"I know the biggest crime / is just to throw up your hands / saying 'this has nothing to do with me / I just want to live as comfortably as I can.
You got to look outside your eyes / you got to think outside your brain / you got to walk outside your life / to where the neighborhood changes." (From Willing to Fight, by Ani Difranco)

Sunday, January 24, 2010

Conversations in a Beauty Parlour

The collection of stories I am working on:
http://thinkfeminisms.blogspot.com/

Glimpses from India, a Mini-Report on CLP Winter Programming

Wow.

The Child Leader Project 2009-2010 Winter Program was an incredible success. I type this with confidence and a giddy grin. By “success” I mean that CLP youth leaders were excited, talkative, thoughtful, challenging and engaging as teachers and students. Programs embodied CLP values by the ways in which they were dialogical (or open in the ways in which people spoke more freely from their experience, without a need to prove, convince, or defend one’s ideas, feelings or experiences) as well as experiential, requiring students to act out or experience the topics and ideas discussed in the CLP classroom. CLP Winter Program was also a success in the ways it deepened our roots in India and making a home, while also “branching out” in a serendipitous network with similar-minded organizations in and around our home, Pondicherry. Upon my return from India and my first day back at the “day job” in California, colleagues said I looked even more excited and refreshed—it’s all because of this month-long experience.

CLP Programs

CLP hosted programs with two of our different partners this winter, Vidiyal Matriculation Higher Secondary School (VMHSS) near Trichy in central Tamil Nadu as well as Anbhagam International Education and Development Center (Anbhagam) in the capital city of Chennai, Tamil Nadu. These two organizations serve very different populations of youth, requiring the organizations and CLP to be creative in developing programming that would meet their specific needs.

Vidiyal is CLP’s first partner, making this Winter Program their fourth CLP experience and completing their second year of programming! Over 46 CLP students are present at Vidiyal ranging from 8th to 12th standard students. Students who are currently in 10th and 12th standard (similar to the USA “grade” system) are currently focused on preparing for their government-mandated testing and were only able to participate in a closing ceremony. The remaining students (8th, 9th and 11th) were participants for the three-day program.



This winter program at Vidiyal was titled “VISION 2020 in 2010” and utilized the writings of former Indian president, APJ Abdul Kalam as a springboard for discussions and expressions of “community development.” CLP students had selected APJ’s Vision 2020 as a possible topic of interest during our 2009 Summer Program, mindful that APJ’s vision was specifically directed at empowering younger generations and empowering the Indian community towards development. Ultimately, however, APJ argues that India is a “highly developed country in an advanced state of decay.” This statement would turn out to be particularly powerful for students at Vidiyal—in a before survey provided at the beginning of the program, all students stated that India was a “developing country.” In a post-survey, all students stated that India was a “developed country” with social issues that could be remedied by its own people.

Following a group reading of an abridged version of APJ’s “Vision 2020” speech, students returned to their homes and dormitories with a list we called “Points of Development.” This list included concerns related to a wide range of topics, including agriculture, education, corruption, peace and security, trade, environmental degradation and the status of women. The goal of the assignment was to engage the idea of “development” in our own lives— for example, what does “development” look like in our village or in our schools? Students returned the next day with short stories and comments about different points and we found topics and stories that overlapped.

The places of overlap became our “problems” in the CLP version of Augusto Boal’s “theatre of the oppressed.” In this drama, we used stories and situations from our own lives (i.e. concerns about dowry or women’s rights post-marriage, police corruption and child abuse in schools) to act out new solutions. Students performed as actors in the play and would repeat the play, creating new solutions to the problem with each new performance. Ultimately, students created their own “situations” and performed these for 8th standard students at the end of the leadership program.

The experience of performing and improvising new roles and responses was an incredibly new experience for students. One girl, Suhasini performed in the role of the young groom’s father and expressed her total joy at the power she felt in her role. The young man that played the future bride said he felt “negative” describing that he had “never had to be a girl before.” In the performance on police corruption, one student with the ambition of becoming a police officer stood and described how he thinks police could behave differently in the future as students questioned him about the actors in the play. Student performances included issues from caste discrimination in families and friendships to child abuse and public health awareness.

Our feedback from this program reveals the power of this sort of community experience. One 8th standard student describes her experience: “First of all I want to thank Samantha Akka (sister) and Amala Akka. Because I am not so happy in my home or in my class. But I am so happy to attend the CLP and clean the community garden. For this class I hope of having some talent. I attend CLP I have some confidence. I like the games then homework. I like drama that we are acting. I am so fun, happy and I have no words to thank you.” When it was announced we would like to create a “CLP Council” of individuals at the school to help make some guiding decisions about the work we would do together in the future, all the students submitted a statement of interest. We are so happy for the community that we are all building together at Vidiyal.

Our second, main program was with Anbhagam ICEDC. Anbhagam serves the street and slum communities in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. Students from these communities are provided daily tuition and program support from Anbhagam’s three staff members. Anbhagam and CLP come together to provide extra programs, trainings and experiences that inspire and support students in their lives (for the present and the future). This program was focused on the topic of making changes in our lives as it relates to education. We discussed the changes that made a difference in our past and how those changes will also happen in our future. Higher education was described as one of many tools for making a difference in our future.

To take the idea of higher education and make it a “reality,” John Bosco (Director of Anbhagam) and staff collaborated with CLP to take students to a local college, Loyola College, in Chennai. Bosco is an alumni of Loyola College and connected with his previous colleagues and professors to create a memorable experience for the students.


Twenty-six Anbhagam students from the Little Mount community came to Loyola College for an exploration of Visual Communications and college student life. They had tutorials of filming and lighting, photo shop and graphics as well as a full tour of the campus with a lunch in the student canteen. To top it off, Anbhagam and CLP created bright yellow t-shirts for each student that said “Child is not a bucket—child is a fire.” Students were stopped by professors and staff and questioned about the meaning of the t-shirt. Students replied that it meant “we have our own dreams!” No participating student had ever been to a college campus before, nor had any of them had family that went to college. This was an incredible first experience for this particular youth community.

The following day, Anbhagam students participated in a short debrief about the program from the previous day, as well as led in a guided meditation by a special guest visitor (Vijay Mohan) on visioning their futures and the changes they want to make in their own lives.

(I'm also in the process of building Anbhagam a website: www.anbhagam.blogspot.com!)

Exciting Opportunities for the Future
First of all, congratulations to our five matriculating students from Vidiyal. We look forward to giving them college scholarships this summer (four featured below)!




CLP has incredible opportunities for the summer. We are now connected with Baby Sarah’s Home, an orphanage for orphaned and mentally and physically differently-abled children and youth. Baby Sarah’s has over 108 children in its home and is led by a young and enthusiastic 27-year-old man named Karthik. Karthik and I met during an International Conference on Autism that we both attended at Pondicherry University in December 2009.

We are also in collaboration with an organization, CHILD (Child Helpage in Long Duration) located in Pondicherry. This organization provides tuition classes, vocational training and women’s Self-Help Groups for a village community in-between Pondicherry and Auroville. The leaders of CHILD are eager to create programs with social change/social justice focus for the children in their area in the summer.

While both of these new possibilities root us even more firmly in Pondicherry, we would like to see collaboration and sharing across Tamil Nadu and Chennai. One of our goals for summer is a “CLP Convergence” of sorts in which all of our partners will have an opportunity to meet, dialogue and collaborate. We would also like to bring our students from across Tamil Nadu to do a similar activity, making this convergence and conference an annual community-event that CLP sponsors. Many of our partners have described that collaborative or dialogue-based meetings are less common as there are many issues related to sharing practices or staff across organizations (i.e. people are very afraid to lose funding or staff of they share too much information about their work). Perhaps CLP and CLP partners can create a new paradigm of community-based organizations in the areas we all work.

Overall, this winter was an incredible opportunity for collaboration and deepening of our relationships with our partners, new and old. A more extensive report of our activities will be available from our website in the next couple of weeks. This will more clearly outline our work, as well as include the feedback from our students.

More importantly, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank our staff and partners in India, our Board of Directors and our donors and supporters in the USA. CLP is not possible without an incredible community of people, seen and unseen, that have given their financial, spiritual and emotional resources to see this organization take off. From the deepest place in my heart, I can not express the gratitude I have for the support those around us have given to see this vision continue.

And with that, happy new year! We look forward to “visioning” our future with you!

Samantha Wilson's Coordinating Notes

This page is a continuous blog by Samantha Wilson that will serve as a space for updating the process of the Child Leader Project and the experience with international community organizing-- it'll be a space for notes, ideas, ramblings, videos and photos of the life-long process of organizing.

To comment, email samantha@childleaderproject.org