Day Four: Non-Project Village Visit.

Shiur pre-school.

Today we visited the rural community of Shiur. A village that the health initiatives of CRHP had not yet reached.


(In summary: One initiative of the CRHP organisation is the training of village women to become health workers for their community. Not simply training them in midwifery and about disease/illness, but also providing preventative education and even more importantly - facilitating the psychological building of concepts of equity, women's rights and self-worth that most rural communities are generally deserted of as a result of entrenched caste history)


The harsh reality of unequal wealth distribution was blunt. We made our way through the village, from a lower caste house that was almost like a dirt cave - filled with scarce possessions aside from a large collection of cotton sacks that were used to earn their living, to a more spacious dwelling - filled with silver pots, pans and cups, a single mattress for a family of 9, pretty decorations of fabric, and able to avoid filling their home with smoke by utilising gas, onto a giant Brahmin (highest caste) house directly across the road - barred by large iron gates, painted brightly, and as we drank chai in their lounge we sat by their television on raised mattress couches under a chandelier, I really felt disturbed. The Dalites (lowest caste) from the village were segregated about 2km out of town, in a space allocated by the government, and we had to drive to find them.

Low caste Indians are often called 'untouchables', as caste tradition assumes these people are subhuman and will not even be touched. For example, if a dalite women accidentally touches a someone she is in the service of from a higher caste while they are eating - they will consider their food now tarnished and throw it to the dogs - not even to her, even though she may only be living off their leftover scraps.

The children of the dalite community we visited have so much potential though. They were very inquisitive, asking about marriage, and our CRHP representative explained that it is actually illegal for a girl in India to marry before she is 18 years of age - something that they did not actually know. They also sang for us, and we sang our anthem in return - which could have been horrendous but somehow turned out to be kind-of-okay :)

 

 

There are puppies and stray dogs absolutely E V E R Y W H E R E ! You can't walk down a street in rural India without seeing at least one stray every five metres.

 

 

 Above: a family from the Dalite village that was segregated from the rest of the town. The old lady had cataracts and was weeping and begging for help :(  And below, their traditional healer - the man with the ridiculous bling and sunglasses - performed for us with drum accompaniment. Which would have been fantastic... if I wasn't aware of his role deceiving the people. These witch doctors pretend that they have healing abilities, sometimes simply placing oil on an ill villager - and in exchange taking not only money, as they rarely have it, but their food/grain as his payment.