India, a Bittersweet Memory

In summer 2013, I traveled to southwest India. With a mix of doe-eyed fascination and utter confusion, I soaked up all that was new and foreign to me.

Pockets of joy gladdened my tourist’s heart: monkeys playing in a muddy puddle here; an impromptu encounter with a goat at the supermarket there; cows crossing my path every day and standing close; the kind woman striking up a conversation about anything and everything, including spirituality and nature worship and how everyone in India is a believer in some way; the tuk-tuk drivers driving at full speed – sometimes ignoring traffic law.

What couldn’t be ignored was the stark reminders of a harsh reality: litter on every street corner and cows eating cardboard and plastic; emaciated stray dogs; instances of toxic masculinity; the ever-present caste system.

The air pollution left me with burning eyes. The buses filled to the brim, the loud and startling horns, the countless sharp bends on the road exacerbating my motion sickness, too added to my feeling terribly overwhelmed. A poor-me attitude was out of the question though: I came here to do volunteer work and for it to take me out of myself, after all.

At a center for children and teens with special educational needs, I assisted teachers. Some kids had Down syndrome, others had autism, yet others had hearing and speech impairments.

I spent time at a home for the elderly, where most of the residents were not old. They were lonely and bored, I was told, and needed company. We played cards, carrom, memory games, drew, made bracelets – their honest smiles a balm for the soul.

I played with little ones at a day-care center which consisted of one modest classroom, showing and naming animal drawings, throwing and catching the ball. We’d make do with what was available and I found moving beauty in the way the children would not mind the simplicity of the off-the-cuff activities; in fact, as children have a way of doing, they’d derive unbridled amusement from them.

Yet, for the most part, my role as a humanitarian aid worker was to act as a big sister at a girls’ orphanage, helping the girls revise English and do their homework. “Come tomorrow, please, didi,” the girls would say, whenever my fellow volunteers and I would leave. Didi is what the girls called us upon our arrival on day one. It means big sister. Their arms spread wide, they ran to the door to hug us, as though we were long lost relatives.

Their hunger for affection was sweet and heartbreaking. And here too I was inspired to follow their example, to take their precocious wisdom home: I remember how once they were all eating in a crammed room when we came in, sitting on the floor, bursting with gratitude for the meal and their friends.

Still, in all these places, I felt like we weren’t supposed to be here. It felt wrong somehow. I regarded myself as both useless and selfish – the opposite of what I intended to be. I got help, but I don’t think I gave any. There will be other well-intentioned volunteers, I realized then. Other didis will pass through the girls’ lives. There will be other parentheses of sorts punctuated by adieux.

The girls at the orphanage had lived through horrors. I heard some had been raped, others had suffered neglect, yet others had parents who got killed or put in prison. The girls under six were to be put up for adoption, while the girls aged 14 and older were to be transferred from Madikeri to Mysore. All of them had experienced the pain of abandonment. At the end of the trip, I couldn’t help but wonder, Am I an abandoner, too? Did I do more harm than good?

Before saying goodbye to the girls, I gave one of them my hippo keyring with cow spots and a red heart on its belly. I explained this present was for all the girls, but it got lost in translation. My spontaneous gesture was read as favoritism. Feelings were hurt. Good thing the girls were not ones to hold grudges though. They named the hippo after me, and gave me souvenirs I still have to this day along with photographs and my memories recorded in a journal – memories tinged with ambivalent feelings.

I watched Manjula watching us leave, a queasy feeling in my stomach. She was one of the girls I got along with particularly well, though I was fond of all of them. I felt profound sadness. Yet I had a sense of certainty: This was not the end of the journey. I could not, in good conscience, resume my life as if nothing had happened.

More Learning, More Confusion

A year later, I did an unpaid internship at Defence for Children International where I contributed to creating an educational tool on the responsibility of the business sector towards children’s rights. I watched videos and read reports by Human Rights Watch, Save the Children, Maplecroft, the Bank Information Center, UNICEF. I attended information sessions and a conference on children’s rights & business principles. I contacted Fairtrade Deutschland and UNICEF Geneva, and interviewed staff members from achACT, Oxfam Solidarité, and Fairtrade Belgium.

Many questions begged answers: If local companies breach human rights, who should we hold accountable: the home state or the parent company? What’s the most adequate solution: self-regulation or international instruments? As consumers, which products should we turn to? How can we ensure wages cover workers’ and their families’ basic needs? …

This experience was formative to say the least. I knew low labor costs were big firms’ cruel way of meeting consumers’ demand, of increasing manufacturing capacity while making profits. I knew child labor affects mostly regions where the economy is booming but where poverty remains endemic, or countries where work is valued above education. Yet I knew very little about Corporate Social Responsibility. I didn’t know much about the shortcomings of codes of conduct, and many concepts and processes, such as Human Rights Impact Assessments, were alien to me.

I learned more about the garment factory collapse in Dhaka, Bangladesh; I learned about teens jeopardizing their health on noxious tobacco fields in the U.S. I learned that slavery still plagues the world to a considerable extent. According to the International Labour Organization, over 40 million individuals worldwide are trapped in slavery today, a quarter of whom are children.

That seemingly adequate solutions can turn out to be damaging was another eye-opener. The indication “made in” is not necessarily a guarantee of transparency, and a boycott of big brands and an exclusively European consumption don’t always constitute effective solutions:

• The so-called place of origin may refer to the European country where the last production stage took place before import or to the country where the biggest part of the value added was made. Also, in Europe, for example, compliance with work conditions isn’t guaranteed either.
• If a multinational corporation loses all its clients, it produces no more goods and those who had a job and provided for their families end up in even greater destitution. A boycott would be legitimate only if the employees demanded it through a campaign, for instance. Many want to improve their working conditions, not lose their job.

What are effective solutions then, according to the research I conducted?

• Making sure parents have a decent salary so that children aren’t pushed to work for their own and their family’s subsistence but rather have the opportunity to study
• Giving prominence to education and the development of capabilities, and facilitating access to employment and social welfare
• Getting to the root of the problem, investigating the underlying causes of child labor
• Engaging in dialogues, listening to workers’, managers’, and consumers’ perspectives; reinforcing controls, getting involved in campaigns, working on the field as well as at a distance
• Working towards greater unity between the local and intercommunity levels
• Transferring labor unions’ requests, joining mailing lists; sharing information and conclusions of research and studies, while pointing to their non-exhaustiveness
• Supporting ethical and sustainable fashion (cf. e.g. Clean Clothes Campaign), buying secondhand clothing and giving our clothes a second lease of life; buying items with the “fair trade” certification, turning to ethical brands, consulting consumer education resources

The pieces of information I collected, both numerous and insufficient, only highlighted the seemingly insurmountable barriers to the integration of human rights into concrete policies and business practices as well as the complexity of the issue of child labor. So much was left to uncover.

The common denominator between my brush with humanitarian work in India and the internship was the tiny glimpse they offered into different faces of stolen childhood and the ways privileged groups cause harm, knowingly or not.

Thoughts from a Community Development Worker

A year into the coronavirus pandemic, India is struggling to contain the worst COVID surge in the world. Families are pleading for oxygen, medication, and other supplies outside overcrowded hospitals and intensive care units, and healthcare and sanitation workers feel overwhelmed.

The question of what privileged groups can do for the most vulnerable populations – in general, not just in this situation– has become all the more pressing.

So, I turned to Francis Laleman who, together with his wife Michaela Broeckx, leads Education & Development Beyond Borders, the fundraising community of Jeevan Deep, a network devoted to education in Bodhgaya, India. He started running the Anand/Jeevan Deep schools and doing community development work in Bodhgaya in 1978. Michaela and Francis tend to spend half of the year in Bodhgaya and the other half in Belgium or on the road. Supporting a philanthropic organization from within, Francis strikes me as someone who has gained valuable insights into global humanitarianism but who still makes sustained efforts to keep abreast of ways he can effectively contribute to changing long-term outcomes for the better.

Francis and I met in June 2019 in Antwerp at a workshop he was hosting: “Reimagine Work”. His sumptuous fin-de-siècle house is, it dawned on me later, not unlike Francis himself: hospitable, warm, peaceful. “I’ll have to pick his brain one day,” I thought then – about what? I wasn’t sure yet – because in addition to being welcoming, good-hearted, and a pacifist, Francis is a creative, out-of-the-box thinker whose perspective on all kinds of subjects is worth hearing.

SO: You describe the education the Anand/Jeevan Deep network offers as non-formal, non-conformist, and non-conventional. In what ways does it differ from more traditional types of education?

FL: The communities I work with have very little in common with the India of rules and regulations, written and understood, of India as a state of states. They live in the fields, far away from the nearest road. You’d drive by and not know they exist. And this is exactly what happens. Nobody knows. We don’t. And the average Indian citizen doesn’t either.

Until quite recently, these communities were supposed to labor on the fields of a landowner of some sort. In return, they would get the right to live on a stretch of ground, far out in the fields, and they would get paid – often not more than one handful of rice for one day of work by one individual.

This means that these communities got trapped in an economy with zero purchasing power.

Inspired by Vinoba Bave’s Bhoodan, we first focused on persuading some of the wealthy landowners to voluntarily give a percentage of their land to landless people. In other places, we gathered funds to buy a small plot of land – permitting the communities to live on their own ground and grow vegetables, mostly lentils, of their own.

But living in a money-less economy won’t bring you far. So most of the male population of the villages travels off, walking sometimes thousands of kilometers, to find employment in the cities. Some become low-paid domestic servants, others find work in factories, many end up begging. All hoping to bring back their earnings to the village once or twice a year.

All this leaves the villages devoid of males. You will find just the girls and the women and their children, and the odd few very old men.

If you want something to move here, we simply have to bet on education. With the basic education we provide, the children get to a certain level of knowledge and skills (they can read, write, count) that might get them better employment, or at least, that will keep them from being fooled by traders and employers doing the sums for them.

In the meantime, the women get a better life too. By providing them with vocational workshops (sewing, healthcare, sanitary issues, …), we bring them together in groups, and this, in its turn, brings the communities together.

As you can see, in a world such as this, conventional education is simply not an option. We have not spent one rupee on building schools. What we do is education. Bringing the children together under a tree and offering them counting games and alphabet rhymes. We work a lot with sociodramatic play, forum theatre, that kind of stuff. There is always a whole lot of laughter and fun. And all the women, the sisters and mothers and grandmothers, come to watch – and this makes them learn, too.

We depend a lot on the quality of our “faculty”. We have a strong and diverse team of very good teachers and educators.

SO: Why prioritize education while so many cause areas need our care and attention?

FL: In the way we see it and do things, care and attention and education are all the same thing. Everything is driven by loving kindness. You must know that northern India is a tough and rough world. So kindness is the first objective.

Sometimes we need to convince parents to let their children join. Sometimes, parents are afraid. And rightly so: social activists and educators have been killed in the neighbourhood, more than once. This shows that education is not just what we think should be done. Others see this too. And for them, education is a threat. This is not new. Even the great educationalist Paolo Freire wrote of this:  la educación es una práctica de liberación, a educação é uma prática de libertação.

So when people are afraid, we higher the stakes. And we provide extra vitamins and extra medical care. And we help them get pumps and dig for water.

Each pump brings children to our “schools” – and each hour spent playing together there provides a hundred smiles. And each smile provides happiness. And curiosity. And keenness to learn more. Readiness to give it a go and explore what the world is all about.

 SO: How do you imagine this passion project evolve?

FL: Imagining is fine but it doesn’t make the world go round. When the pandemic struck, we saw disaster upon disaster. First the migrant workers got stuck. Go home and work online, the government said. That’s easy. But it caused a major humanitarian disaster, with millions of migrants roaming the otherwise empty cities and roads, trying to find ways to get home without any money at all.

And then came the second wave. The situation is apocalyptic – and nothing like what the news channels report. Our communities are invisible. They live without us knowing. They die without us knowing.

This is no time for imagining. It is time for imagination. Ad hoc, real-time, short-term imagination. There is a word for this is in India: Jugaad.

 SO: How can we bridge the gap between two very different cultures? For example, I remember teachers would hit crying or unruly kids. To me, those were acts of violence I couldn’t condone. However, I understood that it was cultural and didn’t think I was entitled to protest against them. Suggestions relating to school material and initiatives such as buying coloring books were welcome, but any suggestions about child discipline felt out of line. So how can we reconcile our values with our respect for a culture that might not share these values?

FL: This is a difficult issue. I think it is easier to not step into an existing structure. Hitting children is the status-quo in India. I do not think this is a cultural issue though. It is a social one. It is easier for people to hit a dog than to hit a horse.

The existing school system in India is mainly driven by rote learning, forced upon children by low-paid instructors. For something different, you will need to find a private school – and this is exactly what the better-offs in India do.

What is easier? Changing the culture of a vast, large, old and petrified organization – or creating a start-up with a flashy let-us-do-this-together culture?

Fortunately, in India there is no want of examples. Rabidranath Tagore started his own school at Shantiniketan. And there are the Krishnamurti schools.

My hope is for schools like this, but less flashy. Small. In the fields. In every village.

 SO: How can we help the locals in the long run? Unlike brief encounters, solidly-built connections seem more conducive to a real, lasting impact. Yet one can’t always afford a long stay abroad and, if one is traveling thanks to financial assistance from an organization, one often has a pre-made plan to follow. How can we kind of find a way around that?

FL: This is what brought me to fundraising. In our work, I insist that the educational field work must be done by local people, stakeholders in their own communities.

But fundraising has its own bit of problems. We must drop the charity model, urgently. We should look for small, micro-sized circular economy models, where the villages provide billable services – like plays, art, learning structures.

I am involved with another project, in Rajasthan, where my friend Ayla, driven by the first lockdown, has enrolled women from the Thar desert nomad communities to teach online dance classes to a global audience. As we speak, we are developing classes in body language and presentation skills for European professionals – given by the same women, live-streamed from their desert tents.

This is the kind of model that we should be looking at.

 SO: When preventive measures are no longer an option, in your view, how do we repair damages?

FL: As of now, we are in a damage repair mode. The pandemic has destroyed so much. Some villages are left with barely half of their population. Trust in the authorities is gone, now more than ever.

India is being struck by a wave of ultra-nationalism, communalism, hatred, finger-pointing.

But the loss of trust is mutual: NGOs, like ours, are being frowned upon. It becomes more and more difficult – both administratively and on the field. Even I am getting trolled on social media, being called names, by boys so young that they can barely remember anyone else than the current prime minister, and yet take liberties at calling me a foreign meddler with zero knowledge of India.

 SO: Can philanthropy and the government be complementary rather than opposing? Is it helpful to think of humanitarian work as moral duty rather than charity?

FL: You are suggesting utopia here. But I am a dreamer. And a believer. This must be possible, of course.

In theory it can be. In practice we will see.

 SO: How much of your humanitarian work involves seeking funding opportunities and contacting stakeholders to ask for subsidies or suggest collaborations? What are some tasks that might be less appealing to young people dreaming of taking up community development work but that you deem necessary for their ideas to come into being?

FL: When I was young, I was the guy on the field and happy to be so. But let us not mistake humanitarian work with romanticism. From the moment one starts liking the image of oneself in the slums, or in the paddy fields, surrounded by smiling people and feeling so very very good about oneself – one should stop.

Even so, the moment one starts dreaming of the future and the changes one will have contributed to, one should stop.

This is not about the actor. This is not about the result. This is about the work.

And most of the work is invisible.

Here is a quote attributed to Rabindranath Tagore:

I slept and dreamt that life was joy.

I awoke and saw that life was service.

I acted and behold, service was joy.

 SO: What gives you hope? What makes you believe what you do is worthwhile?

FL: That is what makes me believe it is worthwhile:

a smile of joy and curiosity … on just one face.

(As a complement to this answer, Francis sent me a link to a story you can read here.)

Francis Laleman wears many hats. Besides doing community development work, he is a train-the-trainer workshop facilitator and the author of Resourceful Exformation: Some Thoughts on the Development of Resourcefulness in Humans.  Please see some of Francis’s writings on his Medium page and visit his own website.