The first meeting with the young women of Kandi defied all our expectations. Downcast eyes, closed faces, silence that we didn’t know how to read. As young women there seemed so little that we shared. We recognised the need to dismantle our own preconceptions about the basics of communication.
Fast-forward to the final week of our project and the progress made was immense. The gathering of 25 weeping women as we embarked on our last bus ride was testament to the bonds forged over 10 week process together.
As 4 young British women, we were given the opportunity to volunteer in a mountainside community of Himachel Pradesh in Northern India. Funded by DFID, and working in conjunction with Indian NGO IDEX, Platform2 provides young people with volunteering experiences overseas which promote social development and cultural exchange.
The Women’s Group was established only 3 weeks prior to our arrival. We were given free reign to deliver the course content, aiming to educate, empower, enhance skills and build self confidence. Admittedly we were daunted – our lack of formal teaching experience, the language barrier, the setting – a small room in a villager’s house and 2 old, donated PC’s, all seemed major hurdles to overcome.
The women were aged 11 to 21, and we were exited about the prospect of learning about, and sharing, aspects of their lives. We soon found however, that Indian education seemed to do little to encourage creativity and individual thought. Value appeared to be placed instead on copying, parroting. This was a tough barrier to breach, and highlighted the huge difference between our own backgrounds where freedom of expression and encouragement to use our initiative had been the normality. The transition for each woman to formulate a unique and personal response was not an easy one. The concept that there was no ‘right’ answer to our questions about their lives, thoughts and feelings seemed alien to them.
In hindsight I think that the realisation of how hard it can be to obtain information from an individual or group from a culture different to my own became one of the biggest lessons I learnt while in India.
It was a privileged and poignant experience to build bridges with the girls. Each individual was beautiful and gradually transformed from downcast gazes and unreadable expressions into blossoms of Lata, Reyka, Rashma, Keiran… With every day the portrait of each life grew more vivid; more colourful. Doubtless our desire to fill our classes with discussion, debate, creative writing was frustrated by the language barrier. Yet by introducing the building blocks of grammar and vocabulary, we began to explore.
During one session we used an old English folk song as a template for writing. Each line of the song began ‘I wish I were…’ and used nature as its inspiration. The girls found it difficult to take this leap into the abstract, especially in English, yet they achieved it. One girl wrote ‘I wish I were a tree so that I could live and be evergreen’ another wrote ‘I wish I were river so that people would drink from my water.’ This was a good introduction into our next project, ‘Mother Nature’ where we used photography to document life in the village and subsequently a movie in Window Movie Maker. It was fascinating to see the women frame the images of their lives.
Working on the computers was just one part of a jigsaw; my own background in leading singing groups was another. As I taught English songs, the women started to teach us their own traditional songs - Gaddi tribal songs infused with tales of love and separation. Singing brought smiles, mutual interest, bonds; the shared knowledge that singing together as a group creates something bigger than the sum of its parts.
Another focus was to raise levels of health awareness in the villages. According to the local Doctor, half of the health problems in the area are due to poor personal hygiene. And indeed, I spent my mornings in a government school without any toilet facilities and running water, where each child and teacher would have to relieve themselves around the side of the building. Coming from a culture where hygiene is so deeply ingrained it is easy to believe that good personal hygiene is intuitive; yet the harsh reality was that these things are by no means innate. How can children learn hygienic toileting habits when toilets and running water do not exist?
During our final month we explored several different health issues; HIV and AIDS, healthy eating, personal hygiene, and menstruation. We were concerned about the cultural differences. Would we cross unacceptable social boundaries? Would we offend people? We wanted desperately to be sensitive, but when you are initiating discussion on a taboo subject in a county that is not your own, you never know where the potholes may lie. However we were assured and encouraged by our IDEX staff members to go ahead.
During our HIV and AIDS sessions, we explored concepts such as stigma and discrimination. We took the girls on a bus ride to our house, over the huge rocky ravine that had isolated the community for so long before the recent building of a bridge. Here they could use the internet to do their own research; their first time online.
One of our most striking moments was our discussion of menstruation. The previous night we had made several posters detailing the female reproductive system and stages of the menstrual cycle. We had labeled them in English, and we planned to add Hindi the next day. However, in the following session we discovered that none of the women, even the two IDEX staff members, had ever been given access to this information. They had no vocabulary for these parts of their body, and had no idea how to describe them in their own language. They told us of the depth of the feelings of secrecy and shame surrounding periods, along with the scant information they had received from older sisters and friends. It struck us how keen both of the staff members were to seek information about sanitary wear and how to use it; it was as if so many questions had been unanswered for such a long time. Each women declared she felt it was important for younger women to have the information that they themselves had not had
.We focused the group's momentum into creating the first issue of a community magazine - the 'Kandi Women's Magazine'. All content was written by group members and produced using the computer skills they'd learnt. It featured a report of our research project into HIV and AIDS which encouraged support and friendship towards people affected by the virus, tips on how to stay healthy, articles with facts about periods, and a healthy eating pyramid diagram. To all of us it felt like the start of something, and we hope this first issue of the magazine is one of many.
How is it possible to return home with more questions than I had when I left? India's impact in my life feels far-reaching as I still try to process my experiences. My notebook full of Gaddi songs, kindly written for me by girls from the group, is a prized souvenir. I have taught the haunting songs sung to me by Lata, Reyka, Rashma, Keiran to youth choirs in my community. To my delight these British young people have been eager to lend their voices to these melodies, and in doing so have gained some small glimpse into life in Kandi. One of the women's songs, titled 'Tera Khayala' was recently performed to an audience of 1000 by the Devon County Youth Folk Choir. I hope to spread the stories and songs that I was privileged to witness at the women's group, and it is my wish that in Kandi the women's voices continue to grow stronger.
