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Hunar Ghar rouhly translates to ‘Skills Home’, and on the bike home this afternoon I got to thinking just what skill means to me. Here’s what I came up with:

Skill The natural expression of a complementation of imagination, initiative and physical or mental dexterity.

I use natural as in something that comes easily, whether that be inherited or practiced to the point that it is second-nature. I think if any one of those things are lacking you can be good at something but not necessarily skillful and adding anything wouldn’t make one more skillful.

The point I was really thinking about though is that it doesn’t mean some kind of expertise in one particular art. True skill lies not in a specific medium or expression, such as being able to carve beautiful sculptures or write touching poems, but the ability to apply the principles of one type to another. If take from that perspective, it allows for a far more hollistic view of learning where everything is seen to enhance everything else. If the learning guides, or teachers, can take this as a core path to base learning around, it can make for a far more fulfilling and dynamic experience both for the teachers and the learners. They get to do what they want and so take extra initiative and enjoyment, but find that things all link back into one another and even seemingly mundane things that become exciting, such as maths moving from meaningless marks on a chalkboard to calculating how many sweets they can make with Rs 100 worth of ingredients and what kind of profit they can make when selling them at certain prices at the fair in the neighbouring village next month.

One of the things that I find so exciting about Hunar Ghar is how we are completely redefining the education from learning information to developing inquisitive, intuitive and versatile minds. It is that kind of mind that is going to be able to lead a full, fulfilling life, exlore a diersity of different interests, apply itself to different fields and know how to adapt itself to new situations, new jobs and generally act in an organic flexible way that propogates its own growth rather than be dogmatised into certain ways of thinking and always dependent on a teacher or leader to tell it what to do and when to do it.

It would seem that the fighting in Kotra is effecting us more than I realised. The government office that we need to take our school application to within two months is on that town, so our advocate is unwilling to go at the moment. We will have to see how that works out.

On the way home on the motorbike this evening we came across a group of people, five or six, walking in the road like desparados or something. That isn’t unusual in itself, but they didn’t clear to the side when they saw the bike, and one actually tried to block my path then grabbed my arm as I scooted around him. They might have just been drunkards, but nothing confrontational has ever happened to me before in the area. What annoyed me wasn’t the event itself but my innitial reaction to it; what if they had been incensed by the happenings in Kotra, and were ready to pick a fight with anyone that wasn’t ‘one of their own’? It’s impossible to tell but the answer is almost certainly not. It illustrates very well though what I was talking about in a previous post, how negative actions can so easily negatively influence our perspective of future events if we don’t watch our reactions carefully. I have two choices: either consider it related to Kotra and so forever feel a little more tense in the area, be a little less open with people and a little less trusting or I can just say it was a bunch of drunk guys acting stupid and that is that. Choosing the first option will only degrade my experiences and future friendship, while the second leaves me far more open to all furture possible positive things, so it would be foolish to allow the actions of Kotra to have any influence on how I speak, think and deal with people at all

Well the fighting in Kotra has given us our first casualty at Hunar Ghar. A girl called Meenu who was really interested in doing some work with us has decided to cancel her visit to see us because of the fighting. She’s still wants to come, but when the conflict has died down a bit.

For her and her family it is the same as people in England et al hearing of the attacks in Mumbai. In that case people got scared and didn’t want to visit India, in this case Meenu’s family are concerned and don’t want her to visit our school. In both cases the conflict has nothing to do with the rest of the area but the media hype it up and lack of clear information and knowledge of things makes people act in different ways which means that the attacks in India did effect the rest of India where no attacks happened and the conflict in Kotra is effecting people that it has nothing to do with.

In both cases it is not what has happened that causes the most problems but the way people react to events. In such a way terrorism wouldn’t work if people just ignored it. After all far more people die of cancer or heart attacks than terror attacks but millions of people still suck away on cigarettes or tuck into a few too many burgers. It’s not what happens that matters, it is how dramatic it is and how it is portrayed by the media and reacted to by the society. Ultimately though it is us as a society that suffers from giving excessive attention to some things and not enough to others. In the case of all those people that didn’t visit India in the wake of the Mumbai attacks that is then international friendship lost, lost stories that familiarises each culture more with the other. Instead it is replaced by a feeling of uncertainty and caution which only goes to distance people and help themselves justify acting and responding to further negative experiences in negative ways, or to attacking other people. The Hindus justified killing a Muslim because a Muslim killed a Hindu, and visa versa. It was irrelevent if the first death was an accident or not, the social scene in which it occured did not care for such information. G W Bush and his pals justified attacking Iraq as a result of the attacks on new York and Washington. Ther was no Al Qa’ida link, there were no WMDs, there was only a dictator who was no longer playing ball, one who had switched oil trading from dollars to euros. In this situation also the information was irrelevent, it was the dogmatised social perception that over-ruled.

So how we react in such situations is important if were not to propogate problems but fix them. This takes time of course, and personal effort but it seems to me to be something really worth doing. When I first moved into Bakhel with Rob we were told we would be attacked and robbed and maybe shot at with bows and arrows by those ‘backward and violent people’. We went anyway and lo and behold none of that happened an all we’ve had to endure is smiles, friendship some of the most fantastic times I’ve had and cups of sweet tea.

Chatting to Ash on the phone yesterday, we’ve decided to go ahead and do some research into importing and selling palm-leaf baskets on behalf of Educate for Life and the women who make them. Ash reckoned that they could be really popular, as do I but I didn’t manage to say as the phone cut off. I’ve been coveting one since I first got to Bakhel two years ago and saw Buriya’s wife making one but I didn’t want to ask, so I was very happy last week when they offered me one.

My little research I’ve done thus far suggests that import duty is a percentage of the purchase price. In this case it is about 25p per basket, so the tax will be minimal and then we have only the shipping to worry about. One potential problem is that if you are sharing the profits of sold products with the original seller or reseller, you have to pay import duty on that too. We’d be giving part of the profit back to the women. It’s a sensible law as far as tax cronies go, but not great for us considering that extra money is taxing the women and Hunar Ghar. I’ll phone customs when I get back to the UK and see if there are exemptions for situations such as ours, or if that fails I think we should be able to re-jiggle Educate for Life as a non-profit company, so we can purchase at only 25p to keep tax down, but we could pay the women extra through a different scheme in the charity.

If, reader, you know anything about this, please get in touch.

Update: It seems that the baskets come under import commodity code 4602199110, with 3.7% duty to pay and 15% VAT, which comes to a staggering 4.68p per basket. Even better though (although I need to confirm that this applies to trade imports as well as private), VAT isn’t payable if the consignment value is less that £105. In that case we can ship 419 baskets at a time and pay only £3.87 duty on the whole lot.

Ash and I got to chatting about electricity in the village today. As i said in an earlier post, if we as a school try and get a connection straight from the government it is going to cost something like £1000. But if we get together 10 families, because of subsidies available to tribal people, of which everyone in our village is, we can get it for £80 instead, and the cost of the wire from one person’s house to another.

The option is self generation, hopefully by renewable sources. We applied to the local government before for micro solar panels for Hunar Ghar, but the guy   of that ran off with our, and other people’s, money and the gov. refused to admit any knowledge about the scheme. Another option which I’m exploring now is finding a charity that deals specifically with solar energy for poor people to give/subsidise some solar panels to/for us. That’s the problem, solar panels are expensive unless subsidised.

As Ash said though, we don’t want to tax the people in Bakhel, either financially or morally, by dissuading mains power in deference to expensive solar lights. By a quick back of the envelop calculation I’d say they use less energy in year than we do in a few days, and that’s not even taking account of the vast amounts of waste westerns put out, and all the energy and plastic and shipping that has gone into the menagerie of appliances and gizmos and bits-and-bobs that we all have. They then are among the last people on earth that should have any reason to change thier life-styles energy-wise; it is us that should be working in far more feverish ways to get our consumption down.

That taken into account, we don’t want to unnecessarily encourage dependency on a mains grid that is designed by incredibly bad policy; 50 million people in India are refugees as a result of dam projects for power and irrigation. Mains power is also not cheaper if you take into account the debt taken on by the country to finance such projects. Add to that that mains electricity distribution is only 40% efficient in India, plus the fact that solar lights once fitted don’t have bills to paid makes them increasing attractive. We also want to set a precedent that development doesn’t need to, indeed shouldn’t follow the model of the past 100 years that has got us all in this environmental and social mess in the first place. It is incredibly important to challenge the norms to discover and establish new, better ways of doing things. There is another way forward, another way to be healthy, happy and comfortable, and we’re going to do everything we can to establish ourselves at the forefront of that movement.

Most people thinking of solar lights think of the photovoltaic type. That is, the ones that turn light directly into electricity to charge a battery. What you can also do however is use solar-thermal technology; light is reflected to heat water or similar to drive a turbine. A heat sink is used to make the energy continue at night. I don’t know if this can be done on a small scale, but I’ll find out. There is a charity community in a nearby town called the Brahma Kumaris who are building a massive unit to power 1000s of homes with an array or something like 120 60 foot high mirrors. Perhaps they know, or perhaps there is a way of buying electricity off them. I shall find out!