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Global Learning Festival 2012 - Community Life Competence
A perspective from Aniruddhan Vasudevan
We started the day with the appreciation of good music. Alli Sudar, a visually challenged artist, played a short melody on his flute, thus setting the right mood for what was to follow: reflection on the previous day’s SALT visit.
Jean-Louis welcomed us all to make a giant human circle and to share impressions about the day before. The responses were varied: while Joel felt that he was impacted by the powerful people he met, Vignesh was most impressed with how highly motivated the communities were. A very striking example of how successful the visits were came from Prabakar. Though he had known most of the communities that the teams visited, he was struck by how a woman from the community shared a traumatic experience with the group, something he had not been privy to until then. It showed him how the group’s attentiveness and the empathetic listening made that sharing possible.
What does “Success” mean to us?
The SALT visit made Rebecca think about our notions of success. After having people whose sense of pride came from, say, managing to move a liquor store away from the school neighbourhood, and in educating their children, Rebecca shared that she wondered if we needed to rethink our ideas about success. As someone who works with businesses, she said, she was used to the idea of success defined largely by materiality. But a visit such as this, and the exposure to people who live differently and have very different priorities, gave her a chance to reassess her relationship to the world around her. She urged everyone to ask ourselves the question: “What does success mean to me?”
What was common to the SALT visit experiences?
Many others shared their impressions from the visits to Thiruvannamalai and Nagapattinam districts yesterday. What was common to all these sharings was the appreciation of what the communities were able to achieve once they decided to work together. Unity and a focus on their strengths appeared to be the key factors.
Joel, Rebecca and Boris are working on a new model of extending the CLCP approach to business communities as well. They see business establishments – big and small – as adding to the strength of the triad we are familiar with: the Constellation, NGOs, Communities. In their very creative pictographic representation of their idea, these four entities were like the star fish on the sea. When integrated together with the CLCP approach, they can together tackle issues, nurture dreams and rise and grow and become actual stars on the sky! Kokila was fascinated by this imagery and shared with me that there was nothing more powerful than a picture that speaks clearly!
Kokila and I were very moved by Helena’s project on Memory Book. The idea of helping someone create a memory book, so that they could leave behind something of their own creation after they pass on, was at once powerful and moving. Not only does it leave a tangible record of someone’s love for their family and friends, it also gives them a chance to heal and unburden.
Heroes Project’s idea of having public personalities support and endorse projects, Saksham project’s method of integrating learnings from their HIV/AIDS intervention projects with both women in sex work as well as gay and bisexual men, and Truckers……(TCI) Services International’s challenging work providing HIV/AIDS and other STI services to truckers on Indian roads were all utterly fascinating.
Beyond’s work in Singapore helps create spaces for young people from lower economic backgrounds to re-energize themselves to go to school, hone their talents in music, dance, writing, or sports, and gives them a sense of community and care. Jason, who is also from Singapore, presented his work with ‘Vertical Kalimpong,’ that recognizes how our villages (Kalimpong) have shrunk drastically and have arranged themselves vertically in skyscrapers and in apartments where we often don’t see our neighbours, let alone talk to them. Jason helps in drawing out volunteers and helps them design their work in creating a community out of this asphalt jungle! In short, as he says, he helps volunteers volunteer!
Even before the first session, the groups were busy setting up their stalls in the Marketplace. Despite the hectic, though wonderful, travel the previous day, everyone was up early, excited and chattering away ideas as we ate some sumptuous breakfast: not just coffee, bread and cereal, but also idli, dosa, vada, sambar, chutney! Thus nourished everyone set out to furnish the stalls with posters, booklets, banners and other items.
I didn’t have a stall, but I wore two caps today: documenter and translator. Just when I was wondering how I should go about recording the interesting things going on at the Marketplace, Kokila, a member of Vadamalar Federation for Sex Workers, and a person I admire most, took me by the hand to translate everything to Tamil for her. So it is through her eyes that I got to see the Marketplace.
We then had an intense session where people from yesterday’s SALT visit teams shared their insights about the process, and mentioned something that would be a take-home lesson. The teams had listed out their key learnings on chart sheets, which were displayed for everyone’s benefit. Presentations followed.
Some of the positive experiences about the SALT visits that the participants highlighted were:
The warm welcome they received in the villages
The eagerness of the community members to share their stories
Women from the communities were extremely articulate and strong
The communities were able to turn their hardships into a positive, uniting factor
The experience impressed upon the participants that success is not all about money. It is an inner state of being.
The communities could achieve a lot in united, non-violent ways.
Feedback:
I need to point out that one recurrent feedback from participants was that they could have prepared better before the visits by getting to know more about the communities they were about to visit, the organization whose work would they’d hear about, etc. I see this as a valuable pointer for future SALT visits.
One particular point highlighted by many non-Indian and non-Anglophone participants was that some degree of cultural education before a SALT visit would help.
A Good Practice Appreciated by All:
Menike Samarakoon and team from Plan Sri Lanka have done excellent work on malnutrition in children in Kandy, Sri Lanka. They found that the communities had a different set of reasons to offer for malnutrition in children from those offered by nutrition experts. Some of the reasons were: parents do not spend enough time with children, they spend more time watching TV, alcoholic and abusive fathers, children being fed fast food, father spending money on alcohol and smoking.
Based on these reflections, which showed that there were some psycho-social causes for malnutrition in children, the communities designed a simple yet effective solution called the Happiness Calendar. Using this, family members could mark their predominant emotion in a day for everyone to see. They could also mark their perception of the other family members’ moods. This suddenly gave an externalized representation of how each one was feeling and as perceived to be feeling.
This impacted fathers in particular. Many of them, seeing that their alcoholism was having a strong negative impact of the moods of the children and hence their eating habits, decided to change the pattern. The entire community has not adopted this Happiness Calendar process, and there appears to be an improvement in how and what children eat.
A powerful story reflecting SALT:
I am compelled to share what Susan Koshy shared. While her team was on its way to Nagapattinam in central, coastal Tamil Nadu, they stopped on the way for lunch. At the place where they had halted, Susan met two groups of pilgrims on their way back from the famous temple at Sabarimala in the hills of the neighbouring state, Kerala. She struck up a conversation with them about their pilgrimage, rituals and the strict fasts they observe. Soon after, Jean Louis needed her translation skills in talking to another group of pilgrims. To one of his many questions to the group of men, Susan gave the answer herself, though she knew she was meant to convey it to them, receive their reply and translate it back to Jean Louis. When Jean refused to accept her answer and asked her again to pose the question to the pilgrims, she asked what the point was if it was going to be the same answer as the one she gave! And Jean Louis replied that it was not about questions and answers, but about making human connections. In the way he posed the question, in the eagerness he showed to know about them, he was making a connection with them, which was not about what was being said. Susan shared that this was the most intense learning experience she had had in a while.
Cultural Evening at the Global Learning Festival
The cultural evening started around 7.30 pm and went on till midnight, with just half an hour’s break in the middle for dinner. It was incredible to see not only the range of talents that was on display but also the depth and professionalism with which many people approached them. It truly felt like being present at a professional song-and-dance event.
The intense afternoon session began with singing! Padma from Samraksha, Karnataka, sang a powerful song in Kannada language and had us all awake and enthralled. The song was in the form of a conversation with the Rain God, wherein for every blessing that people asked of him, he found some fault with how humans lived as an excuse not to bless them. But, every time, people promised him that they would bring about change. Though the song was, primarily, about the ills of the caste system, it was in essence about all man-made problems.
M. L. Prabakar then led us all in singing the CLCP song that he and Anandakumar, both from SIAAP, had written and composed. As a native speaker of Tamil, I assure you that it is a beautiful song that speaks about the greatness of CLCP and SALT approaches. Much will be lost in translation, but this is what the song says:
This is the garden where appreciation blooms forth…
It is appreciation that will lift people’s spirits. May SALT spread far and wide!
The way I see it, the cultural evening was not just for respite and fun. Once we had chosen to relate to each other as human beings and not as our work designations, we were free to show the other facets of our personalities, too: as dancers, singers, actors, appreciative audience, etc. We needn’t get straitjacketed into a narrow identity.
What I simply cannot capture here is the energy that was in the room last evening. Everyone cheered the performers on. Appreciation was unrestrained and generous. And the performers, too, gave their all. It felt like what mattered to everyone was to make the fullest use of the time we have together here in Mahabalipuram, and connect with each other at as many levels as possible. While in the sessions we connected through conversations, here at the cultural event, we were speaking to each other through our voices, our bodies, our talents, our quirks, and more than anything else, our trust. For it takes great vulnerability to put oneself out there in front of new people to sing, dance, or act.
Mahesh Iyer and team did an exemplary job of planning the evening, and he was also a gracious emcee, clad in this traditional dhoti and kurta. As for the presentations themselves, there was a delectable array: Indian traditional and folk dances, group songs, Bollywood dances, improvised singing, songs from grassroots movements, fun quiz, traditional drumming, flamenco, African dances, Nepali songs, mimicry, dance to the beautiful words of the Bengali poet and Nobel Laureate – Tagore, poetry recitation, short play, and many, many more! It was truly incredible.
There was a lot of stage invasion by enthusiastic participants, including the author of this report, who joined in and danced either right on stage with the artist or on the floor in front of the dais. We were all so full of energy that we needed to continue dancing even after the evening was officially over.
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