A CLEVER, CLEAN MONKEY

A group of youths interested in social development have been presenting street plays in different communities on various important issues. All the group members are students of Bharati Vidyapith MSW College. One of them (Anil Gaikwad) has been doing field work with A-K for the last year.

Asha-Kiran, the Street Play Group and two Spanish volunteers (Nerea Durán Terron and María Lucero Rodríguez) planned the activity in the community. The play was based on ‘Swachha Bharat Abhiyan’ (Clean India Campaign), for which the volunteers prepared beautiful posters.

The play starts with a song that describes Asha-Kiran’s vision and work, followed by a description of the situation of the slums. One person plays the role of a monkey (all traditional street plays use the same concept in India) and another person is his boss. The boss asks the monkey to do a trick, but the monkey refuses saying that he won’t work in an unclean place that smells bad and has so many flies and mosquitoes.

The boss says that this is the typical condition of all the slums, especially in Pune. The monkey then explains the importance of cleanliness in our surroundings and homes. In the second part, he talks about the advantages of a clean and neat neighborhood. We hope that, little by little, the slum dwellers will have a better understanding of the value of hygiene and actively improve their living conditions.

THE WATER MAN OF INDIA

Rajendra Singh, popularly known as ‘The Water Man of India’, began his work in the 80's. His initial idea was to build health centers in rural areas, but after living with the villagers he found out that water was a much greater need. For his efforts and achievements, he has been awarded the 2015 Stockholm Water Prize Laureate.

The lack of water was causing an exodus of young people, leaving behind women, elderly people and children to fend for themselves. The surrounding wells were dry and no crop thrived, so Singh decided to focus on solutions. With the help of the villagers, he began to build modernized versions of traditional earthen dams (johads) which fell into disuse during the colonial era.

Twenty years of continuous work have enabled access to water to over 1000 villages across Rajasthan, and more than 8,600 johads and similar structures have been built. As a result, rivers are now flowing again, the forest cover has increased and some animal species are reappearing. By collecting rainwater and because the groundwater has been recovered, the risk of droughts and floods has decreased to almost zero in what used to be the driest state in India.

“The way we have worked is a way to solve the issue of droughts and floods worldwide, so we believe that the impact of this work is at a local, national and international level. When we started out, we were just trying to solve the drinking water crisis in Rajasthan. Today, our goal is greater. We are in the 21st century, the century of exploitation, pollution and encroachment. To be able to stop this, turn the water war into peace, that is my goal in life”, says Rajendra Singh.

Source: thebetterindia.com

CRAFTS WITH SPANISH VOLUNTEERS

This session was conducted at the Community Center with the help of two Spanish volunteers, María Lucero Rodríguez and Nerea Durán Terrón.

The activity consisted in making earrings and bracelets since all of the 30 participants were girls. Everybody was given colorful chart paper to cut into different shapes (hearts, squares, flowers, etc.) to use as decorations for the bracelets. With needle and thread, all the loose ends were tied and beautiful bracelets were ready. The girls also made earrings by using beads and thread.

All the girls thoroughly enjoyed the process of making jewelry for themselves.

OBSTACLES FOR GIRLS WHO WANT TO STUDY

Roja was 16 years old. She was hard to miss. Quiet at the start, Roja was passionate about school: “I don’t want to be called a hebbattu (illiterate). I want to be a policewoman like the one in my village. That’s what I want to be when I grow up.”

“Parents think girls will marry and go away to another house,” she told me. “All the money they spend in sending girls to school will only benefit an outside family, so they send their sons to school.” Roja saw no sense in this logic. To her, it was clear that girls had to be allowed to study for families to survive. “Boys don’t care. It’s the girls who will take care of their family. If I study, my family will not be poor anymore.”

Once I got my 10th Grade marks, I asked everyone in my house to give me money for college admission fees. All of them said they didn’t have enough money. There was an annual fee of 380 Rupees (€5.60) to get admission, but no one could give me that. My father has been very ill in the past few months so he doesn’t make any money. My mother washes dishes at a nearby house. She brings the leftover food from the house where she works for us to eat. I didn’t want to bother my family anymore, so I decided to work.”

Roja told her mother about her plan, but her mother said, “You mustn’t give up hope. No one in our family has studied beyond 2nd grade. You have done well in school and you must study further.” Roja had expected her mother to agree to her working in the fields. “I was very encouraged by what my mother said. She urged me to keep trying.”

This girl is remarkable. It’s remarkable that she scored a distinction in high school; remarkable that she never let go of her desire to study; remarkable that she pursued it and looked for a way. And she did find a way. The local chapter of the Rotary Club paid her fee. It embarrassed her to be so poor but there was no shame in her desire to study and reach out for help. “I will become a policewoman and then my family will not be poor anymore.”

This young woman deserves to be heard and her individual success celebrated for its potential to encourage others like herself to tackle seemingly insurmountable odds.

(Adapted from thebetterindia.com)

LINKING SCHOOL-GOING CHILDREN AND UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

Last 20th of March, Asha-Kiran set up a stand at MIT College in Pune. The stand included a Wish Tree, contribution boxes, and volunteers giving information about A-K. Through our presence, we wished to link up students from the city with the children from the slum community and the construction sites so as to encourage them to contribute to the development of disadvantaged children in various ways.

At first, MIT students were hesitant to visit our stall, so the organizer of the event and our Director in India introduced us to them. Many students came over not only to make a financial contribution, but also to sign up as future volunteers with Asha-Kiran. After chatting with us, the students began to understand Asha-Kiran’s goals and undertakings on behalf of disadvantaged children.

INDIAN HEROINE FOSTERING CHANGE

In late 2012, the Indian film director Ram Devineni took part in a demonstration in New Delhi following the rape of a young 23 year old student on a bus. A policeman present at the rally said that “no decent woman would walk alone at night”. These words and the indignation they produced in Devineni, detonated the beginning of a transmedia project that is already viral in India: Priya's Shakti.

Priya is a character who has suffered sexual violence to later become the only female superhero in India. Riding a tiger and wearing a colorful sari, she sets out to radically change the mood of the society in which she grew up. Priya personalizes the feelings and experiences of the approximately 93 women who are raped daily in India.

The comic is based on the idea of bringing together the stereotype of classical Hindu narrative with the graphics of new technologies. Priya is an ordinary, dark skinned woman, who, after being sexually assaulted by her countrymen and with Goddess Parvati’s help, dares to face her family and a society that in most cases not only does not defend the victims but puts the blame on them. The choice of Parvati for this cartoon is no coincidence, since it is the Hindu Goddess that relates to humans, which makes her more available.

Created by Devineni and Vikas Menon, the comic presents a narrative that combats gender and sexual violence so that women who have been victims of it can envision a participatory and possible life horizon within their background, using a discourse through which these women and their real stories, can be easily portrayed. In fact, some parts of the cartoon match real events lived by women victims through the use of audios files, videos, animations, and even drawings made by disadvantaged children in Mumbai.

Fortunately, nowadays there already exists a climate of intolerance towards this kind of injustice, especially among the younger segments of Indian society. Its creators plan for the comic to evolve and to be distributed in schools so as to foster a change in mentality. According Devineni, in India there is already sufficient legislation to combat all types of explicit violence against women, but no legislation will be enough as long as victims are not openly supported so that they need not fear the consequences that public denunciation of their abuse may bring.

Sources: yorokobu.es / priyashakti.com/comic/