To light up the torch of inspiration by burning the oil of diligence, To pledge a life for education by extinguishing the wick of ignorance.
Siddamma - Profile of a grassroots activist
S. Ramachandran, A. Balasubramaniam
Born and brought up in the tiny hamlet of Sivaganga in the Chitradurga district of Karnataka, Siddamma is one of the leading human rights activists in India and the first woman recipient of an Asha Fellowship. The story of her journey through activism is poignant as well as inspiring. The aura on her face together with her confidence and the effectiveness of her words left the few people who met her during her visit to Chicago in September 2007 inspired and ruminating on several issues.
Siddamma's life would never have come this far but for several life-changing events. At the age of 7, she lost her right eye due to a bear attack and has had a scar on her face ever since. Siddamma says, "In some ways the tragedy was perhaps the best thing that happened..." as otherwise she would have been married at the age of 15. Instead, she finished high school and went on to achieve her BA in Sociology. Initially, she taught women in a Bangalore slum as part of the government literacy program. She also worked as a full time teacher for children who were otherwise rag pickers. The efforts of her illiterate mother who fought for Siddama's education had finally paid dividends.
From 1986 to 1990 Siddamma was an activist with Pennurimai Iyakkam, an organization that worked on women’s rights. It was then that she learned about the harassment of the native Irula tribals by landlords under whom they were bonded. Beginning in 1990 she lived with the Irulas, inspiring and organizing the community to represent themselves and their rights. She successfully facilitated opposition against human rights violations and worked with Irulas to obtain land ownership documents. From 1995 to 1998, she was the recipient of a CRY fellowship enabling her to continue organizing Irulas in 25 villages in northern Tamil Nadu. Meanwhile she also started and organized Bharathi Trust that supports her organizing and human rights work. Consequently today, the Irulas have started an organization called Sarpam to continue their community work, with a membership of over 1 lakh. Sarpam is now an independent grassroots community organization that advocates for the Irulas, promotes leadership from within the community and works closely with local government agencies for the betterment of the Irula community.
In 2000, Bharathi Trust recognized the need for supporting the education of children from Irula communities. Motivational centers for Irula children were started and Asha for Education supported 10 such centers. These motivational centers have gone a long way towards promoting education by providing educational support to children who are first-generation learners. Children from the motivational centers now go to government school and are performing extremely well in their academics.
Asha's relationship with Siddamma has grown over the years with her visiting many chapters abroad such as Zurich and London, and sharing her learning, experiences, and opinions with volunteers. Asha has continued to support Siddamma's varied efforts related to Tsunami rehabilitation work in villages in Tamil Nadu, rehabilitating bonded families and children from rice mills near Chennai, providing alternative livelihood opportunities and so forth. Following her work on rehabilitating families after the Tsunami of 2004, in February of 2006 Siddamma was invited by the United Nations to present on the role of government in responding to natural disasters while protecting land and human rights.
In 2002, Siddamma received a fellowship from Asha to continue her work and begin initiating a one-of-a-kind community resource center in rural Tamil Nadu, with a goal of developing community knowledge related to agriculture, education, and pottery, dairy and forestry livelihoods. In 2005, this resource center realized its goals by demonstrating organic farming practices to the neighboring villages and convincing farmers to change their farming practices.
Siddamma continues to be a valuable part of the Asha family providing us with tremendous insights tempered by grass roots realities. She conveys a firm understanding of the ground situation when she spoke about development being a progression that needs to take into consideration the livelihoods and cultures of the community involved, and that development plans need to be made in collaboration with the community. Siddamma shows us that this type of community integration is not only possible - it has been done and she willingly offers the blue prints of her varied successful efforts of the last 15 years.
For more information on Siddamma's and Bharathi Trust's work and Asha's
partnership with them please visit
http://www.ashanet.org/austin/projects/siddamma.html
http://www.ashanet.org/projects/project-view.php?p=79
Eureka Quality Improvement Program Tamil Nadu
(EQUIP Tamil Nadu)A proposal to ensure Quality Education for Every Child
S. Ramachandran, A. Gupta
Tamil Nadu is one of the states in India which has addressed the problem of access to schooling and education almost completely, except in certain tribal pockets and child-labor intensive areas. Current enrollment levels of children into schools are at 97%. The state has about 10 million children in school. They are served by 30,000 Primary and 12,000 Middle and High schools. At the pre-school level 50,000 Anganwadis (also known as Balwadis or pre-primary centers) provide basic pre-school care. However, there is a very serious problem regarding the quality of learning in schools; for instance
- 50% children in 5th standard cannot read a paragraph in Tamil. 10% cannot even identify letters.
- 50% children in 5th standard cannot even subtract two 2-digit numbers.
- Science education is wrote memorization; there is no emphasis on concepts, no emphasis on learning through experiments, no relationship between what is being taught and its application.
- Many 4-year-olds in Balwadis cannot even match two identical pictures - something that one ought to be able to perform by this age.
These are just a few visible symptoms of the problem. The identified reasons for the poor student learning and understanding are:
1. No focus on basic skills: The underlying focus is on examination marks and textbook memorization, not on imparting basic reading, writing and arithmetic skills.
2. Lack of learning resources: There is no easy access to learning resources. There is a strong-felt absence of libraries, reading materials, activity kits or science experiment materials. Balwadis have no learning aids or even simple toys.
3. Ineffective teaching methods: Teachers lecture and read out from books. There is no focus on activities or even demonstrations in class. The practice of students asking questions is discouraged. There are no avenues for children to think independently, to work in groups or to learn through an activity.
4. Low community involvement: In many cases, poor children have no access to a learning environment at home. The community is usually very unhelpful in this regard and is not able to provide suitable resources or materials to facilitate learning outside the classroom.
It is in this context that the Indian arm of Association for India's Development in association with Asha for Education, Chicago hopes to implement a two-pronged strategy to tackle the problem of poor student learning. First, AID India aims to work with teachers to bring about measurable improvements in specific learning skills like reading, math and science. They plan to train and motivate teachers, provide teaching materials and change classroom practices through regular visits and practical demonstrations. Second, they aspire to create learning initiatives within communities and get the community to take ownership of these. They want to mobilize village volunteers, train them and start village libraries, children's learning centers, science clubs, math clubs and sports clubs. They also desire that the community volunteers both help schools to improve as well as pressure them to deliver quality learning.
An initial initiative involving 450,000 children in 7,300 schools was conducted and from the results it was found that the Tamil reading skills of children improved through AID India's Padippum Inikkum (Reading is sweet) Reading Campaign. Across 5 districts, children who are capable of reading went up from 54% to 85% within 5 months of the start of the reading campaign.
The next stage of the plan is to expand the efforts to Science and Math, in addition to Reading Skills. This next stage is to be implemented over the next 7 years in 20 blocks of the Vellore district of Tamil Nadu with a cost of $7,000 per block per year. One of the outstanding points of this strategy is the low cost incurred per child - $0.35 per child, enabling the program to reach nearly 350,000 children. This is achieved as a result of the emphasis on collaborating with the government to make use of available resources and community involvement. The strong belief is that the success of this strategy would enable it to be adopted in other districts and even other parts of India, enabling the provision of quality education to every child.
Asha for Education Chicago is looking for individuals or organizations that would like to get involved in a collaborative funding effort to implement this project in as many blocks as possible. Interested people should contact the steward of the project Ajay Gupta at ajaykumargupta.1@gmail.com or Amit Shah at mihir98@yahoo.com.
Notes of Hope: A Vindication of Ability beyond Disability
S. Ramachandran
"Inspired!" It was one unanimous feeling that emerged from the awestruck audiences of the Notes of Hope concert series held on August 18th and October 5th 2007. The concert featured truly amazing and inspirational performances by a dance troupe consisting of four visually challenged students, three boys and a girl from Shree Ramana Maharishi Academy of the Blind. The first concert was held in Chicago on August 18th. However the clamor for an encore was so high that we brought them back for a second packed-house performance on October 5th.
The performance truly emphasized the guiding principle behind the efforts of the Shree Ramana Maharishi Academy, "There are no disabled people; only differently abled people." The efforts these dancers emphasized made a very strong statement in "...charity and compassion are not what people with disabilities want to evoke. They want individuals, organizations and society to recognize their abilities and strengths."
The dancers showed no hint of the fact that they were visually challenged. They showed their mastery over varied Indian dance genres. One of the truly remarkable capabilities of these dancers was their ability to quickly gauge and adapt to the dimensions of a dance stage that they had never even practiced on earlier. They started out with classical and folk dances depicting stories from Indian cultures and mythology that enthralled one and all. They even got the audience swaying with their rendition of the Punjabi dance style Bhangra. Some of the volunteers who hosted and interacted closely with the young dancers were left feeling their funny bone with their side splitting jokes, showing their undying enthusiasm for life despite the challenges in life.
Asha Chicago would also like to make a special mention of a few of our donors, without whose commitment to organize and showcasing this amazing performance, the second concert on October 5th would never have been possible. In all, it has been a very special experience for the people interacting with this exceptional group of individuals.
The Chicago Marathon 2007 - Team Asha
This year more than 100 runners from the Chicago land area ran three awe-inspiring races under the unity of a single cause - Education for under-privileged. Asha's banner was flagged all throughout the city as the runners sweat under the tormenting weather conditions to inspire and to raise money for Asha for Education. Some of our runners share their experiences while they practiced and ran with Team Asha.
Swati: "...with my fears alleviated for a bit, I showed up for the Asha training run on a cold day in April and found so many likeminded people, all fired up to run. It was but everyone’s encouragement kept me going. Of course, it is a great motivation to be running for charity. However, what was really heartwarming about running for Asha was the camaraderie that the volunteers and runners felt. Not only did we meet for weekend runs, but there would be emails about running flying around midweek too. The mentors - Amit and Ajay - were constantly encouraging runners, giving us tips on how we could do better. They put the runners' pace and needs above their own expectations. I became friends with these wonderful people, and reconnected with some old friends too.
Training for the half-marathon with team Asha was so much fun that I signed up to run the full Chicago Marathon. Double the distance, double the fundraising, double the benefit for the underprivileged children in India. It was challenging, motivating, and ultimately very fulfilling. Go Team Asha!"
Madhulika: "I visited India last year and saw several families who were barely able to afford food for their kids. Their plight moved me. As a parent I strive to provide the very best of everything for my child and when I see others who can barely afford basic meals for their kids, it breaks my heart.
Fortunately, I had heard about Asha's educational and development projects in India. Asha was planning its annual fundraising event for the Chicago marathon. It seemed like the perfect fit for me. I have enjoyed participating in sport-related activities and the thought of challenging myself to run 26.2 miles excited me. I also love kids and the fundraising addressed my desire to do something for disadvantaged children.
Everything automatically fell into place and I began training for the Chicago marathon with Asha. Running a marathon requires motivation and discipline. However, the toughest part for me was running alone. Running with Team Asha made this extremely easy as I always had likeminded people to run with. Even if I missed a group run I knew I could call and would find someone willing to run with me.
This experience was especially significant because I discovered several things about myself that I never knew I was capable of, both physically and mentally. Thanks to Asha I was also able to raise $1845 for kids in India."
Team Asha Chicago is looking forward to an equally successful 2008 season. For more information please visit www.TeamAsha.org and select Chicago, or contact us at ChicagoTeamAsha@gmail.com.
