs or cows always get there first, spreading rubbish all round the street in their search for anything edible so if I'm not in when the collector goes down the street blowing his whistle I have to find another disposal mechanism.  When I first arrived in Koraput, the trash collector was a man pushing round a barrow with 4 waste bins on board, collecting refuse from the houses along the streets.  This changed recently to a man carrying a single bin, throwing in the rubbish at each house which had made me curious and wondering why it had changed and where he put the contents of the single bin when it was full.  Today there was a new development.  A small 3-wheeled truck was precariously negotiating its way round the narrow, circuitous streets, having to go backwards and forwards a few times to manage the sharp corners.  The glass beer bottles in the waste bucket were immediately retrieved for selling and the rest of the contents thrown into the back of the truck.  Progress indeed.

This is getting tedious

Yet again we have had a Sunday without electricity.  I have no idea what time it was switched off, all I know is that it was not working when I tried a light switch at around 7 this morning and has only just returned at around 6:30 (with a couple of small hiccups in the preceding hour when it came back, I blew out the candles then it went off again several times).  This is the day when many of us volunteers try to catch up on household chores like washing - hard if your water tank is empty and there is no electricity to pump water up from the well.

Sunday is also the day when we do the main shopping for our week's supply of food.  This I did achieve, fortunately that is not dependant on a steady supply of power although sadly one of the shops I had assumed would be open was all shuttered up.  Tomatoes were today's big bargain at 5 rupees a kilogram.  Tomato soup for supper all week I think.  Jon is curled up in bed with a dose of the rapid Indian weight-loss diet, poor thing.  Is tomato soup good for a dodgy belly?

The building plot next door to my house continues to evolve in mysterious ways.  Gaps that had been left for doors and windows have been bricked up while new gaps have been created.  A group of 4-6 women do the hard work of mixing the mortar by hand then carrying it up for the brickies to paste the bricks together.  All this is done via my front yard, steps and roof which seems to be the easiest way for them to get it up to the height where it's needed, ducking underneath the washing hanging up there to dry, leaving spots of mortar all over the place.  There is also a nice trail of splats of mortar, grit and sand en route from the gate to my yard, up the drive and steps and across the roof.  Occasionally they sweep up but not very often.  I have found myself getting more and more paranoid about keeping the outside of the house clean in an effort to minimise the attraction for ants and to keep the drainage clear and end up sweeping up after them 3-4 times a week.

They seem to have colonised the area around my house, leaving their tiffin tins on the steps out of the sun all morning then sitting on my roof to eat in the early afternoon, sometimes playing games in the yard outside my front door - all within the boundaries of my property and almost falling into my house in their revelries.  I came home on Friday to find someone's motorbike parked outside my door with a big-boss builder contemplating the works from my roof.  Saturday I went upstairs with my washing to find the plot owner was also up in my roof with his wife, son and mother.  The big problem is that I have no contact with the landlord.  The lease is held by another NGO who want to retain a space for their next volunteer and pay the rent.  My NGO has no contact with the landlord and I have no way of finding out  if he's given the builders permission to work from his property.  Maybe I should just put a padlock on the gate to see if anyone complains?  I suspect they'd just climb over the wall as I've seen them do several times to get to their building material compound - which just happens to be my yard.  Grrrr!

Koraput changes

At last, after 5 months in India I have my first visitor from home.  Jon, my husband has braved the journey and arrived here on Saturday morning, staggering off the overnight train looking a bit bemused and crumpled after 48 hours of travelling.  It's lovely to see him again after such a long time but I can't help feeling very apprehensive about how I'll feel when he leaves again.  Miserable as sin I suspect!  (that's a nice welcome for him isn't it?)  The first time I have a visitor arriving is also the first time that I've managed to get sick since I've been here.  It's really not fair.  Maybe I'm getting a bit too blase about hygiene after 5  months of good health. The only food I ate for over 24 hours before it started had been cooked by myself so I can't even blame someone else's dodgy food.

J arrived here on the same day that my friend M left at the end of his assignment to return home to the UK.   M had been expecting to travel back to Delhi by train, starting from Vizniagaram junction in Andhra Pradesh then on to Delhi via Bhubaneswar.  Due to some civil unrest the director of his NGO decided that it would be safer for him to go to Bhuba by car so he duly spent half the night being ferried across the state in chauffeur-driven luxury in an effort to make sure he got his train connection to Delhi.  M has been replaced by a married couple working at the same NGO who both seem really nice but it does mean that there are now 2 married couples and lonesome me here in remote Koraput.  I need to get back to my Oriya books to try to acquire a bit more language, getting to know some local people would be easier if I could actually manage to talk to them.

Ants have invaded my house.  I gave the place a thorough cleaning around 10 days ago on my first "rest" day for around 3 weeks - the dust was beginning to pile up and I thought I ought to do a bit of cleaning in honour of my visitor.  A few days later I noticed some grains of red soil accumulated in a corner.

I followed the trail to find a rather magnificant architectural edifice comprising a tube which had been made with the soil combined with ant saliva, rapidly growing and running alongside the wall.  The tube was filled with ants scurrying around carrying grains of soil to build their nest then filling it with their eggs.  By the time I decided I'd better stop the colony from encircling the room (and my bed!) it was around 2 metres long.  I'm now wondering how many millions of ants there are living in the mortar and brickwork underneath my house, burrowing their way through and carrying segments off to make homes elsewhere.

I'm curious about the house that's growing in the plot next door to mine.  I had been a bit put out by the close proximity of the new building as my windows now look out onto a blank brick wall about a metre away, blocking out most of my natural daylight.  It does however bring the advantage of cutting out most of the sun which helps to keep it cooler and for me, that has to be an advantage.  The thing that is really intriguing me is the building technique.  This photo is taken from my roof, looking down into the plot onto the internal walls.  The bricks were laid, the door and window holes roughly framed with bamboo poles and a layer of what looked like ordinary local soil laid over the top.  After that, a layer of cement was added followed by a metal frame which was used to build a concrete beam along the top of the walls, windows and doors.  I suspect that is how my house was built as well.  The site is staffed by a couple of (male) brickies and up to half a dozen women doing the heavy digging, lifting and mortar mixing work.  Somehow these women manage to look elegant while carrying great pans of mortar or a dozen bricks on their heads, saris carefully folded around them and sometimes wearing flowers in their hair.  They have colonised the steps up onto my roof, keeping their tiffin tins with their lunch on there and out of the sun during the morning and sitting on my roof to eat their lunch in the early hours of the afternoon.  So much for being able to use a private roof space for hanging out my newly washed underwear to dry in the sun.  It risks being splattered with mortar which they carry up onto my roof to lay.   At least they sound cheerful while they work, the place is constantly filled with peals of laughter.

Power cuts are a regular occurrence here in Koraput but have been particularly bad over the last couple of weeks due to a faulty transformer.  The town has been sharing a single transformer since the pair blew with different parts of town alternating supply, 2 hours on and 2 hours off.  It gets to be quite a challenge to work out when there will be supply to recharge batteries and refill water tanks.  I had been told that the transformer was due to be replaced on Tuesday but we still had a lengthy power cut this morning, Wednesday.  Maybe tomorrow?

Portraits of a society part 3

Adivasis frequently live in remote and inhospitable areas such as hills and forests, suffer poor health due to disease and malnutrition, have little or no formal education leading to low literacy levels, use a low level of technology and have a distinctive culture and language.  Many have a culture of nurturing the land that they live from, e.g. finding ways to use forest products that do not result in the loss of the trees (my non-timber forest-product house brush is one example, the leaf plates - totally biodegradable - is another).

There is some indication that they have little contact with people from outside their communities but all the Adivasi that I have met have made me feel very welcome, despite my inability to speak any of their language.  Gatherings of people representing these communities are a valuable way of them sharing their concerns, experiences and ideas and to have a much-needed celebration of their culture.  The short time that I have spent working in this community has made me wonder if these people have got it right.  They lack formal education opportunities and the ability to read and write is essential in many parts of the world and can lead to so much other learning.  Many suffer from malnutrition, starvation occurs, serious and preventable health problems are not uncommon and there are frequent reports of serious exploitation, abuse and even killing of tribal people.  However they get (or provide) a different sort of education, learning how to live with and for the land and to leave little impact on the environment.  Do they have a greater chance of surviving than those of us who are highly dependent on an oil-based economy, acquiring lots of material goods that we don't really need to survive, churn out carbon emissions, depending on others to supply us with our food and basic living needs and where harvesting a crop usually means destroying the plant that produced it?

I was told that this is a wine tree.  A branch is cut and the sap seeps out of the cut end into a bowl suspended underneath the cut end.  Or at least the bowl collects what the birds don’t get first.  It does not seem to harm the tree, the wound heals and the tree and continues sprouting quite happily.

The trick to harvesting this ‘wine’ (which is not alcoholic) is shinning up a bamboo pole ladder to get to the source.

There were several nests woven high up in the branches.  I've heard of weaver birds - wonder if these nests belong to them?

I think that this is a banyan tree with harvested paddy fields behind and cashew trees in the distance.

Village street.

Village water supply.

Street cleaning.  It was one of the cleanest places that I've had the pleasure of visiting.

It’s a good idea to part your vehicle in the shade.

Drying the laundry on the paddy sheaves.

Song & dance acts

The Tribal Convention that I attended was for a serious reason.  The people were gathering to discuss their issues and what they were doing about them or what they wanted to do about them.  However, it's also a good opportunity to have a bit of a celebration; there's nothing like a good get-together for making some entertainment.  Adivasi entertainment is fun.  It can be very noisy, sometimes a little disconcerting like when I found myself whisked up in the middle of a group of ladies dancing their way across to lunch but we all had a good time.

 

 

Adivasis have talent, everyone joined in the singing (except for me, all I could do was clap along to the rhythm when I wasn't using my camera)

Portraits of a society part 2

Adivasis are the indigenous population of India; i.e.the original inhabitants of the land.  They form a substantial minority of the Indian population at around 8% of the total population (around 68 million people) and around 50% of the Koraput district population. The Indian Constitution uses the term Scheduled Tribes as an administrative term to 'administer constitutional privileges, protection and benefits for peoples considered historically disadvantaged and backward'.  Not all Adivisis are classified as Scheduled Tribes.  The Constitution offers great protection and privelages to all the people of India but sadly the practice of administering people's rights is not so good.

In 1793 the British introduced the "Zamindari system that conferred control over vast territories, including Adivasi territories, to designated feudal lords for the purpose of revenue collection by the British. This drastically commenced the forced restructuring of the relationship of Adivasis to their territories as well as the power relationship between Adivasis and 'others'. The predominant external caste-based religion sanctioned and practiced a rigid and highly discriminatory hierarchical ordering with a strong cultural mooring". (A History of Discrimination, Conflict, and Resistance by C.R. Bijoy, Core Committee of the All India Coordinating Forum of Adivasis/Indigenous Peoples  

http://www.pucl.org/Topics/Dalit-tribal/2003/adivasi.htm).  

Historically, the Adivasi people did not own land individually but had territorial land that was used by many generations of the tribal community which ensured that the land remained in the control of the tribe rather than individuals.  The introduction of the Zamandiri system meant that the land that they lived on and from was taken out of their control and they lost their means to survive, leaving them low in the social hiearchy.  Subsequent developments such as the creation of large dams to form reservoirs resulted in further displacement of these people and disruption of their irrigations sytems, building large factories (that offer little employment to local people) on huge plots of land, mining bauxite (which not only displaces people but removes a valuable land resource as bauxite acts like a sponge, soaking up water during monsoon season for retention and life-support system for plants during the dry months) have added to the problems faced by many of the Adivisi communities.  

This is not a political or activist blog but I could write pages and pages about the problems and discrimination that are faced by these people.  They have huge problems that I am only just starting to comprehend.  There are many activists and NGOs such as SPREAD are trying to address their problems but it takes time and resources to get anywhere.  There are many very good blogs posted by activists who know far more about the Adivasi people and the problems they face than I do if you are interested and want to find out more.

There were loads of kids at the Tribal Convention - none of this leaving them at home for someone else to look after nonsense so often seen in many other countries.  They form a valued part of the society and seem to be welcomed everywhere.

Portraits of a society part 1

Here are just a few of the adivasi (tribal) people I met at the Tribal Convention at the weekend.  They were all there for a good reason - talking about the issues being faced in different blocks (political divisions of the area), what they are doing or tryuing to do about them and also to celebrate their culture and way of life.  It's rare that I've had the privelage of meeting so many people, unable to speak each other's languages but who have still made me feel so welcome and part of their society, if only very briefly for a couple of days. I was wandering round in my salwar kameez, enjoying the cooler air that we are having now here in Koraput.  However, if you have been brought up in the Indian climate and accustomed to much warmer temperatures, you feel the cold.  It was only when it came to trying to sleep in a village house that I felt a bit chilly.  At least my house didn't have the big mouses that my colleague told me about in the house that he had to sleep in!