My placement: Navsarjan

In addition to the legal work my NGO does (which I will talk more about in another post), Navsarjan has several schools set up for Dalit children. Their biggest school serves as a vocational high school for Dalit children to expand their vocational skill set so they are empowered into believing that despite the caste system, they are neither predestined to do any one specific job nor must the work they do be humiliating and degrading. They also have several primary schools. On my visit to one, some of the children preformed a song and dance for us. While the style of the music was typical Gujarati folk music (garba), very familiar to me, the words these kids sang were not. Instead of singing about getting water from the river or going to a fair, like many of these folk songs that I danced to as a little girl are about, they sang about the fact that when they are in government schools the teachers make them sit in the back and refuse to call on them. But now they’ve learned that they are worth more than that and that they will fight back against the discrimination they face and demand to be treated as humans. While I was proud of them for recognizing their self-worth, I thought at that moment that no child should have to sing a song like that in the first place.