Debbie's Placement in India 2018

The last couple of days have been a bit unusual. There is a strategy conference happening at SEDS this weekend, and a whole bunch of people are coming for it, some are board members and others will invited guests so that there are a range of ideas possible. This means that the women fieldworkers have all been at the house, slaving away with cleaning and cooking and other preparations for receiving the visitors and setting up for the conference. As a result, Alex and I haven't been out to the field again. I went to the school yesterday (30th) and helped out with some lessons yesterday, and today I mostly worked in the office, doing university course work, some assignment work, and some general reading about the role of social work in development. I also started to do a bit of job hunting, just thinking ahead... I arranged to go to the teachers meeting in the afternoon after lessons finished, and Alex tagged along too. I wasn't sure of the format that the meeting would tak

Today was another school day. In terms of my presence at the school, I have done my best to make my time with my class a bit fun, but also fairly routine so that I'm helping with rather than disrupting their education. This doesn't give such interesting blog posts, but it makes me feel satisfied that I have the right approach. I worked a bit as a teaching assistant today in the maths class. I noticed that one of the boys was a bit slower to grasp the problems - they adding up numbers with decimal points. He is a lovely, funny, and helpful boy, but one who has a cheeky and lazy side to him... I noticed that as he was a bit slower to write down the problems, he would say that he was ready when he wasn't, and when the teacher went through the problems on the board he would simply copy down the answer. I felt that he wasn't learning anything from doing this, so I sat next to him to give him some one-to-one attention. At first, he wasn't confident enough to attempt

Today was a day with farmers, and I had thought that it would be more about Alex and him trying to develop some more of his idea for his project on ecotourism. I had planned to stay in the background to allow Alex to do what he needed to do, but I actually ended up getting included quite a lot and having a really good day! We headed out with just Shammy, the driver, and he took us to do a couple of chores first, exchanging gas bottles and so on. Once this was completed, we carried on. We picked up another SEDS fieldworker, Raj, from the  Sustainable Agriculture (SA) project. Along the way, we saw a lot of very large, very colourful Ganesha statues. I asked what festival they were for, and was told that there was a Ganesha festival coming up in mid-September. The statues are very cool to look at, but as they get put into the water I can't help but wonder what effect the colourful paint has on the water quality, especially as there are so many statues and the area is so water-p

Sheik Basha had spoken to me previously about wanting to take us out to the watershed area. We had needed to rearrange the date a couple of times to accommodate things that arose which required his attention, but today we got to have a Basha day. We had already been shown the Sanipalli watershed area by Ronny, who had also given us a presentation about the management techniques used and so on. However, I was keen to show gratitude to Basha for his interest in teaching us something, and to show him respect. I also thought it could be valuable to hear a different perspective and to see what the project meant to someone who lived locally, and who probably had a different background in environmental attitudes compared to a European person. A painting of the watershed management area on the nearest bus shelter I really enjoyed the morning with Basha. He enthusiastically told us about the ground constructions that had been carried out, what it had been like to work on the project,

We had breakfast with Sunil, Manuela, and Shazia, and Alex went out for a drive with them. I stayed at the SEDS farm as I wanted some time to rest my brain a bit - I've been feeling very tired recently - but when an injured employee arrived for some help, I assisted. Venkatrammadu injured his foot some time ago, just receiving a small cut from a piece of metal in the ground. He didn't think much of it at the time, but this small wound went on to become infected and he eventually collapsed and ended up in hospital. He had some surgery on the wound, but it didn't get better and he was very sick. We had visited him at home previously, but now he was coming to SEDS so that Manil could clean and dress his wound. I assisted by fanning the wound to keep the flies away, and helping to hand things to Manil. The wound was such that a good quantity of skin was missing from his foot and the flesh was raw and gunky underneath. Manil painstakingly cleaned away the gunk, and al

We had breakfast with Mark and Augustine, and over breakfast we had some really interesting talks about social issues in India, development issues, cultural issues, and so on. In discussing cultural constructions of privacy, I mentioned my observations about different tasks that would be thought as more private in our own western cultures, that are conducted publicly here. I was thinking of things like washing, cleaning, and sleeping, all of which happen outdoors a lot here. I guess this is a good example of the impact of environment and economics upon culture. The climate here is warmer and people have fewer possessions, so having less indoor space is not such a problem as it might be in other places. The level of development in the villages means that indoor plumbing is rare, so water is often gathered from shared sources. Washing of clothes, dishes, and even bodies then takes place outside because many of the homes have only one room and so they obviously don't pour water

There has been no internet for a while now, which is kind of frustrating. I do like not doing uni work (come on graduation!) but having it still hanging over me is a bit stressful... After breakfast I went to spend the morning in school with my class. They were very excited for 'a.c.' - arts and crafts - which was after break, but I didn't have any ideas coming to mind. To be more precise, I had plenty of ideas, but not necessarily ones that I felt confident could be done with the resources available, or that I could communicate to these children with their different expectations and different ability at English language. But in a rare case of good luck, for the first time ever my phone got a data signal while at the school site! This meant that I could use the Pinterest app to search for children's craft activities, and then allow the children themselves to choose what to do. I really enjoy supporting the children here to come up with ideas and make some decisions o