On the Importance of Mother-Tongue Early Childhood Education

This video tells the story of the work being done in adivasi (aboriginal) communities in India's Odisha state to develop preschool learning materials for children in their native language, Kui. Government preschools, where they exist in the region, offer curricula only in Odia--the state language. So when adivasi children come to school, they can't speak or understand the language of instruction, and as a result often dropout and never return to formal education.

(For more background, see this earlier Tuque Souq post: Child-Based Community Development)

In the film--called Ganugun Bati Ahangna (Learning with Dignity)--a 5-year-old girl named Jhili overhears her friend Geeta singing a song in Kui. Jhili wants to know where her friend learned this song, and Geeta tells her that she learned it in the anganwadi centre, a new kind of preschool where children are exposed to the fundamentals of education in their mother tongue. The classroom environment was fun and supportive, and Geeta decided to keep attending.

Jhili says that she once attended the government preschool, but there was no singing and dancing, and there was no instruction or activities in Kui. She received a meal and learned the alphabet in Odia, but because she could not understand her teacher, and because the school was so far away, Jhili dropped out.

In the next part of the film, an ebani (social worker) comes to talk to the parents of Jhili's village about the importance of early childhood education for children under six years of age, and how starting to learn in one's mother tongue--and in a supportive, culturally contextualized environment--adapts the child to the learning process that will enable her or him to have a successful life in school and beyond.

The parents agree to support the new preschool and send their children to be educated.

For more information, see the Facebook page of ECE-MT (by Odisha Adivasi Manch) and the Bernard van Leer Foundation, which supports this initiative in Odisha.

Education Programme of PREM at a Glance (VIDEO)

Part 1 (above) and Part 2 (below)

Behind the Scenes:

This two-part film highlights three of the education programmes--Primary & Secondary School Hostels for children from remote areas; Child-Based Community Development (CBCD) preschools; Vocational Training for Youth--of People's Rural Education Movement (PREM) in Orissa, India.

The DVD film, the first for PREM, was produced to send to current and potential donors as well as partners.

Resources were limited to a single camera without an external microphone, and a trial version of a do-it-yourself editing software. And we were up against a tight deadline: we had a two-week window before an important potential donor would be visiting to discuss entering into a long-term funding agreement on initiatives like the ones we’d be filming.

We had two weeks to shoot at a half dozen different locations in three districts of Orissa, plus interviews at PREM’s campus headquarters.

Although my colleagues enjoyed touting me, sincerely, as the director, my role wasn’t to make the film so much as to get them to make the film. In that regard I fought the urge to take over any creative control to make production a collective effort.

Location filming took place at 4 different CBCD centres in Kandhamal district 3 hours north of PREM’s facility in Mandiapalli; then at 2 different vocational institutes in Puri, across Chilika Lake to the northeast; and finally at a pair of youth hostels in Mandiapalli just outside of Berhampur.

On-camera interviews were shot over two days at PREM, with a day off in between when most people couldn’t get to work because of an unbelievable downpour that flooded the entry road into PREM’s campus, forcing us nearly to miss our deadline.

I was hesitant to write a script, preferring the interviewees to speak from the heart. But--possibly due to their uncertainties with English and their anxious debut at the sharp end of the camera lens--my colleagues requested a script. Script turned into cue cards, and well, the rest is there for posterity.

(The president--whose wooden comportment on camera is no indication of his actual personality--didn’t ask for a script, and only gave us one take’s worth of his time to get his introduction.)

In the end, it came together to the satisfaction of everyone in the organization, and seemed to be a hit at its unofficial launch. 

YouTube link Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXArYof2IEU

YouTube link Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKP_Tp5sCTk 

So You've Decided to Start a Newsletter, eh?

The NGO I volunteer with—PREM—decided it wanted to start a newsletter because, well, NGOs have newsletters, but this one did not.
 
I was put in charge of the newsletter, or more accurately I was given the task of coordinating and guiding an Editing Team in the planning, design and execution of a monthly—er, better make that bi-monthly—newsletter, called PREM E-News.

 An editing team of three, myself included, was formed. It became clear early on that one member, the self-professed IT Advisor to the Editing Team, wanted his role to be limited to technical things, and so put himself in charge of converting the .doc version of the newsletter into a .pdf approximately every 60 days.

 Thus the Editing Team became two, me and the person who—rare among the staff here—has little work to do because she has no seniority. In the newsletter, hopefully she'll find her organizational domain.
 

We started with a planning meeting examining several existing newsletters out there in the NGO, for ideas of style and structure. Then we held an editorial meeting about what content we needed for the inaugural issue; basically, what did PREM do in the last two months?

Then we commenced a sort of journalistic training workshop—yep, still just the two of us on the Editing Team—to obtain the content for the newsletter. A lot of people at PREM don’t really know exactly what a lot of other people at PREM do on a daily basis, for reasons that are not terribly relevant right now.

But suffice to say, the E-News Editing Team made the rounds to each program manager, project coordinator and senior staff in the head office to find out what they’ve been doing lately, what activities have been implemented in their milieu, what reports they’ve written for what funding agencies, who did what, when, where, why and definitely how; not to mention show me the photos.

Slowly the newsletter took shape. On the first issue I did just about everything. But as we’ve now rolled out three issues, my partner on the Editing Team gradually has become the reporter, photographer, layout designer, photo editor, and quote-of-the-month go-getter. Whereas I hold only the roles of copy editor, deadline maker (and re-maker), and ghostwriter of the President’s Message.

The newsletter is actually a pretty big success around the office, even if our mailing list is currently only a handful of names long: staff members, funding partners, former volunteers, and my mom (thanks mom!).

For the first time in its 26-year history, PREM has a systematic, textual form of organizational memory. And all it took was a committed team, a journalistic approach, and a guy who makes a .pdf every two months.

Now you can read what all the fuss is about:

PREM E-News, Volume 1, May-June 2010 [PDF]

PREM E-News, Volume 2, July-August 2010 [PDF]

PREM E-News, Volume 3, September-October 2010 [PDF]

(See me on page four)

What PREM Does: Fighting Corruption

This is the fourth in a series of posts about the development work of People's Rural Education Movement (PREM) Orissa, India.

Opportunity Knocks

A Block Development Official (BDO) sits a table in his office in town. On his desk is a handwritten roster of about 1700 names of people in the 250 or so villages in his block who have applied for job cards. Some of the names are fictitious. Others are friends and relatives of the BDO. And still others are real, but they are of people who've no idea what their job card entitles them to, or of people who don't even know they've applied. He writes a receipt for a tent--meant to provide shade for road-construction workers--which he never actually bought. He finishes a report that says 12km of road were completed last month; in fact it was only 2km.*

To his district-level supervisor (whose friends and family are also on the job-card roster) the BDO submits all these documents as records of public works in his jurisdiction, and finally he withdraws the corresponding funds from the government coffers. All in a day's work.

Elsewhere, an Adivasi man is still waiting for his first day of work. But on his job card, which he doesn't yet hold, there is already a fake entry showing 126 days' work. On the report submitted to the state auditor, a figure of INR 5950 (CAD $135) is listed as the wages already paid this man. He has no idea.

National Rural Corruption Guarantee?
All of this is provided for by India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) of 2005, a law that provides federally funded employment in local development for all willing workers for a minimum of 100 days per year at a minimum wage of 60 Indian Rupees (INR; equivalent to $1.25 Canadian Dollars (CAD)) per day.

It stipulates employment for all adults in poor districts through job cards which should be granted within 15 days of application; employment within 5km of one's home village; equal wages for men for women, with a minimum of 33% of job cards in any given village reserved for women; benefits such as unemployment insurance and water.**

Even in a country known for socialist rural economic policies over the first few decades of its independence, few stimulus plans ever developed by the government of India have been as progressive as NREGA. And few schemes ever dreamed up by the government of India have made corruption this easy.

There is overwhelming evidence of systematic corruption of NREGA in every state of India, but nowhere is this corruption more rampant and--due to its infamous mantle as India's poorest state--more devastating than in Orissa.

Village leaders and middlemen take advantage of illiteracy and desperation among lower-caste and tribal villagers, cooking the books and forging job cards. Workers complete a day of labour building a check dam or a gravel road, and the attendance sheet will say they worked 33 days; 32 days' worth of their wages will go somewhere else. A government auditor doesn't feel like visiting a handful of remote villages; for a bribe he'll accept a BDO's story that all job cards have been properly distributed.

A 2006-07 independent study by the Centre for Environment and Food Security (CEFS) found that of the INR 7.33 billion (CAD $165 million) invested by the federal government in the NREGA scheme in the 6 poorest districts of the state of Orissa, more than INR 5 billion (CAD $112m, or nearly 70% of all funds) were siphoned off in misappropriations and outright peculation by government officials and middlemen.***

 "Activists and NGOs spreading awareness about NREGA among rural poor of the state," noted the CEFS study, "are threatened with dire consequences and many have been terrorised into silence by BDOs and other executing officials. Some local activists who accompanied the CEFS research team during survey in Tentulikhunti block in last week of May are being threatened by the government officials and contractors who have misappropriated NREGA funds."

Putting on a Corruption Clinic

PREM is among the NGOs working to combat corruption, principally by training activists and educating the rural and marginalized public to take action against this scourge.

It's not easy, not in an environment where police, government officials and other elites are hand in glove (and glove in pocket). But recently some extra help arrived.

India has a Right to Information (RTI) Act, coincidentally also passed into law in 2005. The RTI Act guarantees access to any public document within 15 days of request. Muster rolls, job cards, payment schedules and BDO reports, to name just a few related to NREGA, are all public documents accessible under RTI.****

One thing PREM has done is establish a number of regional RTI Clinics, such as the one pictured above in Rayagada district. These essentially are training centres where PREM conducts workshops on how to utilize RTI: how to file a request; how to follow up and gain the documents; where to seek legal and other aid if necessary; how to take collective action against corruption. Clinic facilitators utilize methods like group discussion, role play, lawyer visits and testimonials from victims to help instruct community members.

Even beyond the workshops, these RTI clinics are open all the time as walk-in information booths, staffed by community activits who are trained to help victims of corruption take the necessary action for justice.

To read a case study about how PREM's RTI clinics helped one tribal community bring a huge land scam to the public eye (and put the culprits behind bars), check out the July-August 2010 issue of PREM's E-News.

The photos in this post are from an NREGA-funded road-building project in Gajapati district, Orissa.

* Excerpted from a press release of an NGO in Bihar. A Block is a constituted jurisdiction of governance in India which is comprised of anywhere between 100-250 villages and at least one major town.
** Full text of NREGA 2005 [PDF]
*** The six poorest districts of Orissa are Bolangir, Nuapada, Kalahandi, Koraput, Nabarangpur and Rayagada. Read more on this study and the impact of NREGA corruption in Orissa.
**** Full text of RTI Act 2005 [PDF]

What PREM Does: Long, Long Distance Education

This is the third in a series of posts about the development work of People's Rural Education Movement (PREM) in Orissa, India.

The majority of the 8 million Adivasi people of Orissa live in remote, inaccessible villages situated deep in the hilly, interior forests, where a lack of communication as well as other basic facilities are stumbling blocks for development.

Government outreach in education and health care is negligible in most of these areas. Not surprisingly, Orissa’s Adivasi people continue to lag behind the rest of India on socio-economic indexes.

30% of Adivasi children will never spend even one day in primary school, and only 1 in 4 will complete the sixth grade. Half of the population is illiterate. School attendance rates and dropout rates among Adivasis in Orissa are among the worst in the country. Teacher absenteeism, government neglect, poor infrastructure, lack of consideration for tribal culture and language, and lack of awareness among Adivasi of their rights, are among the proximate causes of these problems and only exacerbate the desperate condition in which these communities live.

A few years ago, PREM partnered with the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) to pilot a program to reach Adivasis in some of the most remote parts of Orissa. Through this partnership, PREM helped build Village Resource Centres (VRC) in eight different rural communities, while ISRO outfitted each centre with computer and broadcasting hardware to connect each VRC via satellite to a studio in PREM's headquarters near Berhampur.

Each Monday and Friday from its studio, PREM hosts a two-hour interactive broadcast on a scheduled topic or issue that simultaneously reaches audiences in all eight VRCs. The broadcasts usually feature one of PREM's ongoing initiatives in, e.g., pre-school education, malaria prevention, youth-club development, agro-forestry livelihood, early childhood and maternal care, eco-sanitation, positive discipline, and others.

PREM's role is to help train those community representatives who will in turn be developing these inititatives in the home community. Audiences of village leaders, parents, teachers, and youth ask questions on camera in real time and can also submit queries by email before and after the broadcast.

More often than not, in PREM's studio sits a small panel of experts and program leaders, presenting to the camera and taking questions from the participants at the VRCs. But frequently these twice-weekly broadcasts feature other, livelier acts: Adivasi singers, dancers and stage performers who present the material in a culturally contextualized fashion.

The two Adivasi men in the photo are presenting a song-and-spoken-word routine on the subject of eye care and preventing eye-related diseases. This is going to have the audience on the edge of their seats!

What PREM Does: Networking Grassroots People's Movements

This is the second in a series of posts about the development work of People's Rural Education Movement (PREM) Orissa, India.

PREM is what you might call an intermediary non-governmental organization (NGO); it is less a solitary, issue-based organization than a movement that reflects the direction of hundreds of grassroots people's and community-based organizations (CBOs). The basic idea of PREM is that people build up organizations, not the other way around.

At its inception as an advocate for education of the marginalized people of Orissa, PREM didn't just build schools. It began to build up a culture of education and literacy among those--aboriginal peoples (Adivasis), lower castes (Dalits), fisherfolk, rural villagers and farmers--who hadn't been exposed to the possibilities and rights of formal education. And it lobbied those who would deny these rights--inept or corrupt government, the haves of society--to be a part of changing the prevailing social values.

And after twenty-five years of evolution as a movement toward this value-based change, PREM now nourishes hundreds of small, village-level CBOs that, e.g., operate pre-schools, train and support local teachers, provide vocational training, promote new initiatives for curriculum development, and advocate for education among constituent communities of Adivasis, Dalits and other marginalized groups.

Over the years, PREM has expanded beyond education to facilitating projects and raising awareness about issues of health care (general, immunization, HIV/AIDS, malaria, hygiene, etc), water and sanitation, livelihood, governance, child rights and child protection, disaster relief and rights implementation.

Beyond CBO-level support at the local level, PREM has organized state-level and national-level networks so that these disparate CBOs might federate themselves for strength and unity in advocacy for change. The Orissa Adivasi Manch (lit: "forum") and the National Advocacy Council for Development of Indigenous People (NAC-DIP) are state- and national-level, respectively, federations of Adivasi-development CBOs and NGOs that are facilitated by PREM. There are similar federations formed by PREM for Dalits*, for the fisherfolk**, and for women's groups.***

From a wide-angle view, PREM is situated within an immeasurably extensive web of people, organizations, development initiatives and values that--with PREM's core competencies of knowledge and resource sharing, and its capacity to bring people together for change--is continuously building itself into a stronger and stronger alliance for social justice among the Adivasi, Dalit and other marginalized people of Orissa.

--
* The Orissa Dalit Manch is a state-level forum for Dalit issues and organizations. It's national counterpart is the Alliance Network of Dalits (AND).
** The Kalinga Fisher People's Union is a state-wide union of 35,000 local fishermen and women in Orissa. The East Coast Fisher People's Forum (ECFPF) is a network of fisherpeople's unions in various Indian States.
*** In 1992 PREM founded Uktal Mahila Sanchaya Bikash (UMSB), a state-level federation of more than 2200 women's self-help groups (SHGs), most of which are small, village-based micro-credit initiatives including seed and grain banks, local arts and crafts commerce, forest-produce and agriculture collectives, etc. All receive training and other organizational support from PREM. Today UMSB has more than 32,000 women members. UMSB is also part of a national network, INFOS (Indian Network of Federations of Microfinance Self-Help Groups).

Photo: Ceremonial planting of a tree at a meeting of various tribal organizations and CBOs with PREM.

What PREM Does: Child Based Community Development

This is the first in a series of posts about the development work of People's Rural Education Movement (PREM) in Orissa, India.

The Adivasis are the aboriginal people of India. There are more than 8 million in the state of Orissa alone, in 62 distinct tribes each with their own language and culture. The characteristics which unite them are unfortunately the least impressive. They live mostly in remote villages, deep in the forests and high in the hilltops, where most government services, such as education, do not reach.

Since 1975, the state government of Orissa has established hundreds of what it calles Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) centres in rural, Adivasi-dominant areas of the state. These centres are supposed to be a kind of multi-purpose daycare for young children (aged 3-5), providing Early Childhood Education (i.e., pre-school), health care and immunization, playground facilities, and nutrition (i.e. a free lunch). Each centre should have a staff of one teacher and one supervisor, be open for at least 4 hours per day, 6 days per week, and be centrally located and well-known in the local area.

Unfortunately, surveys conducted over the years by PREM and other non-governmental organizations have found that these ICDS centres are operating far, far below acceptable standards. Just some of the problems associated with ICDS centres in Orissa include that:

• Most ICDS centres are located on the outskirts of villages or between villages, requiring foot travel by the young children as much as one kilometre each way;
• Most ICDS centres are built in relatively large hub villages, around which are clusters of smaller hamlets whose children are not able to access the centres due to distance;
• Teacher absenteeism (and associated corruption, such as teachers paying bribes to supervisors) is prevalent if not widespread;
• Many ICDS centres are open only a few hours per week, usually long enough for the teacher to show up, serve lunch, and go home (i.e., there is no actual pre-school at all);
• The vast majority of ICDS teachers and supervisors are not from the local community, meaning they likely do not speak the local tribal language and have difficulty communicating with children, parents and community leaders;
• Child abuse in the form of neglect and corporal punishment is reported.

Furthermore, NGO studies have shown that Adivasi children perform better in primary school if they begin pre-school in their mother tongue (i.e. tribal language) and are gradually transitioned to Oriya, the language of instruction they will encounter in primary school. High dropout rates and low performance by Adivasi children in primary school are attributed, in part, to lack of mother-tongue introduction to education in pre-school, and to non-attendance of pre-school. (70% of all Adivasi children will drop out of primary school within one year, due to language barriers, inaccessibility, migration, and lack of priority placed on education by the child's family/community.)

Urged by Adivasi community and people's organizations who are frustrated at the inefficacy of government development, PREM in 2007 launched its CBCD project which has, at present, constructed or renovated more than 350 new community centres in rural Adivasi villages and hamlets. PREM provides training, helps develop Adivasi-focused curricula and materials, and pays initial salary to the staff of two facilitators per centre while initiating a fund for the community members to pay the costs in the long-term. The facilitators are without exception young women from the same tribal community if not the same village. The pre-school education in the CBCD centres is conducted in three languages: Oriya, English and the mother tongue (i.e. tribal language) of the children.

Concurrently, PREM organizes workshops and seminars in the communities for parents and local leaders on child rights, education policy, child-centred health care from pre-natal through adolescense, forming village education committees and parent-teacher committees, and monitoring the implementation and quality of educational provisions.

PREM also lobbies state education officials to take its CBCD project as a model for future ICDS, arranging exposure visits and encouraging local communities to advocate for the program's continued implementation.

Though a relatively young project, it has already yielded positive results. CBCD centres are open an average of four times more per month than ICDS centres. Children who transition from CBCD centres to primary school have a lower dropout rate than children who previously attended ICDS centres or no pre-school at all.

Most importantly, the entire concept of the CBCD centres is constructed from the bottom up, with the participation of village leaders, parents and even children's clubs in every stage from building construction to teacher training to monitoring. As a result, the process is less likely to fail the needs of the children, because the entire community has taken ownership of the program to educate young tribal children.

The Children of the Hills and the English Conversation Club

"We come from the hills, sir." This is how the children explain it to me; how they name their place, as though a simple tilt of my head up from the horizon will answer everything I need to know about them.

Perhaps it does. These children I visit everyday are adivasi--'tribals' in the local English vernacular--aboriginal inhabitants of India. And yes, they live in the hills, in the forests, in tiny village clusters and hamlets. Unassimilated, passed by, on the margins... these are the hills.

They are my children, or so it is said in the parlance of the office. ("Mister-richard, you go to see your children now?") Each afternoon at half past four, I sit with thirty-four adivasi teenagers and facilitate an English conversation class--or club, as I prefer to call it.

It is summer vacation, and the children of the hilly villages have just completed the tenth grade. They spend the school year here, in special hostels, in Mandiapalli village just outside of Berhampur in the Indian state of Orissa. In fact, they've spent most of their lives here. Their villages are less than 100km away but take at least a day to get to, by bus and then by foot, up into the hills. There are no schools there, certainly not English-medium schools. They spend ten months in school, go home for two weeks, and then come back for summer courses, such as Mister-richard's (impromptu) English Conversation Club, where we hang out and tell jokes, swap fable for local fable, and compare and contrast Canada with India on any number of topics.

About ten years ago, the organization I work with here, PREM, helped establish a model school to give adivasi children the opportunities that few of their community ever have. These fifteen-year-olds were among the inaugural class. Their illiterate parents back in the hills had the courage and foresight to sign them up when PREM visited to explain about the school. It probably wasn't easy; a lot of tribal children go to work at young ages in the family business--usually millet cultivation combined with forest-produce gathering and some handicrafts or trades--especially if their fathers are away in other parts of India as migrant labourers. Child marriage is still common, which precludes long-term education.

Today these children read, write and speak Hindi, English and Oriya, in addition to their tribal languages. They have algebra and chemistry and computer science and just what you'd expect a teenager to have in school. After classes they cook and eat with each other, maintain the hostel together, go hiking and play cricket and fly kites. They are thirty-four among three million adivasi children in Orissa alone, and they know this. They are carefree when they should be, but also driven; in class I can hear it and feel it in what we talk about. These children know what opportunity is, and what it isn't. They also speak the language of rights, of values, of justice, and of hope: university, autonomy, community, development, progress, future...

I can't have these conversations with just anyone here. Like all teachers, I am the lucky one.

Last Friday, the students were on pins and needles (an expression Mister-richard taught them). They awaited the results of the annual year-end school examinations, their final cumulative grade point for the year. In the second-floor common room of the hostel, home to the English Conversation Club, no one could concentrate on the activities or games or jokes (in fact, more than a few skipped out on the meeting altogether). To the relief of all, the hostel ward finally got the email in the late afternoon and posted the list on the tackboard outside the kitchen.

Two of my students scored over 90%, apparently a ludicrously high score around here. One of them, a girl called S., feted her success by offering sweets to her classmates, as is the tradition here. (When it's your special day, you provide the treats, not the other way around.)

The other, a short, brick-built lad called J., took the news in typical teenage stride: with a shrug of the shoulders and a cock of the head, which absolutely could not conceal his smile and beaming pride. Some of the other children queued up for the hostel phone to call their families. But J.'s family will have to wait a while to hear the news of his success. In his village in the hills, just over the horizon, there are no phone lines and no mobile phone services.

The hills may not seem so far, but J. and his classmates have come a very long way. I hope their future is as bright as their faces.

--
NB: The children in the photograph are not my English students but others I've visited. I haven't brought my camera to class yet. This photograph was taken with the children's expressed consent.

Steamrolled by the Great Freight Train of Irony

Last week my very bubbly and energetic colleague KD invited me to accompany him on a field visit to the village of Chandragiri, where PREM was conducting a communications workshop with a few dozen of its fieldworkers.

I happily and excitedly agreed.

As we continued our mutually happy and excited discussion about my coming along, I slowly worked out that not only was I going to attend this workshop, but I was going to co-lead the workshop, and would I be so good as to formulate the official agenda and give a one-hour powerpoint presentation on best practices for effective communication in the field?

Oh? Um. Of... course. I'd be very happy to do this (on one day's notice, still knowing very little about the organization I'm working with, and not having created a powerpoint presentation since my final year of undergrad, twelve long years ago!).

KD's happiness index went from effervescent to Eyjafjallajökullian.

So the next day, off we went.

(I shall describe the beautiful village of Chandragiri--two and a half hours' drive from Berhampur up in the hills of the Gajapati district--in another post.)

The workshop was quite successful. Of thirty-five fieldworkers invited, about half were able to attend, despite the distance they must travel from their villages and the time they must take away from their families and work. (Though all fieldworkers are salaried by PREM, they also have other seasonal work, mainly agricultural in their villages.)

KD led the early morning session with some contextual information about the workshop and PREM's ongoing work. I led an energizer. After a couple of participatory exercises, it was my turn to plug in and talk about best practices for effective communication.

Then the power went out.

KD to the rescue; he ad-libbed a discussion on the critical importance of fieldworkers communicating effectively, since they represent the grassroots knowledge base of the entire organization.

When we got power, I was back in the spotlight. I'd budgeted only thirty minutes for my presentation, hoping to save the other half hour for group discussion (assuming, of course, that anyone found my presentation enlightening).

However, I'd neglected to take into account the need for KD to translate (and elaborate thence) every slide I presented in English into Oriya. Most of our fieldworkers read and write in English well enough, but understand very little, especially my accent. To stave off an hour of my speaking to blank, though politely nodding, faces, KD rescued me at each turn.

Occupying that unenviable time slot in the late morning just before the lunch break, and not speaking the local language, and being (by my presence as a foreigner, for some the first they've ever met) a general oddity in the room, by the end of my talk I was resigned to and content with the fact that my presentation on best practices for effective communication had been steamrolled by the great freight train of irony.

But somehow it seems my determined bullet-pointedness got through to a few of the group, who told me afterwards that they feel stronger about their ability to do their work well.

KD was beaming all through lunch. "Mr Richard," he said, glowing. "That was a great presentation. So great. Really great."

"Thank you," I replied humbly and somewhat disbelieving. But KD's wide eyes put me at ease. He is a very self-conscious young man; having worked his way up through PREM to become a field manager, he is ever cognizant of ways he can improve his work and be a more effective leader. He genuinely views me as someone from whom he can learn a lot, me and my rusty powerpoint skills. As we ate lunch, he looked like he wanted something more from me.

"Really, it was a great presentation. Um, do you have another?"

---
Photos in this post:
1-A ploughed field in Chandragiri village.
2-A sandalwood tree just outside the conference centre.
3-KD presenting to the workshop.
4-A mango tree on PREM's campus in Chandragiri.
(Click all photos to enlarge.)

The People's Rural Education Movement

Fight poverty through individual empowerment. Fight it with education. Fight it with rights-based collective action. Fight it while looking directly in its face.

If PREM had a mantra, this could be it.

The organization I now find myself working with began thirty years ago as a small group of determined social activists who identified an enormous gap in the social and political development--and the subsequent marginalization and poverty--of several rural communities here in Orissa:

The adivasi--the aboriginal people of India, the First Nations, in a sense--make up almost a quarter of Orissa's population and number over 80 million in all of India. There are 62 scheduled tribes here in Orissa numbering between 500 and one million in population. They are distinct from mainstream Hindu-dominant Indian society by language, by history, and very often by geography. They live in remote villages, often in the vast forestland and expansive hill country of central India. Rarely have they, by choice or by force, assimilated into the dominant culture, and therefore they remain marginalized and poor almost beyond description.

The dalits--erstwhile known as untouchables, or the lowest-caste sector of Indian socio-political hierarchy--make up nearly twenty per cent of Orissa's population. By rigid cultural design they live on the margins of society, unable to advance beyond the boundaries set by a vast system of social classification, even if modern democratic rights have prescribed otherwise. Many dalits have converted to Christianity (or in other areas of India, Buddhism or Sikhism) to transcend caste repression, and this in many cases has had the result of even further marginalization and repression.*

Until a generation ago, for dalits and adivasi in southern and western Orissa, terms like development and education and human rights were as foreign as the concept of a free, democratic India.

The tools these social activists began to apply to address this marginalization, this gap:

1) Education--starting with functional literacy and progressing to the kind of transformational, holistic, liberatory approach theorized by Paulo Freire and others;
2) Sustainable Development--agricultural and horticultural innovations, conservation, water management, food security, health awareness;
3) Community-Based Organizations (CBOs)--sustainable livelihood, village financial trusts, micro-financing initiatives, women's cooperatives, local schools and vocational training centres, an inclusive and consensus-based (rather than top-down and welfare-based) approach to all reaches of development;
4) Advocacy--social mobilization, government lobbying, demanding the implementation of democratic rights.

Today, PREM is a robust network of several dozen partner NGOs, thousands of village-level CBOs, and more than a million people working together, not as charity from have to have-not, but as a collective force against systemic poverty.

And here I am. My title is that of "Communications and Documentation Advisor" (not a lesser name for this rose!), but really I'm here as much to learn from this energetic and successful movement as I am to impart any skill or wisdom I may have accumulated.

* I have never read a Wikipedia entry more inaccurate or misleading than the entry for Dalit. For a better context, start with this article on the difference between a handful of successful dalits in Indian society and a few hundred million who remain impoverished by what is effectively an unending system of repression, despite recent political/legal acts to demarginalize them.

Quote-Unquote: Paulo Freire

"Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity, or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world."
--Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1969.

(Context: The philosophy of Paulo Freire forms a critical element of non-governmental education development in India, including the organization where I work, the People's Rural Education Movement, about which more is coming to this blog.)