The New Colonials: Part I

Presenting a follow-up of the reconstruction work being done, as well as its highs and lows, a year after the Tsunami hit parts of the world on December 26

What they say about six degrees of separation must be true.

That is, you should be able to contact anyone in the world you want by going through a chain of just six people.

How else does one explain the fact that I volunteered to be an interpreter for a team of Europeans who planned to come to the Tamil Nadu coast for reconstruction work?

In fact, the chain was much shorter, just two links long. A friend’s daughter was contacted by someone who had common friends at her college in Germany and she contacted me inquiring about an interpreter who could translate from English to Tamil. Knowing that foreign accents would be difficult for even English-speaking Indians to understand and that English would be only a second language for the visitors making communications that much more difficult, I volunteered for the task.

The initial contact was from Agnes S. from Belgium. She had visited India in August to scout the place out. From her contacts, she had chosen the fishing villages near Tharangampadi, Tamil Nadu as the place where the European team would work.

A short history: Tharangampadi (“Singing waves”, from tarangam, Sanskrit for wave and padi, Tamil for One who Sings”) is a village about 200 kilometers south of Chennai. It is the place where the Danes landed in the 17th century when European countries were competing with each other for the spice trade. The Danes built a fort near the seashore and called the place Tranquebar. For a while, they were able to occupy a small landmass but eventually had to leave India because coastal Tamil Nadu – the Coromandel Coast –was where the British, the French, the Portuguese, the Dutch and the Danes vied for supremacy. The French lost to the British managing to keep only Pondicherry and Karaikkal, the Dutch traded their possessions in India and Sri Lanka for Indonesia, the Portuguese moved off to Goa and the Danes decided to seek their fortunes elsewhere. The Danish fort has been restored with the assistance of the Danish government, a colonial building used as the District Collector’s office was restored by a hotel chain and is now the pleasant hotel Bungalow on the Beach, and the governor’s palace nearby is in ruins waiting for government approval of sale to private parties interested in restoring it. There is a cross on the beach commemorating the Danish missionaries who had come to Tharangampadi to preach the gospel of Jesus.

I was told that hotel rooms had already been booked at Tirukkadayur, a town about 7 kilometers from Tharangampadi and the lunches were to be prepared by a local church. Tharangampadi has a reputation as the hotbed of missionary activity and I was quite determined to express my disapproval of missionary activity – I believed the team to be part of some Christian Church group in Europe – though I would help them by translating for them. In fact, I thought they would be restoring some churches and packed my T-shirt with the figure of Shiva on it to wear in Tharangampadi as some sort of protest.

On a rainy Saturday night, I waited at the Chennai airport for the team to arrive. It consisted of four Belgians, six French, a Spaniard and a Portuguese, a fine collection of representatives of the most repressive European colonial master-nations of an earlier era. When we were joined by someone named Joseph R. my misgivings that the entire group was up to serious missionary mischief were strengthened.

We rode all night in two rented vans to Thirukkadayur. The recent rains had caused floods along our route and the roads were severely damaged. After an 8-hour ride, we reached our hotel. We showered and got ready quickly for our lunch and to visit our reconstruction locations.

Four villages, Puduppettai, Perumal Pettai, Pillai Theru and Karan Theru had been damaged by the tsunami. Each had a nursery school built by the Rural Organisation for Social Action (ROSA) that needed to be restored. After visiting the buildings, the team returned to the hotel to prepare a plan of action.

The greatest damage was at Puduppettai. The cement floor had to be ripped out and new concrete poured. All buildings had cracks in the walls that needed to be plastered over. The schools had to be painted inside and out. It was decided to divide the group into two teams with Joseph R. acting as the interpreter for the other team.
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At Puduppettai, the team got into action in real earnest. Despite wearing work gloves, David had blisters on his palm within an hour, yet he continued working. The team members hauled water from a nearby faucet and took out the rubble. The villagers gave us the buckets, water pots, pans, etc., needed to carry water or to take out the rubble. This was a sacrifice on their part when one considered that the piped water ran only till 10:30 am and the villagers had to obtain and save the water they needed for the day and they were not just giving us the vessels they were using for storing water but were even giving us water they had collected. The team then used hammer and chisel to widen the thin cracks. The masons arrived, mixed concrete, poured a new floor and leveled it. The team members learnt how to plaster the cracks in the walls and soon were proficient at it.

The villagers came asking if they could provide us tea or lunch. They were quite disappointed that lunch had been arranged for all five days elsewhere and they couldn’t make even a small recompense for the work that was being done in their community.

Manimakalai, one of the women who had given us buckets and water pots, asked me into her hut. She said that the tsunami had killed her first daughter aged six. Her husband had recently gone to Singapore to work but primarily to get away from the memories of the tsunami. She was left alone to cope with the loss of her child. She had a photograph of the child but she had covered it with a cloth because if she looked at it she would cry.
* * *
Whenever the team members took a small break, the villagers who were curious to know about them crowded around us. They had of course seen a variety of NGOs come and help them since the tsunami of December 2004. The children wanted their pictures taken and the team obliged them cheerfully and showed them the pictures they had taken on the screens of their digital cameras.

The villagers wanted to know if the team members were married to each other. I replied some of them were married but not to each other. Manimekalai asked Ingrid if she had children. When Ingrid replied she had a six-year-old daughter, Manimekalai asked her to bring the girl the next time and said that she would take care of her while Ingrid worked. It was a poignant moment for me: I could see a mother’s love for children, in particular the transference of the love for the daughter she had lost to the sea.

The previous night, Agnes and I discussed what it would take the villagers out of their current economic level to the next level. Agnes was afraid, and correctly so, that the do-gooders were perpetuating the poverty of the villagers. Yes, they were providing medical assistance, building permanent shelters and providing livelihood assistance in the form of boats and fishing nets. But all of this enabled the villagers to barely eke out their living from the sea. The question was: how does one raise them at least one step up the economic ladder and show them the way to keep climbing the ladder?
* * *
Since I was not expected to be part of the work team, I spent some of my time talking to the local coordinators of ROSA. I talked to them about the issues I saw such as lack of medical facilities. I knew the girls continued their education whereas the boys would stop going to school at 14 or 15 and start going to the sea to fish. I suggested that three or four girls should study nursing and stay on in the village as primary paramedical personnel. Their salaries should come from a collective levy on all households in the village so that they were not dependent on the government giving them a job that, if at all it happened, would be at a hospital or primary health center some distance away. Perhaps they could pay for one student’s medical education on the condition that he/she should practice in their village for five years (for fee, nor for free). If one village could not afford the costs of medical education, perhaps five villages could join together and the doctor could rotate among the five villages daily. With five villages, it should be possible to demand the chosen student be admitted to a nearby government medical college in return for en bloc voting in favor of the candidate who gets the student admission to the medical college.

I suggested that the villagers should have no more than one child per family. With larger families, more people put out to sea to fish in each succeeding generation resulting in reduced catch for everyone. While the ROSA volunteers could see the logic behind my argument for limiting family size, they themselves had borne three children by their late twenties so it was going to be hard for them to propagate that message among the women of the village. One of them said that women were warned by their husbands that if they underwent any birth control procedures such as tying the Fallopian tubes, they would divorce them and marry another woman.

I asked the women to look at possible sources of a second income. They knew that goldfish sold for as much as Rs. 200 in Karaikkal. They could learn how to raise goldfish in their homes and sell them to augment their family incomes. There was a fisheries development center in Tharangampadi where they could possibly learn how to do it or they might have to go up to Chennai but it was a reasonably simple skill they could learn. The response was they would have no time what with the time required to take care of the family. I was quite upset at this response. I asked if the goldfish needed to be taken out for grazing or milked regularly like cattle. All you needed to do was feed them once a day and watch them for signs of disease. It was clear that 50 years of democracy where every party promised them that the government would take care of all their needs had completely sapped their initiative.

Over the next four days, I was to have similar conversations, this time with young men waiting for the bus. After listening to me for about five minutes, their only answer was that they wouldn’t do anything except their traditional occupation of fishing. I pointed out that a prawn farm was coming up right next to their village and the owner of the prawn farm would have no skills in fishing yet would have a guaranteed catch which would bring him huge profits. At this point, the youths bid me goodbye saying their bus had come.

The recent rains had overflowed the ponds of the prawn farm carrying away the tiger prawns to the sea. The fishermen were catching several of them in their nets. The owner of the prawn farm demanded that all prawns be given to him as they were his property. The fishermen simply ignored that request and were making good money on the large prawns.
* * *
We returned to Puduppettai two days later to paint the walls after the plaster had dried. The first coat was applied, allowed to dry and a second coat applied the next day. The building looked quite handsome and the villagers were happy to see the building in good shape for their children’s use.

It was clear that the women of the village had no voice in the running of community affairs. ROSA volunteers told me that the village and the fishing community as a whole were completely dominated by the men. I could see how difficult it was going to be to change these people yet if they didn’t change there was no hope for improvement in their economic circumstances.

We were to encounter similar stories in other villages. The impressions Agnes gathered were similar to mine, that the villagers were resistant to change. So the major challenge of getting the villagers out of the economic doldrums formed the crux of evening discussions between Agnes and me.

How does one make the reluctant horse drink after leading it to the water?