chartandwaters

*I don't have time to review this to make sure it makes sense, so I hope it does! Hi!*

Hello, I am back and going into the wilderness again to do a one-month project organizing documents for a tribal welfare NGO. (Tribes are also called "Adivasis", the name of their caste, meaning I think "indigenous/original people".) It's not really the wilderness; I have a nice little bed in an empty dormroom-style cottage (dormroom style b/c it's filled with a lot of other empty dorm beds); during the day it's warm, but at night it gets cold and I sleep in gloves, a wool hat and my fall jacket (under a woolen blanket), and this combination for some reason makes the bed one of the absolute coziest by morning. I find this fact very striking and would like to see a study someone has done on when bedding is cozy and why. Also there's a cafeteria that serves all our meals and morning and afternoon tea and, on the first night, the shy, hard-working cook, knowing no English, simply tilted toward me a dish full of boiled, unseasoned green beans and carrots. A German man staying at the camp explained that they, rather than ask, they simply boil spiceless vegetables on the first night for every foreign visitor. If the foreign visitor eats the chiles that night, the cook stops making the vegetables, but I did not eat the chiles. (The German man couldn't have known how happy the sight of these tasteless vegetables would make me, but they are emblematic of the camp's exceptional hospitality toward foreign guests.)

I was there because...the short story is that Gandhi and Bhaskar know a man named William Stanley who runs an NGO called "WIDA", which is celebrating its 25th Anniversary and needs some help summarizing its work over the last 25 years. I guess Bhaskar had recommended me to Stanley (since I was often in Bhaskar' office helping them write proposals for grants) and Stanley (that's his first name, Indians put last name first) was on the trip to the tribal villages to record music. On the trip I asked if I could do a project with some tribal kids under his auspices and he invited me to come see the work they are doing near the little town of Semiliguda in the Koraput District of India. But I thought he was inviting me b/c I proposed to do a projct with kids there...only later did I realize his hope was for the documentation project. He would actually let me do the other project, but he'd especially like me to do the documentation project! Which, in fact, I'd be very happy to do instead; I had a lot of reservations about my own proposal and submitted only at a friend's urging. He and his wife are very interesting and there is a lot more to say about them, but I guess the most interesting obvious thing would be that they serve some of the most remote tribal villages. We stayed overnight in one yesterday and it was very, um, interesting. These tribes are so poor, so cut-off; it was a forty-five minute 4-wheel-drive jeep-ride through very, very rocky terrain to get there, at one point for ten minutes between two thick hedges of lantana crowding in and insistently scratching at our sides; no buses will or can go, no electricity, but there is (unclean) water from a good stream.

No forests or foliage to be had, you simply go to the bathroom on the mud floor behind the house... the whole place surrounded by terraced fields of rice paddy, pulses, some maize supposedly though I didn't see any, and vegetables. Despite the apparent bounty, the crops are small, and meals are an enormous plate of rice with a dash of veggis. This particular tribe, Semiliguda tribe...the women wear three golden nose rings, one in the center pointed, often with a ruby in the middle, and one on each side of the nose, all three linking...it looks strange at first and then as your eyes adjust it becomes very beautiful. They are very poor...the gold is saved up for for a long time, then passed from generation to generation. Their dress is fabric wrapped around the body and knotted on one shoulder, and as everywhere else the adults and children alike are wearing the most exquisite fabrics, shining silk gold-yellow, royal blue, with old, sometimes scratched or dirty bangles in, nevertheless, a somehow always appropriate color, to sift their rice, grind their millet, carry their water, snap beans out of pods. Many of the tribal people have no income but sustain themselves with farming on small plots of land. Some may have income from selling vegetables, or they may have some land to rent out; or they make what I think are palm-leaved brooms for some small Rupees. Many of these villages are in such a remote place that teachers don't want to stay there, so the teachers get paid by the government to teach there then simply stay home and do nothing. Apparently this is very common and has been since the NGO's inception.

But in this village there is one teacher who stays there, a man who is from the village itself; he met us at a government office in the closest town and acted as our guide and translator (he spoke Orea, the language of Orissa, and Kubi, the tribe's language, but not English, so if I wanted to know something from the tribe I spoke to one of the two NGO staff, who then spoke to him in Orea, who then spoke to the tribe in Kubi). He is a young man that carries himself with great pride and confidence, as he has gained much power by getting a good job. We arrived at night, the whole place lit, very poorly, by kerosene lamps, and one slightly brighter spot where a megaphone-style loudspeaker was set up and people were dancing, mostly visible as silhouettes. This particular sight in the basically completely dark camp was awesome. All the people stopped and surrounded us, at first with just curiosity, then, when they saw my light face, with something looking much more like fear. They pulled out a plastic chair for me (it's very common for there to be just one or a few plastic chairs available and reserved for guests, while everyone else stands or sits on the floor) and the NGO team began to explain why they were there, and it was very striking how the people's faces all lined up as if they were very used to organizing 70 faces so that every single one could see (no one was in the back, jumping up to get a good view).

With so much fear or shock on their faces, I just looked at them and tried to smile warmly, and eventually they started smiling back. I thought they must be wondering what they would do with this girl who spoke no Kubi or Orea, but it turned out they knew...The NGO's presentation was short, and at the end the girls asked him if I could dance with them. Then two girls got on either side of me, put their arms around my waist and led me to the dance floor (this kind of immediate physical comfort I've seen elsewhere in India but nowhere like with the Adivasis I met), where all the girls lined up in a row and did the simple, very rhythmic line dancing I had learned with the other tribes the week before. It's strange and interesting, the different tribes have different customs, different myths and rituals, and slightly different styles of dress and jewelry, but all have this very similar line dancing where the women link arms behind their back and repeat what ever step the leader does, moving forward, then back, then forward again or around in a circle. It looks like, and maybe is, the very essence of cooperation and community, as if dancing is, for them, especially about celebrating community.

The NGO team was there b/c they want to bring electric power to the village using a "micro hydro power plant", which, once it is built, the village learns how to run itself. They have built two so far for nearby villages, this will be their third; each one costs about $45,000 and serves, I believe, about 800 people.