The Rest of Wednesday

Village traffic

Friendly locals

Sweet and milky Indian tea

The first village we visited with Ratnamma and Bushana had a couple of biogas units to conduct maintenance on, and there were some custard apple trees there. We were invited into the home of one family to eat custard apples - so delicious - and then the family brought us watermelon to eat - would have been delicious except they put salt on it - followed by sweet milky tea. The lady of the house was very sweet, and was especially excited when I showed her that I liked her forearm tattoos, to which she reacted with a huge smile and by squeezing my cheeks fondly and placing a kiss on my face!

I was surprised to discover that tattoos are fairly common here. Women will often have intricate patterns roughly between 2 and 4cms across tattooed onto the underside of their forearms in black ink. These patterns can be in the form of a tree of life, mandala style, or simply decorative geometric designs similar to those which are made outside the doors to the houses. They can be done for protection against bad spirits, or simply for decoration. Some women also tattoo the names of their husband on their forearms. Tattoos of an arrangement of small dots may also be given to children as talismans for protection.

A lotus image chalked on the ground outside a doorway

At the next house, just around the corner from this first one, we were also invited in. Here we were given bananas, boiled ground nuts (peanuts), and more delicious sweet milky tea.

Ratnamma with a biogas user. You can't tell from this photo, but Ratnamma was really keen to get in the photo!

The next place we moved onto, we had a bit of a group talk with a group of women who have been involved in the self help groups. SEDS initiated the organisation of such groups for women in the villages, and now this support is continued by the government. The women get together to form a group of 10, and each month they each save 50 rupees each. Once they have been saving for a specific amount of time, they then become eligible for a 10 lakh loan from the government. The women share this loan between them, getting 10,000 rupees each, which they can spend on agricultural investments, buying sewing materials, paying for their children's education, family healthcare - whatever is important to that woman. The women continue to put their money into the loan repayments, and the government subsidise these repayments.

Talking with these women was very interesting, and several of them also had tattoos. After my good experience earlier I finally plucked up the courage to ask one lady if I could take a picture of hers:

At lunchtime we weren't too hungry after our mid-morning snacks and teas, so instead fo going for a big lunch we pulled up at a cart selling bananas and bought a large hand of them to snack on.

Drive thru bananas

Eating the bananas along the way, we drove to the next village for a few more biogas maintenance sessions. This village had several biogas units, although not all were being used. For the units we did maintenance on, I was able to help run the pipelines over the roofs of the village houses to the cooking areas and I enjoyed getting stuck in to some practical work.

Nagabushana at work

While we were working, a man leading his cow around came to talk to me. He had some English and it was possible to have a slightly stilted conversation with him. After talking a short while, he invited me to his house for some coffee. I was keen to go, but Manni was the boss and I wasn't sure if it would be allowed. Ratnamma led me with her to continue helping, and this man also followed along and helped. After finishing this gas pipe, we followed the man through the village, and he pointed out to me a very old house, possibly the oldest in the village.

The man's cow

Old house in the village

We reached his house and he invited us in, but there was a government school at the end of the road and Ratnamma encouraged us - Alex had also joined us by now - to visit this school. We apologised to the man, and visited the school for a short time. The teachers there explained to us about the curriculum they taught, which I think is the same as ours except that the school was a Telugu medium school rather than English medium. They also talked about not having enough resources to do arts and crafts or sports and games, and gave us a plea for assistance if we could make that possible for them. We then spent some time with the assembled children for them to practice their English.

Ratnamma wanted to get in the teachers photo too ;)

After the school we tried to help Manni for a bit, but the school day had ended now and the children rushed to us to practice English and to jostle to get photos taken. It was hard work managing so many eager children when you were trying to focus on something else!

Eventually Manni shouted at the children to leave us alone, we were able to finish up that biogas task, and then we were free to head back to the man's house for some coffee. He was very pleased to see us come back, and I was also very pleased to not have to reject his hospitality - and to get another hot sweet drink!  He introduced us to his wife, and told us about his daughter who was at college studying biology. He seemed very proud of his daughter, and even showed us a file where he kept all of her reports and certificates from her education.

As we sat outside his house, gradually school children and other villagers gathered to look at us. One lady was there with her baby, who was very sweet. I tried to ask the baby's name, and learned that he was just called babu - which means a baby boy - because baby's don't always get named here until they are about a year old. Then a ceremony will be held, which includes traditions such as cutting off the baby's hair and offering it to the gods, and during the ceremony the baby will be given a name. Sometimes such ceremonies are repeated during different stages of childhood, and the child can be renamed (an issue which has previously caused confusion for managing enrollments at school!)

After this tea break, we carried out maintenance work on this man's biogas pipeline, which had developed a bit of a leak. The man (sorry for just calling him 'the man', but I am writing this over a week later and I can't remember his name now...) also assisted with the work, and seemed very proud of his biogas and very grateful for the support from SEDS with the maintenance of the unit.

By the time we finished here, it was getting a bit late so we finished up in the field and headed back to the SEDS farm for dinner.