Of AIDS education and office space

Srikakulam, Andhra Pradesh, India

Our first full day in Srikakulam is drawing to a close and Deanna’s taking her turn going down to dinner. There are two volunteers from a non-profit in the U.K., Becky and Hannah, who are teaching English here, and we all usually have meals together. Since Mason goes to sleep before dinner is ready for the adults, though, one of us has to stay here with him while the other goes to dinner. The upside of not getting to hang with them, though, is that I get to check in with you and fill you in on my day.

From India One

Left to right: Hanna, Becky, Mason, a man I don’t know and Deanna

I’ve been provided with access to another of the guest rooms here to use as office space, and it has already proven invaluable in terms of productivity. As much as I love Mason, he’s not a boon to my to-do list, and having some quiet solitary space is a treat. The guest room/office is on the second floor of a four-story building, and the third floor has another just like it. The fourth floor is a water tank and the first is the pump house for it. It sits at the end of the palm-lined road that runs down the middle of the grounds and the view out the door next to my desk looks down that road to the gate. The breeze is frequent and sunlight bountiful. My favorite part of the building, though, is the mural of Gandhi and a small child on the fourth floor. The caption says “My life is my message.”

From India One

I have to admit, reluctantly, that having no internet access is also tremendously helpful in terms of getting things done. I have a full outbox to match my full inbox, but not being constantly interrupted by more incoming stuff allows me to deal with the innumerable things I flagged to get to later, but haven’t. Of course I dread the incoming data the next time I sign on, but for now I’m reveling in the productivity.

From India One

After a good morning session of catching up on stuff I spent the afternoon traveling to a high school in a nearby village with one of the staff members here, Mr. Somayajulu (yes, it’s quite a multi-syllabic country!). He was going there to give an HIV/AIDS awareness talk and asked if I wanted to tag along. HIV/AIDS education is actually a relatively small part of the huge work that ASM does, so it’s sort of a strange place to start telling their story, but it’s what I did today, so I’ll fill you in.

From India One

The principal was away and a science teacher was filling in on the administration duties for the day. She offered us chai and we spent a few minutes talking while we waited for the class periods to change. The school is small and rural and serves primarily the children of illiterate agricultural workers. We talked about their struggles and the difficult choices their parents have to make during the current harvest season about whether to send their kids to school or have them work in the fields. Many of the parents only have work for six or seven months of the year, during the planting and harvesting seasons, and the extra income provided by another laborer in the family is not easily lost.
We chatted (some in English and some translated back and forth to Telugu) about the irony that people from other countries are often fascinated by India, but the children here just want to go somewhere else, and Mr. Somayajulu told her a bit of my story and how I cam to be here. Then, when our chai was done and the students were ready down the hall, we rose to go. Translated through Mr. Somayajulu, this bright and capable woman who must have been almost my age told me that I was the first foreigner she had ever met, and asked if I would write down a few words to leave with her. In the hours since our visit I’ve been chewing on the fact that this teacher had never met anyone from anywhere but India. This is a world that is pretty far from my own in more ways than one.
India has a significant problem with HIV/AIDS. According to Mr. Somayajulu (citing a national AIDS organization, NACO), Andhra Pradesh, the state where I’m working, ranks number 2 among India’s 25 states. Intravenous drug use is not a huge problem here, comparatively, so only about 3% of infections arise from it. 91% arise from unprotected sex.

From India One

Today, tomorrow and the next day ASM staff will conduct workshops in ten area high schools and one workshop for youth who are not in school. They distribute informational booklets in advance, and the students did a good job answering the questions that Mr. Somayajulu asked them. The most impressive answer, though, came when he mentioned their good fortune at being in school and having access to this information, then asked what would happen to the kids who are working in the fields. A young man in the back enthusiastically responded “we’ll teach them.”
Because I’m a funny-looking foreigner, I guess, I was asked to speak for a few minutes at the end, and I took the opportunity mostly to congratulate them on being in school, which strikes me as not only smart, but wise, given that it is a long-term investment against a significant short-term loss. And I talked a bit at the end about the relationship between believing something is possible and making it happen. In a nutshell, I pointed out that if you have a dream but you don’t do the work to make it real, then it never happens, but if you don’t believe in the first place you’ll never do the work. Either way, the first step is believing, and the second is getting to work.
The great thing about speaking to groups like that, of course, is that I have to listen to my own words. That’s why I’ve always written songs about things that I don’t have figured out rather than things that I do. There seems to be a surfeit of songs about time, for instance, in my repertoire, because I have such a hard time apportioning mine in a way that feels right to me. Little did I know that all I had to do was move to a village in India without internet in order to work it out and get some things done.

From India One

the view from the office