A 'Happy' Project- 'Sambandh'

According to the World Happiness Report 2018, India ranked 133 among 155 countries and established it’s presence as one of the world’s least happy nations. As per the report of National Crime Records Bureau, 8934 (6.7% of all suicides) students are committing suicide every year. Under this extensive crisis, a greater responsibility comes to the education sector to provide the students with a scope to by forming an adequate eco-system which ensures the social, emotional, mental and physical development of a child, while enhancing the cognitive faculties, simultaneously.

Due to my professional responsibility as a fellow to support the school and the community in development of the educational eco-system by capacitating principals and support them in appropriate implementation of policies on ground to ensure holistic development of each child, I engaged with the school and community stakeholders of the village Nesada, situated in the block Dholka, in Ahmedabad.

During my one month stay at a government primary student’s house in the rural village, I’ve closely observed the day-to-day lives of the parents and their children. Utilizing participatory observation and survey as primary research tools I’ve figured out that, in a village with the population of 1956, only 28.5% of the parents were socially and emotionally aware about their child, where as the literacy rate was 66.4%. This gap between the official literacy rate and the social-emotional awareness exposed the core problem with the education system, that is lack of focus on a child’s social-emotional and mental growth, which urged me to look for scope to incorporate ‘Social-Emotional Learning (SEL)’ as a concept, at the implementation level to enhance parent-child relationship and ensure holistic development of children by bridging the gap between the school and the community.

With the support of the youth in the community, I’ve opened a community learning centre, where the local students were taught using art as a medium to improve their cognitive skills as well as to ensure their mental and emotional growth. The curriculum I’ve designed was based upon the five major pillar of the concept Social Emotional Learning by CASEL. The five major pillar were self awareness, Self Management, Social awareness, relationship skill and responsible decision making. The curriculum was divided into 8 parts to be executed in four weeks, that is one month of a span, and included art based learning sessions and events.

The sessions and events were organized and facilitated by 14 youth of the community, for which 5 capacity building sessions took place with the youth. The curriculum included two major art forms- art and craft and theatre (street theatre/role plays). The students’ ability to think, create and comprehend enhanced with each sessions. The first event took place in the community was around dustbin Installation, where collaborating with the Sarpaanch and Talathi, the students painted colourful dustbins by mending waste buckets and prepared creative posters and badges. By conducting a rally, the children installed 13 dustbins in 13 village shops. The next event was a Nukkad Natak prepared by children performed in three parts of the community. Three parents workshops , also, took place sensitize the parents about the SEL components to contribute to the overall school and community eco-system.

The one month of intervention brought joy, hope and a lot of learning to the yound children and strengthened the parent-child bond, to bridge the school community gap.

Celebration of Identity - through colour and love! :)

Let me introduce Saraswati to you all. Saraswati, a seventeen year old 'bahu' of the Sarpaanch's (head of the village) elder brother, in the village of Khatripur. Now, a little bit of geographical and demographic background is needed to understand the context of the story I’m going to narrate to you, a story of Saraswati, the woman, of all women in that village.

Khatripur is an interior village, situated about 55 km away from the main city of Ahmedabad, Gujarat. As per the census-2011 report, total 205 families reside within this village, which has a total population of 1152, while 583 are females, which is greater in number as compared to males.

During my fellowship journey, while supporting the rural government primary education system by capacitating the school principals and consulting in the overall development of school and community, a wonderful opportunity came in my way to stay back in that village for a whole long month with the villagers to put my feet in their shoes to unlearn and learn. In the initial phase of my community immersion I stayed at the Sarpaanch’s place where I discovered Saraswati!

Saraswati was married off and forced to quit studies when she was fifteen years old. She shifted to her ‘sasural’ immediately after the marriage and from then on stayed back at home performing the regular household duties. Rising up very early in the morning (while the men of the families would remain on bed sleeping), making ‘rotla-sabji’ as breakfast, washing clothes, cleaning the house Saraswati never seemed to sit for a bit. Here, it’s important to mention that Khatripur is a village of the ‘Thakor’s’, as they refer to it ‘Thakor’na gaam’. The Thakor community conventionally carries forward the fundamental patriarchal values from generation to generation as a part of their core cultural value system, where a female member is never allowed to come out of their veils in front of strangers or senior members of the community; Saraswati was no exception indeed; her identity was suppressed under her veil, in the broad day light no one never asked her to remove the veil to look into her eyes, no one, never, bothered to know who she really is. while I had the fortune to meet the Saraswati behind the veil, once; and that meet made me reflect, reflect on my existence.

It was a usual day when I was sitting around with her, post dinner, in the bedroom for a short span of time til’ her husband would turn up. Suddenly, she wanted to show me something and asked me to keep it a secret. It was a drawing work book. She stated that she painted sometimes to support her nephew in school tasks, as the boy cannot paint. She was hesitant, embarrassed yet excited to show me her works. As I kept flipping the pages, as I passed by every stroke of brushes, every explosion of colours created by her, I realized Saraswati is brilliantly skilled, she is extraordinary. It burdened me up with some sort of a strange guilt for her to be non recognized, and ‘our’ journey began from there.

With the help of 8 upper primary female students I started to broaden my network within the village. Wandering from door to door I eventually discovered 14 young female artists in that village, who happened to do ‘Bharat-Kaam’ or ‘Moti-Kaam’ (a region specific craft work) as a leisure. After conducting a full-fledged structured research (using survey, interview as a tool to collect both qualitative and quantitative data and complete the primary research as well as conducting a secondary research by gathering documents from the ‘Paanchhayat Bhavan’, ‘Aanganwadi’, school and other institutions available.), I’ve figured out that the males of the community export the items to the local ‘bazar’ in most cases and the females have no claim on the profit they generate. The females are used there, as cheap machineries to generate some extra income to the family, while they have denied their fundamental rights to take it up as their occupation. With the denial of financial rights, their identities were denied. Their identity, as an artist, as a responsible citizen of the country.

In a span of next two weeks, I, with an extensive support of two female ‘Bharat-Kaam’ workers and one of my peers, a young talented theatre artist Shailesh Chhatrapal, and the local Government school Principal Baldevbhai T Zala, an intensively enthusiastic personality, gathered some funds (around 1,500/-). Seeking support from three of the small scale businessmen from the nearest market place. Gathered sufficient amount of pieces of clothes, motis, papers, brushes, colours and other requirements, which we distributed among 37+ female artists. By the time they prepared their crafts, several sessions (one-on-one and group) were conducted with them to understand art and the market around to develop their knowledge, skill and self confidence.

By organizing a cultural rally, where female upper primary students (age group-12-14) came up with innovatively designed posters with some social messages written on them, after spreading awareness in the village, finally, a big event took place.

I’ve managed to seek collaboration from the caretaker of the local Mandir, to utilize the space as the venue of the event. The women who entered the Mandir space til’ date to pray for their husband’s health and success, were for the first time, entering with their artistic creations which had their names written on them. The artefacts were displayed there in the broad day light, while a creative writing competition was held for the young children, organized and facilitated by the female youth of the community. 40+ women stepping out of their house visited the exhibition. The Sarpaanch, the Cluster Resource Officer along with the principal visited. At the end of the event, the children were given out the artefacts as prizes. Bhaarti Ben, who originally is the Saarpanch of the village democratically elected with majority votes and acts as the ‘wife’ of the acting Saarpanch, was close to tears while greeting the team. The efforts of one month opened some channel for the women artists, which was the beginning , the very beginning of their journey ahead.

It’s been one and a half years, and two of the young ‘Bharat-Kaam’ artists now have started with embroidery work in order to sell their products locally (where they don’t have to depend on the male members to travel to the market) realizing the scope of being financially independent within their small sphere, where Kiran, one of them stated “Didi, I earn now to help my mother and save up a little from it to attend tuitions, where I can learn this craft effectively”.

There is still a long way to go to bring actual impact of this one month project and the path is dusky, as dusky as Saraswati’s face on that evening when I packed my bags and was ready to leave the village and move back to my safer, a little (actually quite) privileged shelter, when she silently moved close to me with teary eyes and handed me over her painting, with her name, her identity on it, uttering ‘Sonali, keep this with you'. I kept her, within. :)