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In my frustrated haste yesterday I think I fell for exactly the narrow-mindedness that I was accusing other people of, namely the lumping together of so many different people and slinging them in ‘the community’ box. That frustration also erupted at Sharmaji when I was talking with him on the phone, which wasn’t particularly fair or professional of me, but I got the measure of it today: Something wonderful about Bakhel is that no matter how peeved I am about something or how disparaged I feel all it takes is to play with the kids for a bit, joke with Deepi and Tina and then go on a few home visits and one realised that actually everything is pretty great.

Today Deepak and I went on home visits to lots and lots of people, we walked around the village for nearly 10 hours, and will do the same tomorrow as we only covered about half the households that we want to. We were going to inform them of the meeting on Monday, 10am sharp. The younger brother of one of the girls who comes to Hunar Ghar died last week so there is also a function at their house that day, so hopefully it will act to keep our meeting concise.

After hearing yesterday how there was so much discontent in the village about Hunar Ghar our visits today suggest that only a few people are wondering why we are giving jobs to outside people instead of local villagers and that they are not even remotely near being annoyed enough to want to close Hunar Ghar. Far from it as we joked and laughed about the usual things, my crumby grasp of the local language and how I’m still not married. (Shock horror as I tell them that people in England generally get married a fair bit later than they do at 18 ish.) the family that we are closest too expressed their regret at how Deepak and I were talked to yesterday and said that had they been there they would have had one or two things to say in return. So essentially yesterday’s measure of it being one or two people just making a lot of noise is correct.

We have two theories then. One is that Dhunji is feeling slighted, and his power under question, by the fact that outside people came without his permission. And his permission should be sought in such matters, as far as he is concerned. This may be fair enough in terms of us being respectful in our position in the village and it was negligent of me not to ask, but this is hardly the appropriate way to deal with it. Theory two. Bhuvanesh (one of our teachers) wanted his wife to work at Hunar Ghar when the two new women came. He may have asked his family to get involved to try and make this happen but when his wife put the cactus in the road to stop Deepak he felt really bad and backed off, but the inertia of his family kept going and caused this extenuated situation.

Whichever it is I don’t really care as I don’t think much can come of it. It will be just another little whorl that will disappate in a week or two.

There is community unrest afoot in Bakhel. It took the form of Dhunji, one of the more senior members, coming to Hunar Ghar today to explain how I was a liar and that Deepak and I are bad people, before leaving, repeating his slander over his shoulder, without giving us opportunity to try and discover the root of his grievances.

The noise of unhappiness followed me to Rohida with Sharmaji telling me that he has heard from some RBKS fieldworkers how ‘the community’ in Bakhel are threatening to close Hunar Ghar. ‘The community’ is NGO speak for clunking together a bunch of people into one common blob for the ease of administration and from not knowing it more intimately. So ‘the community’ that is talking about closing Hunar Ghar is just a handful of playing the age old game of politics, and we can probably count on Dhunji being one of, or perhaps even the only, person to be talking to the fieldworkers, claiming to represent The Voice of The People.

It is certainly no small matter though, we don’t want people to be upset with Hunar Ghar or unhappy about it. Equally though we are getting pretty bored of the petty politics with people engaging with Hunar Ghar to an absolute minimum unless they can extract some financial gain from it. Extraction now failing, they are turning to extortion and it is pretty pathetic. Each time it happens those involved sell out their credibility a little more.

We are holding a meeting on Monday with Sharmaji, where we hope to clear things up. Before that though Deepak and I will have to scout out the problem as much as we can by going around the village tomorrow and on Saturday. It’s an extra pain in the arse because we’ve had to cancel our trip to MGIS to hold the meeting. We’ve been trying to have this meeting for some time now but it has been repeatedly postponed. It is unfortunate that it now appears only to be happening because ‘the community’ is throwing a tantrum, rather than because we suggested that we would have one and we agreed in a friendly way. It’s probably my fault for not pushing harder for the meeting to happen. Sharmaji has only made one trip to Hunar Ghar this year, as far as I am aware, despite our agreement being that he would come one a month and at the very least once every two months.

This, and our lack of clarity with the community about Hunar Ghar, has led to misinformation which is the classic fodder of unrest. As I’m feeling slightly perturbed tonight I would just point out that many, many times Deepak and I and Ash have been round the village, talking to people, asking them to come to Hunar Ghar, asking them to attend meets, all of which was met with a certain amount of apathy. I don’t expect nor want the community to be buzzing around like bees getting all excited about Hunar Ghar, but I also don’t expect those people who tell us they will come to meetings and functions when we ask, but then don’t, to then turn round and tell us that we don’t talk to them enough.

Harumph.

This morning I pus a few of the finishing touches to our Hunar Ghar booklet, that should go to print this afternoon. It’s looking pretty good, with full double page full colour photos over laid with information about our vision, activities and commitments over the coming 5 years. Once it is finished I’ll upload a .pdf and put in our docs section. I imagine most of our readers will have to think of it just as a pretty picture book; it’s written in Hindi.

The book is part of our new focus on sharing greater communication and clarity of commitments with the community so we’ll be sharing a copy with every family in the village. The extras can be shared with external people that take an interest in Hunar Ghar. Those sorts of people are mounting in their numbers and I think it is pretty tring for Sharmaji to keep explaining about Hunar Ghar.

The police around here don’t seem to be able to agree with how to deal with me. One town tries to take me to the police station each time they see me, one has told me they don’t care what i do so long as I don’t live in an area where they are going to get into trouble if something should happen to me, and the third invited me back to the police station yesterday after our Independence Day celebrations and we ended up having lunch and a whisky together.

I wasn’t quite sure what to do with the whisky first because the smell make Deepak feel ill so he went off to sit somewhere else and secondly because the last time I had a drink in the area it precipitated some Christian missionary troubles. As well as that Bhuria’s brother works at the police station as a cook so I didn’t feel it terribly sensible if he saw me sitting there drinking, which is fairly socially stigmatised where we are and just this morning we’d been talking about the dangers posed to the new women by drinkers. Another part of me was reminded how this would once have been one of those funny embellished travelers’ yarns.

I ended up taking a couple of sips to keep the police officer (who was tucking it away, and probably had been since to morning) happy then leaving the rest (it was cheap rubbish anyway), and I let him drink on with Mahesh, our new-coordinator-on-trial. They finished the half bottle and added it to the collection of various other empties lying around the mess quarters.

That was in Mandwa. In Rohida this morning as I was washing my clothes the police man who had once told me to get out spotted me. He asked what the hell I was still doing here, gestured a bit, then went into the shop he was outside. I was expecting him to then come to my house, but he never came. Am I all clear? Who knows, but if it seems peaceful I’m not going to stir anything.

The policeman from Mandwa assured me that he would help me get my next visa, but I know it because I told him I am leaving in two weeks and he didn’t want to see such a quick end to his new foreign drinking buddy, who he insisted come at least twice a week in the evenings and that I am welcome to stay the night there. As if!

The 15th of August 1947 is the day India finally became independent of the British colonial powers and is a day of nation pride and generic ceremonies. At Hunar Ghar the police and local governors came as out guests and we raised the flag and the children put on a performance of singing and dancing, and Gandhi even made an appearance in the shape of a dhoti-clad child sporting a pair of borrowed glasses hobbling out to say hello.

The day before the teachers and children gathered at Hunar Ghar to make sweets which we distributed on the day. I also hear that the evening was pretty fantastic, although unfortunately I was not there. As the day passed and night began, the sweet making wrappping up, people remained on Hunar Ghar. Someone lit a fire and by the light of the moon, stars and glowing wood people gathered to sing songs and dance before all sleeping together on the Hunar Ghar rocks. It’s the kind of spontenious sharing that I hope Hunar Ghar will one day come to represent. Of course, these things happen anyway and the fact that it happened to occur at Hunar Ghar probably shouldn’t be read into a great deal, but still it might represent something.

After the celebrations we had a meeting about the new women ‘problem’. Much of the issues cited before didn’t reoccur and the main objections seemed to be that we didn’t ask the village and the question of who would take responsibility for the women’s safety to, from and at Bakhel. As to the question of not asking we responded that we’d stopped having village meetings because very few people came (the last only having three people). We said it was the village’s responsibility to engage with up as much as it is ours to engage with them. We made the observation that many, many times we have gone door to door telling people about a meeting and they say they will come but then don’t come. We said it was no problem if people just spoke openly that they can’t/won’t come, and people can’t expect us to cosult them if they don’t engage with us when we try

There are two main issues relating to the women’s safety problem. The first is that if a drunk person (drinking being the eternal scape-goat of misbehaviour) harms or hassles them it can cause inter-village conflicts, the second is a concern of what will happen if she runs off with a local man? We explained that these aren’t issues of Hunar Ghar but of the village, and that we as members of Bakhel must take joint responsibility for how safe people are in our community. I said that this is very good oportunity to show to other villages how open and welcoming and peaceful we are, and with a move in this direction other villages will be less hostile too. Without openess , responsiblity and peace, I said, we can never get the things we want as a village.

The money issue was brought up lightly, but we managed to pass taht issue by without too much problem saying how much work the village has already had and will continue to have from Hunar Ghar, and that more importantly Hunar Ghar is not to be seen as a source of income but a place of quality education as our ultimate target. At this time we also laid out or commitment of taking on 30 new children each year, 2 new teachers and building 2 new clasrooms, as well as starting to give 5th class certificates 1 year from now.