Interns' Diary: Afsoon Donna Houshidari III
Name: Afsoon Donna Houshidari Fieldwork: Day 2 After an hour’s bumpy ride from the city of Varanasi (formerly Benares), our team arrives at Manihau, a village where there has been no intervention by UNICEF’s Bal Adhikar Project. Our aim is to gain a baseline understanding of a typical village in this area, so that we have a point of comparison when investigating a village where the project has intervened. Sanjeevji, one of the Project Management Officers is our guide. Our team is lucky to have two Hindi speakers, and I’ve been equipped with a translator. One interesting discovery for me is the overlap in Hindi and Farsi, one of my mother tongues. Many words are the same, such as zendegee (life), mosghel (difficulty), aseman (sky), and zarooree (essential). Hindi is influenced greatly by Urdu, and Sanskit and Farsi are both part of the Indo-European or Aryan family of languages. The overlap in languages is also no doubt reflective of the Moghul era of Indian history in which the ancient Persian kings ruled India. To learn more about India’s history and culture I’ve been reading two great (and very different) books recommended by fellow interns, May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons, by Elisabeth Bumiller, and The Argumentative Indian, by Amartya Sen. But I digress… We visit the government primary school in Manihau first. It is the first day of school, so attendance is low—so low in fact, that they let the children go home. Nonetheless, given the arrival of strangers, many children accumulate while we talk with the teachers. It will take a month or so before attendance rises, they tell us. The school consists of two rooms and a small foyer. There is no blackboard, no chalk, no chairs, one closet, one desk, and one thin dari, or rug, for the children to sit on. When I ask the teachers if they have any teaching materials, they say no. When I ask the principal the same question, he says yes, goes into the closet, digs up a box and blows the dust off of it, and takes out an unused textbook, handing it to me and saying that I can keep it. Why I am the recipient of that workbook rather than the teachers or the students, I cannot tell you. There is a room adjacent to the school that is used for meetings with occasional government officials or school inspectors but normally it is locked and the 300 children enrolled in the school do not have access to it. Yes, there are 300 children enrolled and two teachers. The teachers tell us that generally the large majority of children arrive shortly before the morning meal is served at 9:30 am, after which they promptly leave. They arrive again just before noon, when the midday meal is served, and then are not to be seen again until the next morning. This “meal scheme” as its known was instituted by the government a few years ago as an incentive for children to attend school. Instead, it appears that the children come only for the meals—at least at this school. But the food is creating more problems: when I ask the teachers what the one thing is that they would change or improve about the school if they could, they say that many of the children choke on the midday meal because of its consistency, and that is the definitely the most important thing to improve. Later, parents would tell us that the provision of the meal is sporadic, and when it does come, it is of such poor quality that their children have gotten sick from it. So much for an incentive to go to school. The midday meal costs the government 3 rupees per child per day. Monthly, at a school with 300 children, the cost of the midday meal is equivalent to the salaries of two additional teachers (which, in case you’re curious is 18,000 Rupees or about $430CDN). I wonder whether the money would be better spent on the teachers. Seeing the situation in which a typical rural village operates was a harrowing experience. But it was also my first meeting with rural Indians, walking through a village and interacting with people. The teachers were most willing to speak with us and share their stories.
Later that day, we visit Ramnagar, a village where the Project has existed for over 5 years. We are told that we’re going to a “Cluster Over a hundred women have gathered for this meeting, all of whom are part of “Self-Help Groups” (SHGs) that were created through (See pictures IMG_4440: My teammates Diksha and Akshay addressing the
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