We're Going to Meet the Governor!

We have been invited to attend a program at the Museum of Tribal Arts and Artifacts on the evening of June 4th where the children will meet the Governor of Odisha, the Honorable Murlidhar Chandrakant Bhandare, and present him with a memorandum on their desire to attend school and to be taught in their own language. The director of the Museum, Dr. A.B. Ota, has requested that they wear traditional garb and bring musical instruments. I can't wait to see this and I'm sure the children will present themselves marvellously. Some are shy but others are superbly poised.

Although this trip is meant to be fun and educational, the children's request to the Governor is an important one. First, the situation in India's primary schools, especially in the remote rural areas, is disturbing. Teachers are often absent or teach only an hour or two. The schools our Pila Panchayat members attend are not, as they say, "regular" so the children are deprived of even the most basic education. In the Odisha hills, most people speak tribal languages rather than, or in addition to, the state language of Odia. Although they usually understand Odia, their customs and experiences are very different from those of people who live on the coast and they are often treated as inferior. This does not contribute to a quality education and in fact school can be very uncomfortable for tribals, a situation that is more fully described in an Orissa Review article.

Take the example of the curriculum materials. Such topics as train travel are standard fare in children's textbooks, but most tribal children have never seen a train. Why would that kind of education feel relevant to them? In fact the retention rate of tribals in school is dismal. Very few finish 10th class and fewer go on to higher education. There is a movement to make curriculum in the tribal-dominated areas more relevant to its students and to encourage tribal teachers, but with the graduation rate among tribals so low, tribal teachers are hard to find.

SPREAD's child rights program has an objective to collect the customs of the Paroja and Gadaba tribes for inclusion in the curriculum and this will be a great step forward - I wish I were going to be here to help and see the results. But in my absence, let's see what the Governor can do.

Pila Panchayat Trip to Bhubaneswar Confirmed

Just a quick post to note that after meeting with SPREAD director, Bidyut Mohanty and Project Coordinator, Pabitra Nayak, the proposed "exposure" trip to visit the beautiful Museum of Tribal Arts and Artifacts in Bhubaneswar, and the UNESCO World Heritage Sun Temple and Radio Namaskar in Konark is a go! I hope the Museum will bolster the children's confidence in the significance of their culture and the Sun Temple will show the importance of preservation. Radio Namaskar will give them a "behind the scenes" look at mass communications and I hope will whet their interest in journalism and broadcasting.


We will take 10 or so of the older children on the overnight train, the Hirakand Express, from Koraput to Bhubaneswar and rent a van to continue to the coast and a day in Konark. Along the way we'll interview the directors of the Tribal Museum and Radio Namaskar to explore occupations in anthropology, broadcasting and journalism. We may even make some recordings in Radio Namaskar's sound studio. We just need to make arrangements for accommodations, check dates with the Tribal Museum and Radio Namaskar and book train tickets.

I am coming full circle, as I started my career organizing and leading all-school trips. I confess that I'm excited to see the kids experience a completely different world from their tribal villages, dip their toes in the Indian Ocean and stretch their imaginations about their futures.

Pila Parab a Success!

Our Pila Parab "children's convention" brought more than 100 Hill Tribes children together for two days and two nights of cultural activities and just plain fun staying up all night, watching videos and dancing. The parab is always built around culture, but this year we made an extra effort to emphasize the importance of cultural identity by setting up a "children's museum" for cultural artifacts and artwork and distributing educational materials about the Catching the Moon project that explain what oral traditions are and illustrate what metadata needs to be collected for each asset.

The focus of the activities are competitions in song, storytelling, drawing and sculpture. For the event this year we asked the children to bring traditional artifacts, and they brought beautiful things: drawings of Chaitra Parab - a village festival going on concurrently - clay sculptures of traditional and modern artifacts, and songs and stories. They were not shy at all about standing up to sing and tell folk tales and the evening when they performed skits was hilarious - although more about modern day trials and tribulations in school than traditional dramas.

The most telling moment of the event for me was when I saw that three out of the four girls who brought sculptures included mobile phones with their vegetables, boats, vessels and other traditional subjects. If there was any doubt that this is a moment of strong cross-currents in the culture, that doubt was expelled for me. I know this Capture the Moon project has a small scope but I hope it has at least a small lasting impact.

The high point of the event for me was the second and last evening when we distributed photos we had taken as the children arrived and registered. I thought there might have been an issue getting 100+ photos done in a short time, but the kids were so cooperative and eager that it was easy. We still didn't get them done until almost 4 PM because small groups of kids arrived all throughout the day. Each time I was ready to move the photos to my computer and then memory stick we'd see a group of them coming down the road or up from the river. The last contingent was 5 or 6 very little ones with women who must have been their grandmothers. Pila Panchayat is for children 6 - !4, who are old enough to benefit from the program, but they often bring their brothers and sisters in tow which is great. How wonderful to see the strong family bonds and also feel that the little ones are seeing that in addition to being fun, Pila Panchayat also helps people by standing up for rights.

We had made paper picture frames with the message: Culture is Identity and I am Responsible for Preserving my Culture. When the developed photos arrived by motorcycle on the second day, the children were frantic with anticipation, but it took us a couple of hours to apply the frames and glue them to cardboard backs. When the time came to distribute, the children were arranged in orderly rows, but as we called them up village by village to receive their pictures - bedlam erupted! They do not often get the chance to be photographed and especially to take a photo home, so this giveaway was particularly exciting for them. And for me. I hope they take the message seriously to heart and that the photos give them much happiness.

Although I am no artist, I was struck by how beautiful these portraits turned out. Partly it was the wonderful fabric backgrounds that I used - the "walls" of the bamboo tent house - and the vibrant colors of the children's garments in contrast to the rich browns of their skin. But mostly it was their handsome faces - the openness of their gaze and the strength and dignity with which they hold themselves, even the little ones. I came away just loving those kids. Just look at the handsome trio below, and click on the video to watch the group dance. See if you can resist them!

Welcome to Radio Namaskar!

If you could put your community radio station anywhere in India, where would you locate it? Easy... Konark.

Site of the UNESCO World Heritage Sun Temple, Konark lies 40 km north of Puri and just inland from Odisha's coastline. It's easy to find Radio Namaskar's tower and the hospitality of Mr. N.A. Shah Ansari, the director of the station and founder of Young India, which he started when he was only in Class X. Mr. Ansari founded the station to give voice to remote villages and it is the only station in Odisha performing that vital service today.

The sound studio is insulated with indigenous materials - local egg cartons in fact - but the station is powered with an impressive array of equipment for editing and broadcasting; young volunteers serve as journalists and technicians.

Mr. Ansari shares my enthusiasm for capturing oral traditions - in fact is way ahead of me - and played two recordings he has made of a traditional lullaby and an itinerant fiddle player, both hauntingly lovely. He feels a strong connection to the songs and stories that he grew up with and sees the way they affect the way he thinks and behaves today. He knows that they are disappearing and is enthusiastic about receiving our recordings and both broadcasting and narrowcasting them.

In India community radio stations are licensed to broadcast 20 kms although programs may be heard from somewhat farther away under some conditions. That's not far in a big state like Odisha, but narrowcasting can be used to reach more audiences. Just as I like to download American public radio programs to my iPod and listen to them on my walk to work, Mr. Ansari can make sound recordings available for villages to play over their loudspeaker systems. Whereas broadcasting is "one to many", narrowcasting is "one to one" or "one to few".

This visit was truly exciting. I left the station feeling part of a dynamic movement and look forward to collaborating with this dedicated group of change agents.

To contact Radio Namaskar email them at radionamaskar@gmail.com or youngindia@hotmail.com, or visit them on the web at www.radionamaskar.org.

Local Language and Its Challenges

The members of Pila Panchayat speak tribal languages and Odia. We have an excellent handbook (really a pamphlet) on capturing and documenting culture, prepared by the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) and published by the Tribal Museum in Koraput, but it is in English and designed for an older age group.

The next task of our project, after organizing the stakeholders, is to develop training and communications for the kids. Easily done, except that I speak only English and my computer struggles with Indian English. Even though I have colleagues who can translate, it's not easy at all to reproduce materials in Odia script. There are input programs that allow you to type in Odia, but each character involves three or four keystrokes and that is not only time consuming but a skill that is is short supply. The best option may be to handwrite the pamphlet in Odia script but that will make it a lot larger, and even if I could write in Odia, you would not want to try to interpret my handwriting.

Catching the Moon Project Launch

Cruising the backroads of India's Koraput Plateau, I could see why anyone would want to ride a motorcycle here. My colleague, Pabitra, is a careful driver and we covered the 10 km from the SPREAD office at Mattamput to the Pila Panchat meeting at a pace that allowed me to enjoy the spring breeze, take in the flowering trees and wave to the villagers who stood up from their toil cultivating paddy to wonder "Who is that stranger riding with Pabitra?"

My name is Margaret Campbell and I am a visiting American consultant working as a communications advisor with the Society for Promotion of Rural Education and Development (SPREAD) in Koraput town, Odisha, India. On Sunday, February 21st, I was working with Pabitra Nayak, Prasant Patnaik, Sukharam Gandanga and Pila Panchayat, SPREAD's youth governance group, to launch a project to document the cultural heritage of the Odisha Hill Tribes. Our project, entitled "Catching the Moon" after the Odia saying "A janha mamu sarag sasi mo kanhu hatre podore khosi", is meant to accomplish three things:

1. The capture and sharing of oral traditions and performing arts of the Odisha Hill Tribes at tribal museums and over community radio.
2. An increased appreciation by Pila Panchayat members to the importance of their culture and exposure to five occupations related to the project: anthropologist, journalist, broadcaster, civil servant and community organizer.
3. The creation of a project "quick start" kit so that other youth groups will have an easy time of launching their own projects. This blog is part of that aspect of the project.

About 30 children were assembled for the monthly planning meeting. Although more than 600 children participate in Pila Panchayat, the leadership consists of one boy and one girl from each of the 12 villages. Pila Panchayat acts like a smaller version of the panchayat local governance system. The typical business of the group is to identify issues of concern to children, such as school enrolment, teacher attendance, midday meals and health services, and escalate them to village leaders and beyond. Another objective of the group is to honor and cultivate their cultural identity. One boy had brought in two traditional songs, which he performed after much coaxing, about the daily life of a child in the villages. Our Catching the Moon project will give the children a way to share their cultural heritage with others outside Pila Panchayat, and preserve it for future generations.

Pila Panchayat also holds an annual convention, which in 2010 will take place March 31 and April 1. We are planning the activities around the themes of Catching the Moon, with a play to kick off the event introducing a hapless hunter trying to capture his culture (it is Chaitra Parab, the tribal festival, on this day, which makes the hunting theme especially relevant), a children's museum to illustrate the fun of sharing culture, and individual photos of each child in frames that say "It's up to me to preserve my culture" in local language. We won't have formal training at the convention - just fun with the themes - but will follow up with more detailed information at the April meeting of the group.