I want to describe one of the field visits I went on for work to give you a snapshot of some of the issues I’ll be working on. My first week of work, I traveled with a colleague to Palanpur in Northern Gujarat. We spent two days interviewing victims of atrocities and their perpetrators, and manual scavengers* who hadn’t been paid for 6 months for their work. Each and every one of their stories was heartwrenching. However, we were able to make immediate change for one of the victims. The widow of a Dalit man who had been murdered by upper-caste villagers and her community had been camped outside of the Collector’s office (sort of like the public prosecutor) for 8 days waiting to be seen by him, to demand that the murderers be arrested. After listening to their stories, we drafted a letter for the Collector on behalf of our organization listing their demands and took a group of them into the Collector’s office with us. Since we were there, the Collector agreed to meet with them. The next day, the accused who had been at large for 3 weeks were finally arrested.
While doing a field visit like this was a dream come true for me, it was as taxing, both physically and emotionally, as one would imagine. I had never been so homesick in my life as I was while I was there those two days, and I couldn’t understand why. But now that I reflect on it, I think that after being around people whose security was so severely threatened made me just want to be in the place I feel the most secure – at home with my family.
*I posted a link to a video below (“I’m Dalit, How are you?” on manual scavenging in Gujarat.
1 comment:
wow. these posts are amazing to read. that bit about opv is pretty interesting. it might be cheaper [and more risky] but it's far more effective at eradicating polio b/c maybe the boys are getting indirectly vaccinated by the girls from fecal-oral transmission. but it definitely brings up issues about health education. or just education maybe.
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