What do you DO?

“Good Intentions are useless in the absence of common sense.” Jami, Baharistan
From “India Unbound” by Gurcharan Das

--

Emails, MOUs, funders, and friends ask me what I am going to during my 9 months here. Right now I don’t know and am in the process of trying to understand that process that might let me understand what needs doing and where I fit into that – so may processes and lots of trying. In these beginning days there are no deliverables, no tactics grounded in any methodology, thoughts of sustainability and capacity building are in the distance. Right now I sit with people, gain their confidence, make jokes, laugh, smile a lot and hack my way through some Hindi, trying to make an effort and willing to be the brunt of a joke.

In the mornings we sit, take tea, and read the newspaper in search of coverage on the mistreatment of sewage workers. Each day passes slowly. A proposal is revised, a receipt stamped and submitted for reimbursement, lunch, more tea, training manuals stapled. Western thoughts of output and efficiency sit on one shoulder, but the wiser voice prevails, taking my time in the beginning, in no rush to push things along, trying to understand the dynamics of the office, who does what, who really does what, and each person’s strengths and weaknesses. Showing pictures of my family and friends, the staff agree that I was fat -- we are communicating and that’s good. I ask about their children, pepper some serious work questions, but mostly I am just trying to land delicately like the ballerino I am at heart. Of course I wonder about what I am going to do, know that the work plan is not going to write itself, and that I came here because I want to contribute in a meaningful way, but right now I can only learn what’s in front of me. So, I learn about the organization and I learn about sewage workers.

It is by far the most disgusting work I can imagine (I am not calling the people who do this work disgusting -- to the contrary, I have an immense respect for the work they do each day and the epic personal constitution it must take). I contemplate the actual details of the work, of what it must require to go from sitting on the edge of a manhole to the action of propelling yourself into it. These men dive, depending on where the stop up or blockage is, into the network of pipes that drain pit latrines and industrial waste.

They are real life snakes and plungers. Up to their waste and higher, wearing nothing or just their underpants (no protective gear), a string tied around their waste, they wade in the vilest sludge of weeks worth of fermented human feces and industrial waste and use any kind of homemade implement to clear the pipe. Each year dozens of men die this way when they suffocate in a pipe that has no oxygen or inhale a toxic gas trapped below the street. From a recent report, quoting Justice Ramesh A Mehta (Retd.), “In Gujarat within a short span of 56 days there were 16 deaths of manhole workers in the manholes.”

There are many issues in play: caste, the law and the gap between its words and its enforcement, money, corporations… I have an idea of this scenario in a bigger setting, the common themes of the abusing the poor and taking advantage of the most at risk, but I don’t know the details of this situation. Each day I learn a lot, trying to understand the problem first, then the details of this organization, and then my place within it over the upcoming months.