Agragamee

CI Project Week for Theo (Canada)

For my third project week, I made the decision to go for a Community Interaction project. After having a year's experience of living in India, I felt that I would be able to gain a deeper insight into the work of an NGO and, more broadly, the complexities of social action in general. The organization that we went to work with was called Agragamee, a word meaning 'leading forward, pioneering'. Based in rural Orissa, Agragamee is a multifaceted organization working with the tribal peoples of the state, with empowerment and advocacy as their major aim. With a very well rounded approach to achieving their goals, Agragamee has numerous projects running: education, environmentalism, finance and resource managing, to name but a few. Our project week consisted mainly of catching glimpses and participating in such projects, as well as becoming informed and sensitized to the complex issues surrounding development in the tribal context. While we were generally familiarized with the basic issues in reading some of the NGO's publications and viewing some documentaries they had produced, a much more profound learning experience was the series of question-and-answer sessions with the tribal villagers themselves. Sitting in the center of the earthen square at the heart of each of the tribal villages, surrounded by curious stares, dialog between ourselves and the tribals (facilitated by a fellow student who so fortunately spoke the state language) gave us an entirely unique perspective. If I can highlight anything of the project week experience in this anecdote too short to cover its true profundity, it is the reality check and applicability test it offers.

So often we criticize ourselves for living in a parallel universe, up on a hill top, in the middle of nowhere. Project week is a chance to remove oneself from the surreal, largely speech-based environment of campus and confront the messy reality of issues we discuss first hand, a translation from the formula applicable only in a vacuum into the working world, with all its friction and unpredictability. As we traveled from remote village to remote village, working, sitting, learning from, and talking with the people, previous discussions pertaining to cultural preservation, globalization, and policies of aid suddenly took on a whole new relevance and a whole new immediacy. As our group sat out under the vast Orissan sky on one of our last nights, we found ourselves (so typical of MUWCI students) in a heated debate, surrounding the government's latest plans to displace the tribals in light of mining their hills for bauxite aluminum. I couldn't help but marvel at the unique synthesis between the abstract concepts being discussed and their immediate applicability in the experiences of the week. The dreaded 'mono-culture' of globalization suddenly made itself manifest as we resorted to dancing the Macarena upon being asked to demonstrate our culture after the tribals performed a tradition dance for us. Empowerment was defined suddenly as we met with Sumani Jhoria, a tribal woman who recalls running at the sight of foreigners, but who now serves as Chief Tribal advisor to the Head of the State, and who attends social forums all over the country as well as abroad. The short time with Agragamee, was a deeply inspiring, eye-opening, and thought-provoking experience, yet another encounter with development in the developing context, as heartening as is heart wrenching.

APSA

CI Project Week for Vipul (India)

An integral part of the MUWCI experience is Community Interaction. It is meant to give you an insight into your neighboring environment. And the CI Project Week is a manifestation of the MUWCI ideals, where you get to learn about India, its culture, and its problems and get an opportunity to actually do something for a certain community or an NGO…and before I realized it, I was on my way to Bangalore with hopes of changing the world, and really excited about being given a chance to serve the society, not just in theory, but in practice.

Our project week was in Bangalore, where we worked with an NGO called APSA (Association for Promoting Social Action). It primarily works for child rights, by rescuing child laborers and educating them, so as to provide them with a sustainable future.

It was an interesting experience, to say the least: bitten, every night, by hundreds of mosquitoes, waking up to visit various organizations and getting lectured about how it works, for hours on end, bored gutless, listening to people going on and on about how pathetic the social landscape of India was, when we were supposed to be working! We worked during the day and "chilled out" during the evenings. The days would see us visiting urban slums, women's self-help groups, construction sites where migration workers worked, and playing with children rescued from the curse of child labor. The evenings would be a time for reflection, jokes, discussions, remarks, comments, games, and….PIZZA!!

One moment, we were visiting the 'developed' streets of Bangalore. The other, we were off to the slums. We saw development and, simultaneously, its cost. And what's more, I did basically nothing substantial, and yet, realized that I had learned a lot more in those 10 days than I ever had about my own country.

We learnt about self-help groups and migration workers and child laborers. I learned about myself. I knew that issues existed; but I had never quite fathomed the gravity, the acute intensity of such challenges that face our society. I never thought that these issues could affect me personally in a manner that I see them affecting me now.

On a more personal front, this group of MUWCI students developed a close bond. Before the trip, I did not know anything about anyone in my group apart from their names. However, those visits to Pizza Huts and the reflective conversations that we had every evening, not only brought the group together, but also gave me an insight into the nature of the various problems we were exposed to, through the different ways each one of us looked at the same issue.

We set out to do something to improve the present for those who do not have a future; we set out to change something out there. We returned having changed ourselves.

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