A village near Lamtaput in Koraput district, Odisha

The main street

The baby didn't know what to make of this strange-looking white person wielding a large contraption in front of their face.  Pretty scary I think

 

This is what I like to see, sharing resources

The children all seem to do work as soon as they are strong enough.  Sometimes it's looking after their younger siblings, sometimes it's helping with the family chores, sometimes it's helping their parents grow their food, sometimes it's going out to earn money to help the family survive.

But they still manage to have fun

Jackfruits swelling on the tree and a mango tree in full bloom.  I can't wait for the mango harvest!

Some more paddy fields

I found out that a by-product of the paddy fields is small fish that live in the irrigated land.  No fish in these photos but to my western eyes it was an impressive sight.  The thing that surprised me was the sound of rushing water as the river drained and cascaded slowly down the land

 The paddy is sown in nursery fields after harvest and the seedling transferred by hand into the main paddy fields (padia or bila).  This seems to achieve a better rate of germination and seedling survival than scattering and although the work looks backbreaking to my pandered western eyes, provides much needed work and wages for the community.

 

 The cranes seem to like the irrigated fields.  Maybe they're fishing as well?

A lovely garden

I had another trip out to the field at the weekend, this time to an area close to the Machkund Dam on the border with Andhra Pradesh.  The Machkund river was dammed in the late 1940's as part of a large hydro-electricity scheme.  The project resulted in the displacement of many adivasi villages and families and also disrupted the irrigation that had been developed for the cultivation of paddy.

The local communities are working hard to make a sustainable living from their land with many self-help groups (SHGs) set up to facilitate the process.  We were out with a colleague from another NGO talking to the community about the potential of setting up cooperatives to manage the cashew cultivation, harvest and marketing.  Cashew is an important crop in this area, there are cashew plantations growing in the dry soil, many of them managed by big corporations which may not always get the best deal for the adivasi community. 

I was taken on a tour through a thriving vegetable garden cultivated by a SHG.  It put my gardening efforts to shame. To my inexpert eye, the soil here looks dry, lacking in organic matter and difficult to make productive.  I clearly know nothing about growing vegetables.

These tomatoes may not look as visually impressive as the ones we see in our supermarkets at home but the flavour is wonderful and they cost anything between 2 and 15 rupees in the markets here, depending on demand and the weather conditions.

The potatoes are also very tasty but like growers the world over, there are pests that also make their attack on the crop, in this case rats

Carrying some of the day's harvest into the village

A glimpse of life in the village of Khajuripadar

I met some lovely people in Khajuripadar.  Most of them don't even speak Oriya but their own tribal dialect although most will understand Oriya.  My pitiful attempts at speaking Oriya elicited much laughter and teasing but we managed to communicate somehow and I was made to feel very welcome.  The project coordinators can all speak pretty good English and many of their team members manage a few English words but one afternoon I was left to fend for myself for the afternoon while the teams went out to do some field work.  I sat down in the shade with my Oriya book to try to do some homework but was soon made to get some exercise with a cricket bat.  We discovered that I seem to be able to hit a ball (usually onto a thatched roof or into a neighbours yard) but am without the capacity to catch a ball.  Never mind, at least I managed to hit the ball.

This is the house where I slept each night.  The room was sparse but clean.  The floors are all bare, hard packed soil but very solid and kept well brushed.  I did have a bed but the lack of mattress made me appreciate my own bed all the more when I got back to Koraput.  I felt very guilty when I found that this room is usually used by some of the team members who had vacated it to give me a private room.  I did share it with a bat that kept flapping around one night.

 

 

These pictures make the place look idyllic.  It is very beautiful and peaceful, a remarkably relaxing place to stay.  However, we must not forget what it must be like living in such a remote place when you are sick, have no money to travel or pay for medicines, your children can't get to school, the only water supply is a single pump shared by all, there is one toilet in the village and then there's the monsoon which will turn those hard, compacted soil surfaces into mud.

This lady, who had the loveliest, sweetest smile I've seen for a long time spent hours sweeping the village clean every day.  She put me to shame, I will try never to moan about doing the housework again.

A bit about food

I was fed very well while staying out in Khajuripadar.  There may be little money, no electricity, no piped water and nothing in the way of mod cons but they know how to cook good meals and look after their guests.  The feminist in me was very gratfied to see most of the cooking being done by men, there seemed to be no expectation that this was women's work.  Sadly I missed out on the feast that was being prepared on my last day in the village.  A couple of the team had gone to another village to buy some chicken and this had taken longer than anticipated and we needed to set off back to Koraput before the meal was ready.  The preparation of the chickens was a bit delayed by one of them making a bid for an escape and being chased around the village by men waving sticks and trying to catch it.  However, the racing chicken was brought to a humane conclusion.

Singeing off the last few feathers after plucking.

Dismembering the chicken ready for the pot

A kadei of dali simmering away on the stove.

The Khajuripadar equivalent of a 3-ring stove, carefully attended by Malati, one of the main tribal leaders in this area.

Gopal took me into Ramagiri a couple of times to get a hearty breakfast of idli, made by steaming a batter of fermented black lentils and rice flour, served with some sort of savoury dali type of mixture.  I had almost got to the bottom of my leaf-bowl full of 3 large idli + dali when I was presented with another 3 to munch through.  I did not need to eat again for a long time after.

I managed to take a photo of the main street in Ramagiri after swabbing myself down, having got breakfast all down myself.

Some Khajuripadar life

I came across some interesting trees in Khajuripadar, most of which are not found in the UK.  One of our meetings was held in the shade of a tentuli (tamarind) tree which gave us some welcome respite from the heat of the Indian sun.

I've often used tamarind when preparing food but not seen the fruit growing on a tree which has very attractive foliage.  Here are a few tentuli fruits hiding in the leaves.

This is a very large and probably very old cashew tree with a few tentuli leaves in the foreground.  I have seen cashew trees many times here in Orissa but all the others I've seen have been in commercially managed plantations where the trees are kept small and easy to harvest.  This one looks much more majestic but is probably more of a challenge to pick the nuts.

These are baby jackfruits, a member of the mulberry family.  These fruits can grow up to 20-90 cm long and 15-50 cm wide with a  weight ranging from 4.5-20kg or even as much as 50kg.  How they stay on the tree and don't break the branches with their weight I have no idea, I hope to see these fruits when they are full grown.  To the best of my knowledge I've never eaten jackfruit, it's not something I have ever seen or even heard of in the UK.  I'm told it's added to curries or pickled and one of my colleagues has promised me that he will make me a curry with jackfruit.  I look forward to it.

This is a young wine tree.  I don't know the proper botanical name for them but there are a couple of species of palm tree here which are tapped for their sap which I'm told is sweet and tasty.  The liquor (not alcoholic) is sold and a strong, healthy wine tree can yield 70 lakh INR.  A valuable resource.

The harvesters work out which branches to tap by looking for where birds nests have been woven, high in the trees.  This, I was told, shows the branches which are full of the sap.  I've added a couple of photos here used in a previous post, now that I've found more about the process.

The tapping is done high up in the mature tree, lopping off the selected branch and hanging a bowl under the cut edge to collect the seepage.  The tapper climbs up a bamboo 'ladder' (more like a pole with a few notches on) to collect the sap.

I don't think that lizards are used as a source of food here but this one didn't hang around for long when it realised I'd spotted it.

No village is complete without it's canines.  These pups are from a family of 3 survivors of a litter that lost their mother when they were only around 1 month old.  They're lucky to have survived but looked healthy and full of energy, scampering around and digging holes in the ground for us to trip up in.