First day in the field. I want to apologize in advance because this is going to be long. I realized that I am actually recalling/reflecting in triplicate on these type events, taking pretty extensive notes and pictures while things are happening, then this, then recording it all again in my travel journal. Which means that I am remembering way more than I maybe should. And on top of that, a lot of new stuff happened today. So here it goes, events and then thoughts as they come to me, or as they came to me as this all happened.
Today we were going for the first time into the field, out of Chennai by about 100 km, into a rural village where there is a heavy microfinance presence. The point of the trip is more or less to get us used to the conditions that we will be finding when we actually go into the field, and we were accompanied by some experiences researchers who could translate and tell us when we were flippantly insulting people’s mothers when we thought we were asking where the bathroom was. We had a long van ride to get there—it was a long ways away, and there was pretty bad traffic getting out of Chennai.
I love driving through the country. We saw miles and miles of Tamil political signage along the highway, and small shops and towns living off the traffic, and fields of rice and other crops. And huge manufacturing plants, the result of government incentives and the ‘Specialized Economic Zone” which requires workers to be bussed in from both directions, the city to the East and the farmland across the rest of the compass.
We got to the closest town to the villages that we were visiting. Right off the highway, a maze of shops and houses, nothing more than three stories tall. White adobe-like walls, more bike repair shops than people riding bikes, and cows with painted horns being driven through the streets. We whizzed past the odd clash of a neon advertisement adorning the top of an ornate, gaudy, Hindu temple. The buildings grew smaller, and the space between them grew until we were driving through fields. On roads that were legitimately better than some that I have seen in California. Three cheers for the budget crisis.
We arrived at our first destination—a village training facility and community organization center—really just a meeting room with a TV, lights, and the necessary blessing of fans to make the room bearable. Which then promptly stopped working five minutes into our meeting. We were there to talk to the local Federation, which we were to find out is the group of women from the area who head the Self Help Groups that have formed. Each of these women was in charge of a number of collective loan groups, and they wanted us to hear their stories. None of them spoke English, or at least not enough to communicate. I’m sure their English was better than my Tamil. So we were working through translators, the researchers from the IFMR who had come with us. They started to speak.
It was strange, not being able to understand. We only got translations every couple of minutes, and even then it was not full word-for-word transcripts but rather the sparknotes version. So other things became much more important. More important than I realized they could be, as I struggled to find meaning. Language left a void, and, like a blind person’s hearing and other senses--expressions, gestures, tone of voice, volume, others’ reactions, all were suddenly more meaningful. The woman speaking first was confident. She spoke slowly, deliberately. Her eyes held those of our Preethi, who was asking the questions and would be translating. She sat comfortably in her chair, not fidgeting like I was, twirling my pen while I watched for more signs. You could tell she was proud. A smile would flash over her lips for only a second, but it would stay in her eyes longer. She was by no means the oldest woman of the group, but none of the others interrupted, and they were all attentive. That was all before I knew what she had been saying.
Many years before one boy from their village had managed to get into a university and pay for it, and became a doctor. Instead of going and getting a job, he brought back a suitcase of medicine and set up shop outside the local school, giving it away to those in need. “The whole organization started out of that suitcase” Preethi translated directly. That line mattered to the woman. I remembered a triumphant and fleeting smile and a gesture to the surrounding room. The doctor then began to teach some of the older girls—8th graders and the like—to be his assistants, almost like nurses. That was the woman who was talking. Her name was Janeki, we found out then. And the service grew, and turned into a clinic, and then a mobile clinic, and then a training program for women so they could do basic treatments, use herbal remedies available to them, and know when they needed to take someone to the hospital.
Each of the women talked about something else in turn. One told us of the interlocking life insurance and scholarship programs that she had set up for the people in her special help groups. It took us a good while to understand how it worked, and not because it was being explained poorly. Another told of providing money for surgeries, and for the mentally ill. Another talked about how the entire federation had set up almost a credit union after having seen the microfinance banks in action. Her reasoning for this was fascinating. They didn’t want to be dependent on the bank for a loan in a crisis—instead it was the other women in the village who would decide if you needed more help.
I grimace thinking about what I am about to type. I hate reading it, and I have been trying to think of a less cheesy, trite way of getting the message across and failing. Sorry. These women were empowered. We could tell—there was something about the look in their eyes, the way they held themselves. They were no longer thinking “what if” and instead thinking “we can.” I took that directly from their promotional literature, no joke, they had pamphlets.
After that we left the community organization center and went to one of the villages. It was sweltering. We sat with the village leaders on the ground and had them help Preethi draw a map of their village. They were working too fast to translate, and I was sitting in back so I couldn’t really see what was going on. Instead I distracted myself by killing flies. Personal record—four in one swat. We were sitting under a Tamarind tree, something that I always associated with India. Here, we were told, they are associated with two things. Red ants the size of your thumbnail and evil spirits that will possess you. Preethi did interpret some of the goings-on for us. The villagers told her that they were happy with their lives. They wished that they had better water—Irrigation was from rain, so when it was dry they went without, and their drinking water was contaminated and caused frequent illness. They wanted better transportation, and a closer hospital so that they wouldn’t have to travel the kilometers that they currently trek whenever something goes wrong. But beyond that they were content with their lot. The castes lived separately, with the upper levels on one side of the main road and the lower across the way, but there was no reservations about interactions. Nor was their conflict between the religious communities—most were Hindus, but a large number of Roman Catholics also lived in the town, along with an American trained father.
We wandered the town. They were incredibly proud of the things that they had—the requested that I take a picture of two men working to put up the new transformer, and showed us their temples, and the towns only tractor. I made friends with one of the village boys when I happened to get a picture of him being pushed into a sand pile by his brother on a bike. He was a ringleader, and a few of the other boys in the town let him do the talking for them. They wanted to show me their cow, and the banana tree, making me take pictures. The rest of the group was shown the front of the old Hindu temple in town. Afterwards, the boys took me inside, letting in enough light that we could see the bats darting around the inner room.
When we got to the play structures and the government buildings, and an man took my friend aside and talked to him. I’m assuming it was his father. The boy came back, and I could tell he was asking me something but could not tell what. He looked uncomfortable, and was struggling with his English (more the pronunciation than the words themselves, I had realized by that point. Not that it made it easier to understand). Preethi came over to help, and the boy shut down. His assumed father started talking, directly to Preethi. Asking me for money (we found out later, it all happened in Tamil) through her, saying that the boy was enrolled in a program that they had put the down payment on, but could not afford. She turned him down—we had been warned that this kind of thing would happen, and that our best bet was to say that we were students, that we were not being paid.
I was conflicted. I knew that we couldn’t, or that we shouldn’t, or all the arguments about why this one and not the many others who are inevitably going to ask the same question over the next few weeks. I still looked at this kid and felt bad. It was clear that he was intelligent. Not as much in the book smart, memorization way that would be rewarded in the tests and exams which dictate the course of the Indian educational system. He reminded me of Tom Sawyer, leading his band of happy village children, running around, turning the visiting westerners into a grand entertainment. He was gregarious and charismatic, and mischievous, and energetic. It turned out later that his father had been drunk, and had most certainly put him up to it. While Preethi talked to the father, Archana, one of the other IFMR researchers, said something to me that I guess mattered a lot in how I have been thinking about this whole thing.
“He is almost exactly who you are targeting in your study. Who you people are trying to help.” Or something like that. Same basic idea. We continued our tour, and the boys, especially my friend, continued to playfully harass me, showing me this or that and demanding “picture? Picture? Christian church. Picture?”
The drive back to our hotel was long. Miles to be covered, traffic, the three researchers had to be dropped off. Plenty of time to think. Watching lightning flicker across a sky split between the gold of an late afternoon sun and the steely blue of a coming rain. The lightning never stayed for long enough for the eye to focus: it was simply a flash in my vision. But it was enough to keep me watching the clouds, and when enough time had passes between strikes and I had grown bored and went to turn away, inevitably it would flicker again at the edge of my vision right as I turned my head away, holding my wavering focus outside the van and in the countryside of southern India.
There were other thoughts on that ride back. Of cows and elephant men, of vendors and moths, of wilderness and of the darkness only found in the heart of a city. Of “Trouble,” and staying “Forever Young,” of a “Heart of Gold.” But these for another time. I have rambles long enough already.
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