Out in the Field: The romantic/un-romantic side of human rights work

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.

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.

"The Land of Contrasts"

The common theme throughout all the presentations at orientation was that India is a land of contrasts. The moment you try to make a blanket statement about India, it will be contradicted. While I think I’ve always known this given how incredibly diverse this country is, this is my first trip to India where I’ve been trying to catalogue these contrasts in my head. I’ll describe a few.

Caste discrimination: While waiting to get into a supposed exclusive club in Delhi one Saturday night, the crowd outside the club started to get restless. Wanting everyone in line to chill, a guy behind me in line said something to the effect of, “I’m Brahmin, we’re peaceful people.” I was so irritated by the fact that he thought his caste was relevant to the situation. But before I could even complete my thought, the woman in front of me in line retorted something to the effect of “You’re a racist is what you are.” I smiled. I didn’t have to say a word. In my rural visit in Rajasthan, I met two teenage girls who were students there. As we introduced ourselves to each other, one asked me what my caste was. I asked her why she was asking me that question. She said it was just to get to know me. I told her I didn’t think it mattered what caste I was. Her friend standing next to her jumped in saying, “My grandmother says it doesn’t matter what caste anyone is; we’re all human first.” I smiled again. Again, I didn’t have to say a word.

Religious discrimination: At some point during my 16-hour train ride from Delhi to Ahmedabad, a young Muslim man in my compartment, laid out his mat and began to pray while surrounded by a Hindu family. The family had a little child who had been running around the compartment until then. But when this Muslim man started his prayers, the father of the little Hindu boy picked up his son and told him to not to bother the man because he’s praying. I smiled because such respect for an outward display of religion different from yours is not something you really see in the States. But then I reached the state of Gujarat, the site of the massacre of 2,000+ Muslims by Hindu fundamentalists 5 and half years ago, and I traveled through a section of the city informally called “Little Pakistan,” where many Muslims were displaced and segregated from the rest of the city, where no government hospitals or schools are found.

"Validating our work" in the land of lions, tigers and snakes

Our orientation included a rural site visit to Rajasthan’s Alwar District. Though I had known that Rajasthan was supposed to be one of the most beautiful states in India, it didn’t really hit me until we were there. We made a trek to a school set up by an NGO called Bodh, where we stayed the night – we were told that we might see lions, tigers and snakes. Sadly, I didn’t see any, but the beauty and simplicity of living at the campus that we stayed at matched only in comparison to the farm I once lived on in Honduras. It was breathtaking. We spent part of our day visiting one of Bodh’s schools. Bodh provides an alternative to the government schools found in the rural areas of this district, where the children’s voices are suppressed and discipline is a carried out by a stick. Bodh encourages their students to question their teachers and treats them with more respect than is shown to them in the government schools. Bodh concurrently tries to train government teachers in this model so that their method reaches more children and becomes sustainable in the community. We sat in on one of their lessons, during which some of the children read me the stories they had written as part of an assignment. After their lesson, we played Kabadi in the playground. A game sort of like tag and wrestling put together, needless to say when I tried to play, one of the other fellows, Brian, knocked me out immediately.

While in Rajasthan, we also visited a group of women in a farming community who are clients of a microfinance organization. In microfinance parlance, their group is called an SHG – a self-help group. The women told us about how they run their meetings, how their loans are used (mostly for water buffalos – the animal that to me symbolizes rural India), and most interesting to me, the other ways their meetings have helped improve their lives and their communities. For example, by working together, they were able to get the teacher to regularly come to their children’s school. In other words, they used the social capital they created through this network to aid in the social development of their community. I spent a lot of time in my last year of law school reading and writing about the social capital that arises out of microfinance initiatives. I honestly believe that this capital created through social networks is what sustains a community. When women—the backbone of society—are able to create social capital and use it alongside the financial capital they’ve been given through microfinance initiatives is when true development can occur.

I labeled this post as “validating our work” to quote another fellow in our program. He had worked with the Grameen Foundation in the States (an NGO that focuses on microfinance initiatives) prior to this fellowship – and for him, meeting the women of this self-help group in Rajasthan and seeing how the microfinance initiative improved their lives really validated the work he had been doing over the past few years. I know that we all felt that way in some shape or form throughout orientation so I thought quoting him encapsulated what I took away from those two weeks.

OPV – an unbelievable morning in Uttar Pradesh

My middle school was named after Jonas Salk – and all I heard about when I was going to school there was how he developed the vaccine that eradicated polio. Years later when I was at the UN, I remember seeing a clock in the lobby of the UN building counting down the eradication of polio throughout the world based on the number of vaccinations administered, and realized how little of the story of polio I had been told about as a child.

Rotary International funds a program whereby the oral polio vaccine (much cheaper to administer than the injection) is administered once a month in the areas in India most plagued by polio, including the state of Uttar Pradesh. So one Sunday in September, I had a chance to travel to Uttar Pradesh with some of the other fellows to a Muslim town in UP where stalls were set up on the street to administer the oral vaccine to children under the age of 5. In order to fully eradicate the disease in a community, every child under the age of 5 must be fully vaccinated. Unfortunately, similar to the reception anti-retroviral drugs have received in many parts of Africa, there are some in these Muslim communities who believe the polio vaccine is a conspiracy of Hindus trying to wipe out Muslim men in India. As a result, some families will hide their sons on vaccination days, but allow their daughters to get vaccinated. A weird twist of events given that the trend in India is female infanticide. The volunteers of this program, thus, vigorously focus their efforts in these communities, both by setting up these stalls and by going door to door to make sure as many children are covered as possible.

I had the incredible opportunity to actually place two drops of the oral polio vaccine into a little boy’s mouth. (He was not very happy about it!) Our being there did cause quite a stir in the neighborhood with all the children wanting to have their pictures taken on our digital cameras. Normally, I hate making a spectacle of myself in a foreign country, but this was one time I didn’t mind, as it drew more children to the stalls!

The angels and elite of Delhi

The first two weeks of my fellowship were spent in Delhi, as part of an orientation program set up by AIF. We spent our days listening to different speakers from various parts of Indian society, including representatives from NGOs (non-governmental organizations) working on development, the former chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, a journalist, a feminist publisher, the director of the National Gallery of Modern Art (who gave us a private tour of the gallery!*) and the list goes on. The diversity of India is truly reflected in the endless layers of political, economic and social issues the country deals with on a day to day basis. Our speakers exposed us to the wide range of problems facing India and at the same time, shared with us some truly inspiration stories about what they have accomplished for this country. From improving the livelihoods of bicycle rickshaw-pullers to uncovering a World Bank scheme to make water harder to access in Delhi in order to benefit an American corporation to publishing a book on women’s health created by poor, rural women to educate themselves and others, the people who work for these NGOs are no less than angels. Each day I was inspired to continue on my chosen career path and at the same time reminded about how frustrating and difficult that path would be.

However, beyond the formal presentations of orientation, I had the wonderful opportunity to learn from the 28 fellows joining me on this program. Given that we all come from different backgrounds (law, health, education, social work, finance, etc.), but share one common passion—to be a part of the social development of India, the discussions that would arise among us after each lecture were great learning opportunities on their own.

There were some other prominent and inspiring people that we met who sit on the AIF board of directors. I’ll refrain from going into detail of who they all are here, but there was one person I met worth noting for you fellow Bollywood fans out there: the owner of the production company that produced films like Saathiya and Mangal Pandey! Sadly, my lifelong dream to be recruited for a Bollywood film was not fulfilled that night…

* We were invited by the Director of the National Gallery of Modern Art to visit the gallery after hours and attend a private lecture about Indian classical and contemporary art by him and Anjolie Ela Menon, a renowned Indian artist. Given that the kind of Indian art that is usually displayed in museums in the West, I hadn’t realized how very much alive the Indian contemporary art scene is. If only such pieces had more prominence in the West would some of the exotification of India die down – Indian art is not just about ancient carvings, Hindu gods and the Kama Sutra...