Nobel Peace Prize! (Aliyah)

June 29

This blog is one that I have been waiting three weeks to write, and finally the time has come. The wait has been long and perhaps unnecessary.

On 6th June, Veerasamy called me into the office. Amma was off on one of her many visits to the Nagapattinam Collector’s office. Veerasamy handed me a letter and asked me to explain it to him. The letter informed us that Krishnammal Jagannathan had been selected, out of over 2,000 names submitted, to be one of the 1.000 Women for Peace being nominated collectively for the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize. (you can read about the nomination and about all 1,000 amazing women at www.1000peacewomen.org.) I had heard something somewhere about this movement before, but I don’t remember where. The effort is aimed at giving greater international exposure to 1,000 activist women who work fairly invisibly and are not widely noticed for the Nobel Prize this fall. Women are very underrepresented in the history of the prize, especially as they are overrepresented among peacemakers as a whole. I burst into a big grin and told Veerasamy, “This is good news.”

At the bottom of the page, just where I would read over it the first time, it said: please keep this news confidential until 29th June. Thousands of people probably know about it already. This is not a secretive society, though I did refrain from telling anyone about it except my parents when I was trying to figure out who nominated her. We still don’t know.

Of course, I am far more excited about it than Amma is. She has no time for excitement, with 15 brick-making centers to deal with. “When I win the prize, then I will be excited,” she told me. As a result of a letter to the government from a 14-year-old boy, she is going to meet the President of India when he’s in Nagapattinam tomorrow. Or rather, as I see it, the President will meet Amma. She wants to talk about prawn farms. Jagannathan seems to be planning to come as well. It’s going to be an absolute zoo, I’m sure. I wonder what will be busier -- this, or Bill Clinton’s visit just before I arrived in May.

It’s unbelievable that it’s been a month since I left home. I don’t want to go back. I could spend my life here watching the chickens peck in the yard and the rice grow in the neighboring field, making soup for Appa and whomever else wants it, and learning this activism, as quiet and slow and strong as mangrove roots pushing into the sand.

Aliyah

"Madam" Krishnammal

It has been a strange two days, and it just got weirder. I got back from Akkarapattai and saw three men in blue uniforms in the office. I thought, “Police?” No! They were three security guards from a company come to see if LAFTI, as an NGO, had any use for them. As has been common these two days, I smothered my laughter. I came across Muttukumar (my friend, and one of the drivers), who was doing the same thing, with as little success, and asked him, “Don’t they know they should be guarding against us?”

The weird days started Saturday afternoon when the man from TATA arrived. TATA a huge Indian corporate conglomerate, but they engage in charitable work. The man was head of tsunami relief for his organization in Nagapattinam District. He was quite a sight. He was dressed as the archetypal off-work wealthy businessman: perfectly neat jeans (jeans! I haven’t seen anyone wearing them in a month!), a pressed, tailored, button-down shirt, and polished leather shoes. His hair and beard were the same once-dark color as David’s, but there were no little straggly bits of moustache falling down into his mouth. The TATA man (I never did learn his name) came from Hyderabad, and spoke not a word of Tamil. At first I liked having him there because it meant that things were explained in English (his English was word-perfect), but after a while I wished we could get rid of him.

It was not until that night that I learned what Amma wanted from him. She wants to make fly-ash bricks (fly-ash is a byproduct of coal burning that, when properly mixed and cured, forms a cement-like substance). These bricks require no burning, which is otherwise a problem during the rainy season. She has a source for fly-ash that will cost her nothing, and all the other ingredients, but she has no money for the machine to make the bricks. This is what she wanted.

The first thing that struck me as funny about the TATA man was that he called Krishnammal “madam.” Never before have I heard someone use a formal form of address when talking to Amma (at least in English), neither “madam” nor “ma’am” nor “Mrs. Jagannathan”, though I have at least seen the last in writing. Either no one told him that Krishnammal is generally called Amma, or he didn’t listen. We all got in the car to go to the brickmaking site at Kohol.

They were mixing mud and building a kiln when we arrived. Everyone was mud-covered. The man started talking about how the bricks could be made uniform in size and composition and should be stamped (he seemed to me to be under the impression that LAFTI was planning to try to sell some of them), and he was full of plans for improving efficiency and decreasing hand labor. He didn’t seem to realize that Krishnammal, like all Gandhians, is most definitely against decreasing manual labor as doing so causes unemployment. Krishnammal, for her part, was in rare form as the simple, schemeless soul who leaves all the planning up to God. The TATA man seemed totally taken in by this, and seemed to think her a little crazy and not very bright. 50 percent correct isn’t too bad. He seemed very surprised that the little, dark man in the torn undershirt and mud-covered dhoti was, in fact, the organizer of the site. He took samples of bricks and drinking water for testing. He didn’t smile at the muddy, unclothed, happy babies. This is always a bad sign.

The next morning, Krishnammal, Veerasamy, Gandhi, Muttukumar, and I went to Akkarapattai. It was exactly seven months after the tsunami, almost to the very hour. Roads had been swept, debris hauled away. Five or six men were knotting bright blue fishing nets on the side of the road. But it was still filled more with ghosts than people, and it seemed hushed. We went to the TATA office, where the man showed us his computer-training programs, and then his model house. It costs three times as much as LAFTI’s, for the same size or maybe a bit smaller. Still, he has the money, and he is planning to get LAFTI the needed machine. The rural secretary of Tamil Nadu was berating him because the house has only two rooms. But that house is bigger than anything that the poor people here have ever lived in, and I can imagine living in it myself.

I met two women there. One, named Roopal, was working at the Gandhi Center in Ahmedabad. She was either American-born (quite possible, as she had very fair skin and gray eyes) or had lived there for a long time, because she spoke what I would normally call unaccented English. Her American accent sounded harsh on my ears after weeks of hearing Tamil. She works on getting Indian youth in America to come and do Gandhian service projects in India. The other woman, Sitalakshmi, grew up in Akkarapattai, and had her house destroyed in the tsunami. She had formed an NGO – Phoenix - doing livelihood work for all the people, not just the fishermen, and was trying to form a coalition of all the local NGOs which had connections to the people there. Neither had ever met Amma, and both were very impressed. They came back to Kuthur that afternoon.

Aliyah

Bandits

So, I asked Krishnammal about Lila last night. Lila has come to Kuthur to be arrested for failing to appear in court. Apparently, she was originally arrested at the same time as Veerasamy, nearly ten years ago, but unlike Veerasamy she has not been appearing in court every week to have her case postponed. She’s been working in some other part of the state, though I couldn’t quite catch the name (perhaps Kanyakumari District in the far south), and when the order for her arrest was sent out, she didn’t want to be arrested in the district in which she was working, for fear of tarnishing her reputation with the people there. Actually, Jagannathan could be arrested at any time for the same offence, but they won’t do it, for fear of taking the blame if his health becomes worse.

By the way, the charges against Lila (who is from Kerala originally, and has been teaching me a few words of Malayalam, the language of that state - Vellam is water) are that she burned down the houses of some officials of the prawn companies. So here we are, sheltering an arsonist. She’s not the worst of our criminals, though. Veerasamy is an attempted murderer, and Jagannathan is the leader of the whole organization of bandits that has its headquarters here, and he went with a lorry full of weapons to attack the prawn workers and destroy the farms, physically impossible as it may appear. Even the dog here steals shoes. Krishnammal and I have both found our right chappals (Hindi for sandals), slightly chewed, hung on thorn hedges just outside the ashram this week. I had thought it was Veerasamy, but I guess he’s innocent of that charge. Our drivers break every traffic rule known to humankind. Krishnammal herself, saint though she may seem, is a kidnapper (not all of the children in her hostels from poor or abusive homes were taken with the full consent of their families). As for me, I have been known to break a bunch of copyright laws. I also break almost anything else, like a bull in a china shop. I am a complete and absolute klutz.

I first met Jagannathan in the Madras City Jail, when I was three years old. I don’t remember it very well, and at the time I didn’t really know what a jail was. He gave me a present: a leaf, stolen from a government-owned tree. Jagannathan has been in jail uncountable times, and most of the people here have probably been arrested at least once (Krishnammal has, in fact, escaped from a police van when the officers went to get tea. I forgot to list that among her offenses). It goes with the territory.

All combined, there are more than 500 false cases that are being postponed indefinitely. I wonder if they will ever be thrown out, if they will simply be forgotten, or if Veerasamy will have to go to court every week for the rest of his life, to stand there waiting from dawn till dusk. He asked me if I wanted to go to court with him on Monday. When I said yes, he looked at me as though I were crazy. Maybe I am crazy. Here I am, associating with murderers, arsonists, and vandals. Am I an accomplice?

P.S. Jothi appears to be recovering. I went to her house in Valivalam today, and met her daughter and grandchildren. Tomorrow I go to Akkarapettai, by the coast.

Drumsticks...and Malaysian Mangroves (David)

While I’m awaiting for Aliyah’s next blog to come through (Internet connections with LAFTI are sometimes intermittent), I thought I’d make an editor’s note, and comment on a recent news story.

In the last blog, Aliyah mentioned “drumsticks”. I want to assure readers that these drumsticks are not associated with chickens or turkeys. Confused me too when I first visited south India. Drumsticks are “vegetables” (actually, seed pods) that grow on, what else?, drumstick trees. The pods are 12-16 inches long (I’ve seen longer ones) and look like…drumsticks…the kind one uses to actually play on drums. They are usually cut up in two or three inch-long pieces, and cooked in sambar. One eats them like artichoke leaves, scraping the innards out with one’s teeth, as well as eating the seeds. As I remember, cattle also enjoy the leaves.

Probably more than you ever wanted to know.

Reuters just published an article on shrimp farming in Malaysia. It seems that the mangrove forest to the northwest of Kuala Lumpur, which served as a natural protective buffer against tsunamis, and provided wood and marine products, is now being turned to aquaculture.

The Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi had called for the mangrove swamps’ preservation, noting that they shielded several Indonesian islands and Malaysia’ northwest coast from the tsunami last December. But as an indication of how strong the power of the Prime Minister is when arrayed against multinational business forces and the World Bank, an 8-kilometer stretch of prime mangrove forests has been turned to shrimp farming.

It was a big investment, too, as the acidic mangrove swamp water had to neutralized to sustain marine life. The area was formerly home to fish, blue and orange fiddler crabs, otters, mud skippers, silver-leaf monkeys, and 156 varieties of birds. And snails, a big part of the diet of the villagers in the area, are now virtually gone. And the farm owners put snares around the boundaries of the ponds, ensnaring otters and birds, used to living in what had been forest reserve.

Malaysia should know what to expect next. In 2002, a 988-acre shrimp farm growing tiger prawns that displayed rice fields in the northern Malaysia was wiped out by a virus. Now the land simply lies in waste. No rice growing, no shrimp, no employment. Just a tan-gray wasteland.

Sigh. It’s the same story everywhere.

Hot and Sticky (Aliyah)

It’s hot and sticky here and I often feel too tired to write, but I need to get something new out. Maybe I should become nocturnal, but I’m not much of a night owl and I like the weather until about eight in the morning and after six in the evening. I want to be a swallow, catching insects in the morning and evening, or, failing that, a bat. Jodi had to go to the hospital yesterday for some sort of heart trouble. I don’t know how serious it is and I haven’t heard any more recent news. Another worker, Lila, is here, who remembers David very well, saying that he sponsored her (David’s comment: I supported her work with Amma many years ago, when LAFTI was just getting off the ground). I have never met her before, to my knowledge. She says that she has just come from “the police.” I don’t know whether this means she has come from jail, or from court, or somewhere else, but she mentions something about a warrant and prawn farms. I’ll have to ask Krishnammal to explain.

On Tuesday, two men arrived from somewhere. I don’t know where they came from, and they disappeared after lunch. Krishnammal took them off to visit the house-building sites and I went, too. She has a new, slightly larger plan for some of the houses. After we visited a few villages, we went somewhere I had never been before. We drove across a wide, salt-encrusted plain, the vegetation growing less and less until it was finally completely lifeless. There, bulldozers were throwing up a tall, wide berm out of the grayish, blackened, sandy soil. Krishnammal explained it to me.

LAFTI had distributed this land to a nearby village in the 1980s. Fifteen years ago, due to climate change and later to prawn farming, the saltwater tidal river started flooding it at every monsoon. They are building this wall to keep the salt water out before the monsoon starts. It will take years, but eventually (at least in theory) the rains will wash the salt from the soil and make it cultivable again. The people had asked the government to help, but the government programs are food-for-work, and this job cannot be done this without machine labor, especially if they want to have it done before the rains. I don’t know when these rains are coming, but I hope it’s soon.

We’ve had various guests coming in and out, most of whom I have never meet. There was a former president of Gandhigram Rural University on Tuesday, who asked me about my studies. There is a girl from Valivalam hostel here now, named Saraswati, who is being given new clothes, which her family certainly cannot afford, as they didn’t even have a bit of land for a hut, and had to attach a shelter to their neighbor’s home. There are various men who I assume come from different projects to meet, who never stay long.
Some of these people I may already know, but, as I said, I have a terrible memory for faces.

More later,

Aliyah

Englishing...and a Short Note from Amma

I just managed to get some bath soap, which is lucky, since I finished off the last bit of the bar I had been using. A few days ago, I asked one of the cooks for a bar, and she sent Bharvi, one of the LAFTI workers, off for laundry powder, which wasn’t at all what I wanted, since bar laundry soap works much better for washing clothes by hand.

This entry, however, is not about soap. It’s about writing, and the LAFTI style of it. Those of my readers who are in contact with LAFTI (and I often wonder how many of you are) will know exactly what I mean. Long, meandering sentences, articles and plurals left out, and word choices that are often quite charming, if sometimes bizarre.

It’s definitely Indian English, but more than that, it’s Krishnammal’s English. She is the only person working here, with the slight exception of Gandhi, who acts as her scribe, with enough command of that language to write in it, and it shows. Except for scribal errors, the LAFTI writing style is almost exactly the same as Krishnammal’s spoken language. This explains some of the confusion and repetition in the writing. Amma often has to say something several times in different ways to get the whole point across, and she always works much better in a dialogue than just speaking by herself. She also makes mental leaps from one thought to another that leave anyone else in the dust.

I have become the vengeful angel of proper grammar. I’ve been taking letters, notes, descriptions of projects, budgets, and anything else written in my native tongue, and running them through the mill of proof-reading. (I’d edit Tamil, too, but I don’t even know the 200-something-letter syllabic alphabet. A few days ago, Gandhi said “Here, Aliyah, edit this,” and handed me five pages of a Tamil description of the self-help housing program. Krishnammal had just been lecturing him on his Tamil grammar, or maybe word choice. I’ve gotten to the point of knowing enough of the language that I can sometimes tell what people are talking about, but not what they’re saying.) When I’m finished, the pages are full of black-and-blue pen-created bruises, and when they heal they are perfect American English, except for the spellings, which I allow to remain British.

A good example might be the “Short Note about LAFTI,” which I think may have been published on this blog previously. Below is the original of one paragraph:

“There are 49% of landless people. Most of the lands belong to temples and absentee landlords. Because of old feudal system there was constant struggle between landowners and landless. The result 44 women and children were burnt alive in the year 1968 on Christmas day.”

This is the only mention of the beginning of LAFTI’s work. Nowhere in the note, except for the signature, is Krishnammal mentioned, which is quite usual in her writing. Nowhere is the area in which LAFTI works spelled out, although the phrase “this area” is used in the first paragraph. After my edits, the above paragraph reads as follows:

“49 percent of the people in this mainly agricultural, rice-growing area have no land. Most of the lands belong to temples and absentee landlords. As a result of the old feudal system, under which one landlord held the land and others worked it for him, there was a constant struggle between the landowners and the landless workers. In a tragic episode of this struggle, 44 women and children were burnt alive in the year 1968 on Christmas day, in the village of Kilvenmani.”

The rest of my changes are of much the same sort. The grammar is perfect, the words are correct, but I wonder if I haven’t done something wrong in so drastically changing the style. Obviously, clearing up the pieces of history and details that were skipped over can only be an improvement, but there is none of the original wording left, and I had been really very fond of it.

If Krishnammal were to send me a letter with every punctuation mark in the correct place, every verb agreeing with its subject; if her recipe for sambar had everything measured out to the last lentil or drumstick; I would find it very odd and indeed disturbing. She likes my changes, saying that I am able to write what she tries to express (these are not her words) but I am less sure about them. I would like to find a balance between clarity and LAFTI style, and I will continue to work towards this.

And now I’m helping Krishnammal with her Italian.

Aliyah


A Short Note about LAFTI

LAFTI (Land for the Tillers Freedom) is a registered organization. It was incorporated in 1981, although its founders have been working for the last 35 years in the Nagapattinam, Tiruvarur, and Thanjavur districts of Tamil Nadu with the mission of distributing land to the landless poor, most of whom are dalits (untouchables).

49 percent of the people in this mainly agricultural, rice-growing area have no land. Most of the lands belong to temples and absentee landlords. As a result of the old feudal system, under which one landlord held the land and others worked it for him, there was a constant struggle between the landowners and the landless workers. In a tragic episode of this struggle, 44 women and children were burnt alive in the year 1968 on Christmas day, in the village of Kilvenmani.

Beginning in 1968, Gandhian workers, including LAFTI’s founders, S. and Krishnammal Jagannathan, took on this unjust system of land ownership, establishing five Gandhi Peace Centres, and starting the work of distributing the land. After a long and difficult struggle including sathyagraha, fasting programmes, rallies and imprisonments, we have been able to distribute 10,000 acres of land to 10,000 landless families.

Various kinds of development works have been started. We have organized trainings in mat weaving, tailoring, computers, electrics and plumbing, carpentry, and masonry, to give employment opportunities to the young women and men.

As well as these projects, we are conducting three hostels for the education of children from poor families. Women are especially involved in our long and arduous struggle against prawn culture, as well as illicit liquor. Our cow- and goat-rearing programme and curry-powder making are progressing through the women’s self-help groups started by LAFTI. We are also conducting awareness camps, handicapped projects, kitchen gardens, and composite manure schemes in several villages.

During the floods of the winter of 2004, which destroyed crops, houses, and labour, LAFTI distributed rice, blankets and mats to flood-affected people. They did much of the same work after the tsunami on December 26th, 2004. From March 2005, LAFTI has been conducting a brick-making and house-building programme in over 20 villages. So far, they have made over 20 lakhs of bricks, using local materials, and the labour of the people who are building their own houses. LAFTI’s policy is to help the people build brick houses an entire village at a time, removing them from the squalid mud and thatch huts that flood and collapse every time it rains.

For all these years we have tirelessly worked for the betterment of the poor, and we continue to do so.

With kind regards,


Krishnammal Jagannathan

Poompuhar

A cloudy solstice morning here in Kuthur. Not that the solstice means much here in the tropics – the sun still rises around 5:30 and sets around 6:30 – but I hope that my readers in more northerly climes are enjoying the extra daylight. The Internet is finally working here again. Yesterday’s entries were sent from an Internet café in Nagapattinam, where I went to change some money. Nagapattinam is actually quite a nice city as Indian cities go (I don’t really like any of them). Before now, I’d only been to the disaster areas. I didn’t go anywhere near the shore yesterday, but I did on Saturday.

Last Saturday, I went with the Valivalam hostel girls on their excursion to Poompuhar. Poompuhar was the ancient capital and great seaport of the Chola kings in the first millennium AD, and is the setting for the great Tamil epics Cilapattikaram and Manimekalai about which I have written previously. The city is now at the bottom of the sea, destroyed in some great wave thousand years ago.

I met up with the girls in Kilvelur and climbed into one of the two rented buses, one of which had a banner reading “Valivalam Girls’ Hostel Excursion to Poompuhar” on the front. The bus was crowded, but only crowded enough that a few of the littlest girls had to sit on others’ laps. We set off on the three-hour journey to Poompuhar. I was sitting across from a 12th-standard girl of my own age named Hindumani, who remembered my sister from when we visited in ’98, and who had the best English of anyone on the bus.

The trip was a lot of fun. I don’t often spend much time with kids (I’ve never had a babysitting job in my life), but the excursion gave me a lot of amusement and Tamil practice. Associating with children is a great way to learn a language! I was wedged into the edge of a three-person bench holding five people, and I kept sliding off the side. The driver was playing Tamil pop music at full volume. A little girl named Sathya of about nine years, in a green dress much too big for her, got up from where she had been sitting on the floor at my feet and started to dance, falling over frequently and being pushed back upright as the bus turned or stopped. Hindumani took Sathya’s scarf and tied it around her waist, holding the ends so that she wouldn’t fall over so much. We passed Tiruvarur, driving through the countryside, where rice seedlings were being transplanted, their unbelievable greenness startling the eye. I don’t think you have seen the color green until you have seen a young paddy field.

We reached Poompuhar around ten-thirty, and ate a mid-morning meal of curd rice. The children were obviously enjoying practicing their English on me, although they kept saying, right in the middle of the conversation, that they knew no English (or they would point at other people, who were trying to talk, and say “No English!”).

After the meal, the girls were made to stand in a double file with the youngest in front to go through the museum. The women leading the group kept trying to make me stand in the line, or hold their hand, which I didn’t appreciate. Anyone who has known me for a while will know how much I hate being herded. I’d make a much better goat than a cow.

There wasn’t really anything in the museum besides some depictions of scenes from the Cilapattikaram done by a not-very-talented artist. I much prefer my own mental pictures of Madhavi and Kannaki and Kovalan, the three main characters of the epic. Outside in the garden, there was a huge cloud of ladybugs swarming over the flower bushes. Above, there was an even larger cloud of green dragonflies. Hindumani succeeded in catching one by the tail, something that I have never been able to do in all my summers of trying, but Indian dragonflies seem to be more numerous but slower than American ones.

After this we went down to the beach which was sandy, but had large rocks across it. There weren’t many buildings right on the beach, no ghosts of the tsunami. We took off our sandals and went to play in the waves, jumping and splashing. Boats floated in the distance. I thought about the last time I had been to the ocean, and realized it was at the cremation of one of the bodies we found in Akkarapattai, not too far down the coast, but so far mentally from this scene of laughing children. The girls bought ice cream cones from a roadside vendor.

We got back on the bus, but our return journey took seven hours instead of three, because we seemed to stop at every village and temple along the way. First we stopped at one temple to rest and eat, where I sang to the girls and played “ring-around-the-rosy” with some of the littlest children, eight- or nine-years-old. Then we stopped at another temple to make an offering. Then the driver had to make a phone call. Then a girl got off at her own village because she was spending the weekend at her parents’ house, and the women who went to take her to the house took an hour to return. Finally I got back to Kilvelur, where the other LAFTI people, who had been in the other bus, had been waiting for over an hour, and it was already dark. We took a bus back to Kuthur, which was thankfully not very crowded, though I still had to stand. I noticed how segregated the bus was by gender. The women, myself included, all sat or stood towards the front, while the men were behind us. I was very glad to get back and eat dinner.

Ah, Indian transportation.

Aliyah

(David’s note: There is an excellent English translation of The Cilapattikaram (“The Tale of the Anklet” by the poet and translator R. Parthasarathy, a professor at Skidmore College. (Columbia University Press, 1992). It is much worth going out of your way to find: it is to Tamil civilization what the Iliad and Odyssey are to ancient Greek, only it is still part of living tradition.)

Thorns

It is midday now, and blisteringly hot, with a blinding sun glaring down upon the tan, sandy courtyard of the ashram. I have taken refuge in the marginally cooler office, grateful for the large water cooler there. David’s “World’s Most Beautiful Cow” delivered a calf last night. It is the same mid-brown as its mother, the size of a medium-sized dog. When I went to see it this morning it was lying down in the shade, its new-born, knobbly legs tucked under it, watched over protectively by the cow, who was looking at it and chewing her cud complacently. (When Amma came and told me there was a baby in the cow shelter, I had a brief vision of Jesus in the manger.)

I realize that I have not written about the project about which Krishnammal has been talking most frequently. (Maybe David Willis wrote something about it, but I can’t remember or check. The Internet has not been working here for three days. No one knows what is wrong, and when I ask whether this is a frequent occurrence, no one understands the question. Oh, I have just been informed that it does happen frequently) This project has to do with getting wood for baking bricks.

Through Amma’s incessant efforts, the government now provides some land for Dalit families, but it is never cultivable, and is always overgrown with thorns. The people never have time to clear it during the growing season, or motivation to do so during the hot season, when it is difficult to work at all. The land just lies there, useless. It was Krishnammal’s idea to organize the village people to cut the thorns and use them for firewood for the bricks. She pays each worker, and feeds them all lunch every day. In this way, the people get food and money, cultivable land, and wood for the building of their own houses. It never fails to amaze me how these schemes work.

A bit of news about some villages that David and I wrote about in January: In Pappakovil, the Dalit fish-worker village attached to Akkarapettai, they are still trying to move the village to a better location, farther inland. They are having difficulty finding a place and getting government permission. In Aathur, the village of the miraculous bricks, they still need to build more bricks, but they have started fighting among themselves, perhaps with political motivations. Amma has refused to help them until they stop quarreling. I would like to visit Nagapattinam, but I have not been able to do so yet. Krishnammal leaves often in the new car to visit officials.

There is a new photo of Krishnammal up in the office. It shows her in a rather un-Amma-like pose, with her fist in the air, looking defiant. In the corner of the framed picture, there is a photo of Jagannathan wearing dark glasses, sitting on the ground, spinning. Perhaps a reality check on the rest of the photo.

Cars

June 14

So, I’m back from Gandhigram after five days there, resting, and meeting members of the family who I have not previously encountered, including Krishnammal’s brother, a retired lawyer, and her sister, whom I had met a long time ago. Sathya was there, along with Gautami, her cousin, a doctor who works in South Carolina. Gautami has a daughter named Meera who is two days younger than my sister of the same name. When they were eight or nine years old, the two cousins wrote to each other, calling themselves Meera 1 and Meera 2.

It is a five-hour drive from Kuthur to Gandhigram, and we left, both coming and going, at four in the morning. (Appa wanted to leave at three, but luckily we didn’t, or I probably wouldn’t have bothered to go to bed.) The trip was made in the new LAFTI vehicle. There are currently three LAFTI-mobiles, not counting farm equipment, two jeeps (funded, I think, by CESVI), and this new car.

The car has an interesting history. In 1990, my parents raised money to buy LAFTI a van, the first of their vehicles, I think, except maybe a truck. It was a big, white van, with a seemingly unlimited capacity, if you include the roof (as you must) .In 1991, I was nearly thrown through the windshield head-first, I am told, when the vehicle stopped too quickly. In 1998, I got very sick in it on the way back from Madras.

Sometime around 2001, the van died. Since then, it has sat in a little spot by itself in the Kuthur Ashram, becoming almost like a shrine. When I visited in January, I think there were even flowers laid on it. They wouldn’t sell it without David’s permission, which both he and I found a bit ridiculous, as it belonged to LAFTI, and it was doing nobody any good sitting there, except for providing shelter for the neighborhood cats.

Now they’ve traded it in for a big, white Ambassador, which Jagannathan dislikes, as it is the sort of car that big government ministers and such travel in. He is mourning the loss of the van, which he calls his “elephant.” I think we need to paint the car bright green, or have the hostel kids decorate it, to make it look less stuffy. Of course, Appa couldn’t see that, but I don’t much like the current look of the car either, and it would certainly make it noticeable. Here’s a question I don’t know the answer to: Where do you buy gas in rural Tamil Nadu? There are no gas stations that I’ve seen, even in decently sized cities like Dindigul, and I’ve never been in the car when the driver decides to buy gas.

Anyway, Gandhigram is still gorgeous, with the flocks of crows at sunrise and sunset, and the little iguana-like creature who lives in one of the trees outside the worker’s home, and the bourganvillea twining across. But we need to get the roof fixed. The first day I was there, it rained heavily, and the water came in through holes in a roof that seems to consist mostly of holes. There was scarcely a dry spot anywhere, and I slipped and skidded across the smooth cement floor. The whole roof seems to be getting ready to collapse. Pieces of it have fallen and injured Krishnammal, as well as some of the hostel children. I was kept busy sweeping up bits of fallen roof tile. Jagannathan and Keithan built the structure in 1947, and I don’t think there have been any major repairs since, but the whole roof must be replaced. Krishnammal says it will cost five lakh rupees (about $12,500) but she won’t replace it until she gets her other houses built (which could mean all of India!) She is now trying to find money for windows and doors and plaster, which cost about 8,000 rupees a house ($200).

The money must come from somewhere, friends. Please remember us.

RAIN

This morning, I saw a group of men and women unloading large numbers of sacks of green and black dried peas (or I think they’re peas) from a big yellow and red trailer-truck with “Land for Tillers Freedom” painted on the side. They spread the peas out on three large tarps, and left them to dry further in the hot sun. Looking at these peas spread so innocently on the ground, I thought “I’m sure it’s going to rain today.” I have an occasional prophetic power, it seems. At about four this afternoon, it began to rain, softly at first, giving the women time to rush the peas into the shed, and then harder, pouring for about ten minutes, then stopping, although the skies are still overcast, and maybe it will rain again. The sandy courtyard of the ashram still looks and feels almost dry; it has absorbed the water so quickly in its thirst.

Coming from a rainy part of the world, I have a habit of analyzing rainfalls. Washington State rain is cool and clean, soaking everything with its constant gentle fall, but leaving the air dry. Rain in Massachusetts, where I study, is freezing cold and clingy, chilling to the bone, and seeming dirty. The rain brought with it a distinctive strong smell. It was cooling and dampening, and fairly gentle in its fall. The air is much cooler now, and less humid. I went out to enjoy the rain, and the breeze feels wonderfully chilling on the damp back of my neck.

The next morning, Friday:

It’s still overcast this morning. It’s already 9:15 (as usual here, I’ve been up since 5) and the clouds are still thick, although the air is not damp. Maybe it will rain again in the afternoon. Last night, the breeze felt very different from the strong, warm wind that was blowing previously. I spent about an hour last evening talking and trading songs with the boys on the roof, who should have been studying. Mea culpa! They all wanted to know my address and the names and ages of everyone in my family (when I said my sister’s age, they all thought I had said “50” instead of “15,” and burst out laughing when I said that would make her older than our mother). I sang some songs, having to pause between them to think of more songs to sing (for some reason, whenever I am called upon to sing, I forget all my songs), and then some of the boys sang. There is one boy, Muttukumar, with one of the most beautiful treble voices I have ever heard. He sang a song about Krishnammal and then one about the Kilvenmani tragedy of 1968. Both songs were lovely, but when I asked who had written them, he didn’t understand me. I then left to let them get back to their studying. I’m going to Gandhigram on Tuesday, or so is the plan.

Aliyah

A Book! (Aliyah)

For the past few days I have suffered somewhat from the twin diseases of boredom and frustration. Studying Tamil takes up no more than two hours a day; writing, very little, as I had little to write about; and I was dying for lack of regular work to do. Having brought several thousand pages of literature with me, I have read all my books (Slow readers, you should be grateful for that fact). I am very bad at taking vacations, as I cannot sit idle for more than a few hours at a time. It didn’t help that people kept standing over me asking what I was doing and insisting that I could not clear my own dishes or serve my own rice or even decide when I had had enough. I had thought it was due to most of the people here having known me as a 10-year-old, but my Mom informs me that the same thing happened to her in 1981. She attributes it to my being a western woman here without a clear purpose. It was a lot easier to be here in January, when there was a true crisis, and no one had the luxury of boredom. I was allowed, with a little arguing, to go and get myself muddy and sore digging in Nagapattinam. I sincerely doubt it would be so easy to be allowed to go help mould bricks, even if I wanted to, which I don’t, because the people are doing a fine job for themselves, and I would only be a great distraction.

Well, anyway. I have my work now. I went to Krishnammal this morning and asked for help. She thought for a few hours, and then came to me with a 15-page booklet, with a cover in graduated colors of pink (odd how that color is so prevalent here) with a caricature of Gandhi walking on the front (or at least I assume it’s Gandhi. From the face, he looks a bit more like Jagannathan, despite the figure’s baldness.) The front cover reads, in letters of red and white: LAFTI: Land For Tillers Freedom, and nothing else (I like the back cover much better. It shows men plowing with bullocks, a hand writing, and reads “Land Belongs to God That is to Society.” This, Amma tells me, is the only official history and list of LAFTI’s projects in existence. It has not been updated since 1990. No one has had time. Everything from 1968 to 1990 is summarized in 15 pages. Now that is a terseness that even I, the queen of using as few words as possible, could not hope to match. (Of course, everything is relative. Two years ago, I would have said “15 pages? I can’t write 15 pages!”) Anyway it’s my job to update 15 years of history, and I hope to do it far more thoroughly and interestingly than that little pink booklet. I also plan to do some rewriting of LAFTI’s earlier history.

LAFTI is, though they never say it, having better things to do, the essence of “less talk more action.” This is, in my opinion, exactly what is needed in our information-rich and action-poor society. (Here, I am, saying it. What should I be doing instead?) The disadvantage of this is, of course, that little documentation exists, and publicity is poor. Until The Color of Freedom or its Italian counterpart (the title of which, student of Italian that I am, I have forgotten) was published, there was not, I believe, a single published work that mentioned LAFTI except in passing.

This update is desperately needed (or maybe not desperately, as that is likely a creation of my desperately needing something to do, but it is needed). Since 1990, due to the beginning of the prawn struggle in 1994, and the changing face of India as a whole, the entire focus of LAFTI has changed, although its mission of helping the rural poor remains the same as it was in 1968. There have been droughts and floods and tsunamis, lands and people and struggles have been gained and lost. I am only 17 years old, and still used to thinking of myself as a child. It is odd to reflect that so much has happened while I have been alive, while my sister, born in the same year from which the pink book dates, has been alive.

Of course, my plans for this new book far outrun my means and my time. I want detail and photos and maps. I want to interview not only Amma and Appa but the other LAFTI workers and some of the village people as well. I want to write a full history, and perhaps someday I will finish it. In the meantime, I know that my product will be more modest.

More soon, and I apologize for the gap of a few days,

Aliyah

Bricks (Again, and Many of Them!)(Aliyah)

Yesterday morning I went to some of the villages nearby the Kuthur Ashram that are currently working on building houses for themselves. The progress that I saw was very encouraging, and Krishnammal also seemed in good spirits about it.

I got up a bit after five, when the sky was just beginning to lighten. The hostel boys, who are sleeping on the roof platform, were already awake and studying. The previous day, Amma had given them all a long lecture on how too many of them fail the 8th or 10th standard (grade) from lack of knowledge of English. A university student has arrived from Madurai and is helping to tutor them on a long list of English words that Krishnammal has prepared. Personally, I think she is aiming a bit too high, and that it is almost hopeless to expect children who do not know the verb “to bring” to learn terms such as “abolish.” But they are certainly studying.

Within a few minutes, pink clouds are drifting over the eastern horizon, and I go downstairs, to wander about somewhat aimlessly. (I am afraid that this has become too common of a state lately, and I’ve never liked having too much time on my hands. I have to find something active to do.) At about 6:30, Amma hurries me into the jeep. I am in such a hurry that I leave behind several things, including my notebook and a little book “Learn Tamil in Thirty Days” that Krishnammal gave me. I end up never having a Tamil lesson that day. Jothi, cook, tea-bringer, and ultimate organizer of the entire Ashram operations, packs breakfast – appam, which is a kind of spongy pancake, and bananas – into a plastic bag, and we set out.

At the first village, there are to be 55 houses built. Here, they are just beginning to build a brick kiln for firing. Tan-colored unfired bricks are stacked high under a thatched awning. Krishnammal tells me that they have 4 lakhs (400,000) bricks either fired or unfired, and need to make another 2 lakhs. The bricks are out in the rice fields, now barren in this hot, dry season. As we drive out across the field, driving straight over the dikes that hold the water in when the paddy is under cultivation, the people of the village gather. It is an important day. The villagers swiftly build the first small arch of the kiln, first holding the bricks in the smoke rising from a bowl full of incense, and praying. A man breaks a coconut over the arch, and the people come forward, one by one, to bless the bricks and put small dots of red and yellow powder on them. I am pushed forward to bless them as well. When everyone has done so, the people call Amma to come and put the first log of wood beneath the arch. The wood is covered with garlands of flowers. Krishnammal leads us in her prayer of Arut Perum Jothi. When all is finished, we leave, letting the villagers begin the real labor of building the kiln.

At the next village, they have already finished much of the brickwork, and some houses are mostly finished except for plastering. I go into one of these houses, where a little boy sits on the dirt floor playing with a bottle of hand lotion. At the neighboring house, they are putting up the first of the roof-beams. As we drive through the village, we see a truck with a load of roof-tiles, which are brought from the southwestern state of Kerala. Krishnammal says that she is very happy with people’s cooperation. The whole village is working, not just some of them, and they are working hard, despite the hot weather. As we drive back toward Kuthur, she points out several more villages working on the project, and says that they currently are working in fifteen sites. On the way back to Kuthur, Krishnammal points out the famous wall that the people built to keep the saline water of the prawn farms out of the village. It’s still there, a small wooden dam. The prawn farms are in full operation, and Amma tells me that they have been trying to keep this from Jagannathan, to stop him from trying to fast. We stop at a town and buy a huge load of mangoes for the girls at the Valivalam hostel.

We visit that hostel that afternoon, with Appa and a number of other people, and Krishnammal gives the girls the same lecture that she gave the boys. Jagannathan goes to take a nap, which means that we can’t leave for another three hours. There are girls here who remember my sister Meera from when we visited in 1998. I don’t know if they remember me. Meera always has been much more memorable.

Phnom Penh (Aliyah)

June 4

I’m writing from Kuthur, from the irregularly quadrangle-shaped bedroom on the roof of the LAFTI “Kremlin.” I got the penthouse! The building is really starting to grow on me, strangely. They have put up a thatched awning above the flat roof, so here on top of the building I have a very large shaded area which catches breezes but keeps out the sun, which is right now so fierce that the ground burns my bare feet as I walk (quickly!) down the stairs. I also have a wonderful sunrise view of the tank and the paddy fields, although this morning I slept through the sunrise, having taken an overnight train with Krishnammal from Chengelpattu. (Gandhi said that he was coming to meet me at the airport, so naturally I expected Amma.) Nevertheless, I was still awake an hour before Krishnammal, for probably the first and last time in my life.

Anyway, I’ll talk about my first days in Tamil Nadu later, as I should tell you a little about my experiences in Phnom Penh. Bhoomi and I took a bus there on Monday from Siem Reap. Bhoomi had only ever flown before, as it is only very recently that there has been a good enough road for buses. The bus is of a very comfortable tour-bus style, completely opposite from any Indian bus. There is no public transport system in Cambodia, which makes for clean buses but high fares, so that less wealthy people are unable to travel. Larger purchases are nearly always made in U.S. dollars. Not knowing this when I arrived, I changed money at the airport and am now stuck with $40 worth of Cambodian riels, and I have not seen anywhere to change them.

The bus ride takes six hours, owing mainly to the construction work still in progress on the road. We pass villages and a few slightly larger towns, all of which have houses on stilts. I asked Bhoomi if flooding is a big problem, and he said yes, although the rains have been sparse in the past few years, and the level of the Mekong River has decreased, due to dams upriver in other countries. The monsoon is a bit late this year, although it rains during several days of my visit. We pass rice fields not yet being cultivated, cows in some of them, water buffaloes wading in mostly dry ponds, and some of the scrawniest chickens I have ever seen (all Cambodian chickens look unhealthy, with half-bald heads and necks). Halfway along the journey we stop for a break and Bhoomi and I get out for a cup of coffee (some Cambodians, unlike most Indians, can be convinced to give you milk and sugar separate from the coffee or tea, although they often use condensed milk.) (Jothi here in Kuthur has just come by with a cup of coconut water. I am not going to spill it on the computer.) At the bus stop, there are half-a-dozen women and girls frying and selling the largest crickets I have ever seen. People are buying them by the shopping bag. They must be a specialty of the area. Bhoomi says there is one bus stop at which they sell roasted black spiders. I am not a squeamish person, nor am I an arachnaphobe, but that is one delicacy that I think I would let pass.

We reach Phnom Penh around six, and I am immediately struck by the fact that there are no pedestrians. The same was somewhat true in Siem Reap, and along the bus trip, but it is particularly remarkable here, especially since there are sidewalks on most of the streets. Motorcycles are by far the most common form of transportation, followed by bicycles. Bhoomi attributes this attitude about walking to anxiety left over from the civil war and the Khmer Rouge and fear of being without means of transport. It may also have to do with the fact that there are no buses.

Phnom Penh is a relatively clean city with fairly good air. The drivers are not as law-abiding as they are in America, but they do seem aware that the road does have rules. We go back to Bhoomi’s house, eat dinner, and go to bed.

The next morning, Tuesday, I went to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. This complex of buildings was originally built as a high school, but under the Khmer Rouge regime it became a prison in which thousands of people were held and tortured under terrible conditions. Of the more than 10,000 prisoners held there, only seven survived. I walked around the buildings, set around a central courtyard, containing a playground bar which was used as a gallows. All of the buildings are covered with tangled barbed wire, as thorny as a dead blackberry thicket, and far more impassable. One room contains the photographs of all the prisoners held there. Some show children younger than ten years old. Samet, who drove me to the museum, asks me if I believe in ghosts. I answer, “Sometimes.” Even if I do not always believe in ghosts, I do believe that places have memories, and the memories of this place are horribly troubled. Every muscle in my body tenses up, and I cannot relax until I leave.

That night Bhoomi invited some of his friends over for dinner. There were five guests, not including myself, and I can only remember the name of one of them. (This, unfortunately, is far too common of an occurrence. If I met you only briefly, or even for an extended period, more than a few months ago, and you see me again, do not expect me to remember your name or even recognize you other than “because this person is talking to me, I must know him or her.” I probably won’t, and I apologize.) There were two French men, one of whom worked for UNICEF, the other I think was a psychologist, though I don’t really remember. There were three American women. One was a doctor, I think, from Seattle. (Editors’s note: This was Ellen, a social worker, who heads an NGO called “Social Services of Cambodia”.) There was a woman who had been living in Australia for several years, a psychiatrist, who was also working on a major research project about marriages during the Khmer Rouge regime. (Ed. again: This is Dr. Peg Levine of Monash University).There was also the one person whose name I do remember, because I had been looking forward to meeting her -- Beth Goldring. Beth is an old friend of David’s from 30 years ago at the University of Chicago. She is now a Buddhist nun doing AIDS hospice work in Cambodia.

During dinner we discuss the Australian woman’s research project, the government or lack of it in Cambodia, and the EU Constitution. Beth tells us her reasons for keeping her organization small and out of the sight of the Cambodian Buddhist establishment. She doesn’t want big donors running things, and she does not think much of Cambodian monks (Women cannot be ordained in Cambodia).

The next day, I go to the hospital where Bhoomi works. Some people are filming a documentary of the hospital, and want to interview him, which took much longer than he thought it would. I wander around the grounds. There are a few medium-sized buildings with flower gardens between them. There are pigeon-houses with a flock of white pigeons that Bhoomi introduced. It is quite a nice place, painted in shades of pink and full of flowers. If hospitals in the U.S. were like that, I might not mind them so much.

In the afternoon I go with Bhoomi and two other doctors to some villages, where they are going to talk to people. We have to take a little ferry boat to get to the first village. Someone does a talk about domestic violence, its causes, and various ways of preventing and dealing with it. Afterwards, Bhoomi, with his limited Khmer, introduces me as his brother’s daughter. Someone asks why I am so much paler. I say that I take after my mother, which is sort of true. We go back across the river, and drive to the ferry crossing to the next village. Here, however, the water is so covered with water hyacinths that it looks like dry land, and no boat can cross, so we return.

Siem Reap (Aliyah)

June 3, 2005

I am sorry that it has taken me so long to update. I am sitting here in the Bangkok airport waiting for a flight to Chennai. It’s about nine in the morning and I arrived here from Phnom Penh last night. I spent the night on the floor of the transfer room, which was really not at all unpleasant. As airports go, Bangkok is much quieter, cleaner, and altogether more pleasant than most, without seeming too sterile. It is also sprawling. I calculated that I have already walked almost three miles this morning to get breakfast, check on flight times, and such.

I spent the past five days in Cambodia with Bhoomikumar. I arrived Saturday afternoon in Siem Reap, where I was met by Bhoomi. We stayed in a hotel and spent two days touring Angkor Wat and the surrounding temples. Angkor Wat is by far the largest, most impressive, and best-preserved of the temples, and the bas-reliefs, showing, among other things, scenes from the Indian epics the Ramayana and Mahabharata (as well as a depiction of Hell which I think would make a very good illustration for Dante) are beautifully detailed. Like many of the other temples, Angkor Wat was originally Hindu, dating from the 12th Century, when there was a great deal of Indian influence in Cambodia. Now, like the rest of the temples, it has become Buddhist. In some places, images of Hindu bearded holy men have had their beards carved out and made into Buddha images. In other places, sculptures of the Buddha have been given a third eye, and made into sculptures of Shiva. On the top level of Angkor Wat, Bhoomi finds an inscription penned in Tamil on one of the pillars from the landlord of a village in Tamil Nadu, who visited in 1904.

One thing that struck me as we went from temple to temple is that these monuments are no longer truly places of worship. Yes, there are some monks walking around looking at the sights, and incense is still offered to the images, but the overwhelming atmosphere is that of a tourist attraction. This is one thing that I have never yet encountered in India. When one goes to the temples at Madurai or at Thanjavur, two of the largest and oldest temples in South India, one gets the sense of uninterrupted worship for more than 800 years, a sense completely lacking in Angkor. Impressive as these temples are, and they are wonderfully impressive and amazingly beautiful, they are ruins.

As well as Angkor Wat, the last stop on our trip, Bhoomi and I went to Bayon, with its hundreds of individual carved faces staring from the many towers, each smile slightly different, and each carved from several blocks of stone put together. We went to Ta Prohm, which has been left mostly as it was found, with trees merged into the architecture. We went to several other temples, which have merged together in my mind. It took us two days. Each day we would stop and have a “fruity lunch,” of lychees, bananas, and oranges. I have been introduced to many new varieties of fruit in Cambodia. One morning, I ordered a plate of mixed fruit for breakfast, and was presented with seven or so different varieties, of which I recognized four. There were mangoes, papayas, bananas, and oranges, and then there was a plum-sized bristly red fruit resembling a lychee, with a white juicy pulp and a large, hard stone; a brown, tough-skinned, cherry-sized fruit with a jelly-like inside and a name that translates to “rich man’s fruit”; and a dragonfruit with a brilliant magenta rind and a white inside sprinkled with small black seeds. They were all delicious except for the dragonfruit, which despite its visual beauty, had a very bland taste and the texture of a slightly overripe watermelon. The mango season is much longer in Cambodia than in India, so I’m bringing some mangoes for Jagannathan, as well as the palm sugar candy that he likes, which is a local specialty of Siem Reap. I hope I don’t have any problems with the mangoes. Last time Bhoomi brought some, they looked like bombs in the x-ray machine at customs!

I’ll write back soon about Phnom Penh.

Aliyah

The Mosquito's Humming (K. Saedi)

Thursday 7th April

Appa’s campaign against prawn farming in the coastal areas includes organizing marches by the villagers, which are coordinated by LAFTI workers. In order to stop this, the prawn farmers have asked the courts to issue writs against them. Many people have been acquitted and even praised by the judges for their community works, but some of the hearings are still ongoing.

I got up early to go to court with Veerasamy, but he heard that his sister-in-law, who was suffering from cancer of throat, had died. The court was notified and he went to his village to arrange the funeral. I said goodbye to Gina and Alexia who went on their onward journey in India. In the afternoon, Muthukumar, the driver, and Marimuthu, one of the micro-credit coordinators, took me to the vocational training centres. We had to cover a lot of mileage and the journey was slowed down due to potholes filled with rainwater (it had rained heavily during the night), kids (the goat variety) running onto the road and the villagers laying pulses (lentils) on the road; the cars drove over them and facilitated the process of separating the seeds. The whole countryside smelt of fermented mung beans but we enjoyed the scenery of palm trees bordering the rice fields and along the rivers, village tanks covered with Vengaitamarai (onion lotus) flowers, cotton fields in bloom, and Tamil music played on the cassette recorder in the car!


Cotton fields in bloom

I learnt that all vocational training groups follow the same format: 20 participants are offered training for a period of six months. They attend daily classes run during morning and afternoon sessions, and cover both theory and practice. LAFTI instructors are recruited locally if possible or sent to different localities. They are paid 2000 rupees per month. The participants are also paid 450 rupees per month for possible loss of work. They are expected to learn to work independently towards the second half of the course, by which time some are already engaged in small jobs and earning money. At the end of the course, they are given a certificate of attendance and efforts are made to find employment wherever possible. LAFTI runs these courses locally and where there is demand from the villagers.


Tailoring class

We travelled to Tirumarugal to see the tailoring workshop. There was a jovial atmosphere in the group, and the young women competed in showing us their work and explaining different types of stitches used for making clothes and decorative work.


Electrical and plumbing work class

In Enanangudi, the instructor for electrical and plumbing work spoke English and was able to describe the course content, which was taught both in English and Tamil. The participants were adult males. = This group had started on 2nd December 2004 and was due to end on 2nd June 2005. The quality of knowledge and experience was impressive, and some of the participants were already in part-time employment. Most were confident about obtaining full-time work after completion.

We drove back to catch up with Amma who had already left for the funeral of Veerasamy's sister-in-law. I got there just in time to attend the burial and feed milk and lemon to the deceased. Her son Lakshman had finished his 12th standard exams the day before. He was very distressed by the sudden death of his mother, and I was told that he and his sister will remain in their house for the next 16 days. They will have the support of the whole family who will sleep in the house with them. He is a charming boy who helped with LAFTI's tsunami relief work; normally, he stayed in LAFTI’s hostel and went to school from there.

Friday 8th April

Veerasamy had gathered all the LAFTI workers and was in a buoyant mood. When I inquired why, he said, “Yesterday was for mourning the death of my relative; today we celebrate the donation by the ONGC (Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Ltd) of two-and-a-half lakhs of rupees to LAFTI.”


Komalapettai brick factory

Amma was gone again, this time to meet a local government official from Nagapattinum District regarding bank loans for the land purchase. She had made food for us to take on our trip to Komalappettai village. We saw another brick factory Again the rain had destroyed the bricks but thousands of bricks waiting to be baked were kept under a straw roof and were intact. We also visited the computer class in the village. Due to high demands, the class had been divided between the participants, with morning sessions for women and the afternoon sessions for men. The instructor and the participants were able to speak English and explained the course in details. It was taught in English and covered the history and the development of computers and software. The young women were confident and thought there were good job prospects for them, e.g. in Photo Editing and DTP Operating.


Computer class

On our way back, we visited another housing project in Vengatangudi village. 11 out of a total of 25 houses had been completed but the building work had been interrupted by the rain. While we were there, LAFTI's lorry brought tile roof sections and everyone wished for the rain to stop soon.


Housing programme in Vengatangudi

I had set aside the afternoon to write down my observations but my computer crashed and I spent the rest of the day in Tiruvarur computer shops and markets! The town was bustling with street vendors selling flowers and fruit. People added color to already colorful poster paintings on the walls and the signs on the shop fronts. We had plenty of smiles, greetings and requests for photos along the way!


Town of Thiruvarur

Saturday 9th April




Amma, LAFTI workers, and I went to see the prawn farms. It was sad to see that the farms had already been re-established after the tsunami and were going on for miles along the tidal rivers (somehow I was glad that Appa could not see this, as he would probably start his hunger strike straight away). On one of the rivers, way inland, the villagers had built a wall to stop the seawater from travelling upstream and contaminating the rice fields.


Wall built by villagers to stop the inflow of seawater

There were still prawn farms for about a mile beyond this point and the prawn farmers had to use pipes across the fields to pump in the seawater. It was clear that the wall was only a temporary measure, as a high tide would easily overflow the wall. LAFTI has applied to the government to build a barrier dam to regulate the flow of the water.


Pallankallimedu

We visited two villages along the tidal rivers. In Pallankallimedu, 160 Dalit families out of a total of 170 have signed up for LAFTI's housing programme. They were working in three separate groups to make bricks, and four and a half lakhs of bricks were ready to be baked when weather improved. The village ‘gramsabha’ (council) will decide who receives the 50 houses built during the first phase of the project.


Government constructed home

LAFTI has chosen this village for two reasons: Firstly, the houses built by the government, (under the laws covering the uplift of the untouchables) had been poorly constructed and some were in the process of decay or had collapsed due to heavy rain. Secondly, the men were tidal river fishermen and as such did not qualify for the tsunami relief aid, even though they were frequently faced with losing their nets and the supply of fish with eachrain storm and flooding. LAFTI distributed rice and blanket to the villagers every time they were out of work.

In the second village, Talainairu, men were at work carrying sand to nearby ground for brickmaking. 16 houses had been completed and two and a half lakhs of bricks were already baked and ready to use. In this village, all the material for building 30 more houses were in place, but the rain had interrupted the work.


Talainairu

In the evening, Appa and Amma talked about the prawn farming. Appa had heard from his lawyer in Delhi that the retired judge appointed to oversee the implementation of the order to stop illegal prawn farming was in fact being paid by the Ministry of Agriculture! Appa was planning to write to his lawyer, and I offered to meet him in Delhi on my way back to London and discuss Appa’s concerns.

Sunday 10th April

In the morning, I went to see Lakshman, with Veerasamy and Barathimogen, the warden for the boys' hostel. The entire village consisted of Veerasamy's relatives (he heads the families whose parents have passed away and attends to them even though he and his immediate family live in Kilvelur, not far from LAFTI''s office). Despite the sad occasion, there was a warm family atmosphere and we went from one house to another to visit his relatives. All but one of the houses had been built by LAFTI and every family owned land. Interestingly, all the young people were in continuing education or working in a professional capacity, and only the parents were attending to the land. They envisaged that sometime in the future, they will have to employ farm workers to tend their land!


Veerasamy's Village

It began to rain again in the morning so the afternoon was hot, humid, and full of mosquitos; even Amma was bitten a few times and had to use repellent cream. Nevertheless, we sat outside to fulfil Tamba's (photographic) requirements for a shadow-free film set before I interviewed Amma for a promotional film on LAFTI's work. I hope this will be ready for use in the near future, after Amma has approved the edited version of course.


LAFTI workers

When it rains, all LAFTI workers crowd in the ashram, as no work can be done in the villages. It is quite an opportunity for people like me to get to know the LAFTI family of workers and hear their stories of becoming involved with its work. On these occasions, Amma seems to take the opportunity to give little gifts to the workers in appreciation of their "giving their services to others". A few days ago, she distributed 20 stoves someone had donated, and today, she gave rice to all the workers. She said laughingly, "Charity starts at home".

It was very hot and humid, and I commented that only the insects seem to thrive in this climate. Later, Amma told me that while she was sleeping, she heard the humming of a mosquito and it was so beautiful, as if it was chanting; she felt that all creatures seemed to be in communion with God.

Monday 11th April

When I woke up, Amma had already gone to see a landlord to ask for a piece of land for a brick factory in Vadankalur village and, as usual, she came back having achieved her goal.

It had been raining on and off for nearly ten days and this morning, it rained the heaviest yet. Amma came back and she had, in her hand, an invitation to attend an inaugural ceremony of a Shiva temple in Vidangalur village on 21st April. The landlord was relying on the fact that "people have no difficulty paying to temples", and he had in fact received 7 lakh rupees from a benefactor in Chennai. The landlord had asked LAFTI for rice, to be distributed to the poor on the opening day of the temple, and Amma had obliged, “After all, it goes to the same people” she said. In the past, Amma had talked, with equal acceptance and tolerance, about the expansion of Muslim community in this area, and their entrepreneurial approach to the land. "They go to Dubai or Muscat to work and bring back lots of money. They buy the land to set up businesses, and this pushes up the price. Once they tried to fill the village tank to make space for a shopping centre!" She has good relationship with the Muslim clergy of the mosque built next door to Vinoba Ashram. One day, the Father from Kilvelur Church came to give his support for LAFTI's work. Afterwards, Amma said, “The villagers have converted to Christianity but their situation has not changed, and they continue to live in their mud huts.”

Tuesday 12th April

I talked to Appa after having read the correspondence with his lawyer since 2001. He briefed me about the course of action he was proposing, to be discussed with the lawyer in Delhi.

The remainder of the day passed too quickly, as I went around saying goodbye to LAFTI workers and some of the boys from the hostel who had come to say farewell. It was hard to leave and I consoled myself that I would be back to see Amma and Appa before long.

I stayed a few days in Chennai and went to Delhi on 15th April. I did see Mr Mehta, Advocate of the Supreme Court, and we had a fruitful discussion, which is now being pursued further by David Albert and the Jaganathans: how best to go forward with the campaign against the expansion of prawn farming and the destruction of the environment. Clearly Amma and Appa’s quest and their life-long and tireless efforts to fight injustice and exploitation continue.

Spinning Around the Axis (K. Saedi)

Monday 4th April

In the morning, Gina and I visited the town of Tiruvarur to look around. It had rained and the roads were muddy, but the weather was pleasant and warm. We visited the newly built Medical Centre and met with the physiotherapist who offered his services to LAFTI.


Brick factory

In the afternoon, Alexia, Gina’s niece arrived and we were driven to Porkalakuddi Village where LAFTI has a brick and cement making factory and a ‘Feed Unit’ for its micro-credit scheme. The rain had destroyed all the bricks which had been molded and left to dry in the sun, but fortunately those already kept in a shelter for baking had survived.


Bricks destroyed by rain

Due to the rain, the mat weaving class had been moved to the Feed Unit in Porkalakuddi. The classes had started only this week and the girls in groups of four were weaving mats, which would take three days to complete. According to the instructor, by the end of the course, each person would be able to weave a mat on her own and complete it within two days. This activity is offered to young women and considered a skill that would be used by the villagers, and not necessarily towards gaining employment.


Mat weaving class

On our way back, we visited the 160 acres of public land LAFTI had obtained from the government, and cleared and segmented by LAFTI’s local workers and villagers, ready for distribution to 160 families in the area. In the evening, Amma told us that the land prices had gone up from 10 to 30 thousand rupees per acre. However, the government provided 50% in subsidies, and the rest was borrowed from the bank as a five-year loan with 4% interest. A typical harvest can bring 6,000 rupees (8,000 in a good year), giving each family at least 5,000 rupees after expenses to live on and repay the loan.

Tuesday 5th April



Amma and Sathya

It rained all day so no one could work! It turned out to be a great day for Gina and me. We had breakfast with Amma and Appa, and their daughter Sathya who was visiting us. They talked about their personal experiences, of meeting Gandhiji and fighting for freedom and uplifting of the poor. They recalled how Sathya asked them each time they returned from their travels if there were no more hungry children, so that they would not have to go away again. Whenever she sat down, Amma read books on Shiva and Rama (in English) that Sathya had given her. She said they helped to remind her about how to see God in everyone. Shiva had practiced different religions (initially worshipping Kali), only to find that all led to the same thing. Through their stories she could discipline her mind to focus on itself, stop wandering and remain quiet and calm. She felt restless and disturbed by the suffering of others but it led to thoughts e.g. from mud to bricks, which started the chain of events to the present housing programme.

Appa maintained Gandhiji’s principles of freedom and independence through self-sufficiency: “Spinning cloths to stop the importing of textile; abolishing untouchability; and learning Hindi to stop the education that maintained slavery.” he told us in eloquent English! He described his form of meditation, based on movements and sounds, “The hand is spinning the wheel around the axis and the mind is on the axis. The big wheel turns the small wheel and in turn, the spindle that makes the sound. Meditation without action is hard, as the mind wanders but the action of the hand helps the mind to focus and remain on the axis (representing Rama) and the sound of spindle (calling to Rama).




Wednesday 6th April

It was raining again and we sat down to a leisurely breakfast. An old woman and her grandson came with an invitation card (in two colorful pages) for Amma and all LAFTI workers to attend the ear piercing ceremony of the grandson. Amma was concerned about the amount of money spent for the occasion but consoled herself that the relatives' gifts may bring some compensation! She told the story of this family after they had gone: the boy had been very ill and was not thriving as a baby. Amma paid for his medical care and after six months, the boy was able to walk. Later, LAFTI gave the family an acre of land and built them a house; the older sister was also admitted to the girls' hostel. One day, Amma was visiting and saw the mother and grandmother sleeping outside. The grandfather and the husband were both spending the money earned from the cultivation of land on alcohol consumption. The women had protested, but they were thrown out of the house. Amma pointed out to the men that the house and the land were in the name of the woman. They left on that day, and the husband never came back; he is reputed to be drinking and gambling. The grandfather died after six months. The women have worked hard and they have earned money and the respect of the Dalit community (there is also a hierarchy amongst Dalits and the poor are not respected!) Now the boy is in 6th standard and they can afford having a big ceremony for him.

“Dalit people are very proud,” Amma told us. They come to her for help when they are in need e.g. when there is too much rain and there is no work for them; she was expecting people to come for rice today as it has rained for a few days. “When they work and earn money, they won't even look at me if they see me on the road!” After the tsunami, a woman used to come to collect rice whenever in need. She was a ''bonded laborer", and told Amma that she was paid 50 rupees per month to work for the landlord. When he was selling his land, he gave her an acre for her services. However, her husband suffered from tuberculosis, and she mortgaged the land for 3,000 rupees to pay for his hospital treatment, but to no avail and he died. She was a laborer again as she was unable to re-pay the mortgage. Amma got the money from Sathya and paid the mortgage, and the woman was free and able to work for herself again.

One day, her son was hit by a motorcycle as they were crossing the road on their way to LAFTI and his leg was fractured. The police wanted him to go to the government hospital so that they could make a criminal case against the motorcyclist; this would have meant a long delay. Amma wanted him to get immediate medical attention and had him admitted to a private institution. They wanted 45,000 rupees to which Amma agreed, thinking she would explain the circumstances later. The boy received appropriate treatment but the entire amount was demanded before he would be allowed to leave. LAFTI paid 10,000 rupees and another 10,000 was paid by a tsunami relief NGO. She asked the hospital for time in order to collect more money but they refused to let the boy go home. She could not understand how “so much studying and research to develop expertise had ended in practicing medicine without an iota of compassion for human suffering”. At the end, a total of 32,500 rupees were paid in order to release the boy. Amma approached World Vision for reimbursement; they agreed to contribute 7,500 rupees, but wanted credit for the whole bill!


Thirupanikottur Village

After breakfast, Amma took us to see a Dalit village after the rainfall. We drove to Thirupanikottur. During the floods in October to December 2004, the walls of the mud huts had been eroded and some huts had been completely destroyed. The ground was waterlogged in some places after the recent rain. The villagers gathered around us and were anxious to show us the extent of the damage to their huts. Amma wondered why they were resigned to live in these conditions, and did not ask LAFTI to help. She promised rice to some families. A grandmother whose daughter had been killed by her husband three days earlier was extremely distressed. The villagers had tried to console her but to no avail. The husband had gone to the police afterwards to give himself up and was in custody. The grandmother was now looking after her grandchildren, a 3-year-old girl and a 7-month-old boy. Amma was thinking of bringing the family to live in LAFTI’s premises and to help them cope with their traumatic grief.

After lunch we joined a song and dance programme at the boys’ hostel. It was a great event and we joined in the dance! Amma stayed up late and we sat down composing a letter to supporters updating them on LAFTI's tsunami activities.

Renewal of Vows (K. Saedi)

The following blogs are by Kami Saedi, a retired professor of public health in London (and mentor of Bhoomikumar, Amma and Appa’s son, whom Aliyah is visiting in Cambodia.) For purposes of understanding the below, it should be noted that 40 rupees is exchangeable for approximately one U.S. dollar.

RENEWAL OF VOWS

The first time I saw Krishnammal and Jagannathan (affectionately known as Amma and Appa) was 18 months ago, and soon I joined the army of their children! Now I was going back to see them again and just being with them (in the belief that by doing so, I will gain from their compassion and wisdom). I arrived in Chennai on 29th March and waited for a friend, Gina Albani, to arrive from Greece before we travelled to Vinoba Ashram in the village of Kuthur, where Amma and Appa reside. She had heard about the work of LAFTI and contacted me through a mutual friend, wishing to visit LAFTI operations.

Friday 1st April

Gina and I took an overnight train to Trichy on 1st April, and arrived in Kuthur the next day after having visited the Shiva cave temples in Rock Fort.

Saturday 2nd April

Amma was there to welcome us and it was an overwhelming feeling to see her again. I thought she looked younger! She understood why and explained that after a lull in the land distribution, it had now started again and was going ahead in earnest. She worked with renewed energy and could not rest. She told us that she had attended a meeting with the local bank managers, arranged by the District Collector the previous week. He had recommended that loans be given to Amma for land purchases because of her good credit record (having paid off 95% of the previous loan).

Afterwards, I met with Benoir, CESVI’s Project Coordinator. CESVI, an Italian-based NGO, has been running a project from Vinoba Ashram for the past three years. It supports some of LAFTI’s operations: Vocational Training; Training Camps; and Micro-Credit. The project is financed by the European Union (75%) and CESVI (25%), and has just been extended for another six months through September 2005. For LAFTI’s Land Purchase and Housing Construction, Amma seeks financial support from the government, other NGOs and LAFTI supporters both in India and abroad.

In the afternoon, Amma took us to LAFTI’s brick factory in Kohur where there was a great deal of activity. The families including children lived in temporary dwellings and worked together to produce bricks: channelling the piped water, mixing sand and water, setting, drying, baking and finally storing the bricks ready to be used for building their own houses within the LAFTI’s housing programme. Only the workers with skill in mixing the right proportion of sand and water and setting the bricks are paid a daily wage of 200 rupees. This higher-than-usual wage has caused some resentment amongst the voluntary workers but Amma argues that this leads to increased productivity, and of course the work is very temporary. She is planning to pay in cows, goats, and hens as well as cash so that they will not immediately spend their money on non-essential items such as gold earrings.

Sunday 3rd April

At 5 a.m., Amma travelled to Gandhigram to meet the Finance Minister who was visiting the area on a pre-election campaign. Gina and I went to the coastal area to visit two villages (Akkarapettai and Kichankuppam) hit by the tsunami. and the pilgrims’ town of Velankanni. 4,500 people had reportedly perished in the tsunami. There was little damage to the concrete houses near the coast but all the boats had been smashed into each other and washed inland; one large boat was sitting on the roof of a house! The fishermen were repairing and painting the smaller boats, and the villagers were getting ready to return to the sea, after government permission was granted.

In the afternoon we visited the girls’ hostel at Valivallam. As usual, the girls welcomed us with their songs and dance. There was exchange of presents, and we had supper with them. On our return, we met Amma. She was very tired as she had gone to bed at 1 a.m. that day and got up at 3 a.m. to travel back to Kuthur. She had had a successful meeting with the Minister, letting him know about LAFTI’s efforts in obtaining land for the Dalits to cultivate and build their own houses. She told him that “by land purchasing alone, you can break the centuries of bonded labor that held the people in bondage to their landlords”. The Minister had undertaken to direct the Central Bank to pay the loans. The order from the Central Government was needed for the bank’s continued cooperation.