RIDE

India was not easy. I have never been in as polluted in environment, seen such abject poverty, or been in a city that seemed as chaotic or foreign. The air was grimy and after just a few minutes outside, you began to see your clothes blacken from the coal and soot in the air. Beggars lined the roads and sometimes seemed to come at you from every direction. Little things suddenly seemed complicated. When trying to cross the street, you felt like you had stepped into a game of Frogger, darting auto-rickshaws, cars, bicycles, and trucks that seemed to weave around one another and zip by without any discernible regard to traffic rules. Even settling on a restaurant to grab a quick bite to eat could prove problematic since health standards and foods in India are so different from what we are used to.

Despite the challenges though, India was incredibly rewarding. In no other port have I experienced more genuine warmth and hospitality from my hosts. The welcoming that Semester at Sea Voyagers were given wherever they went was truly incredible and I have never been received with more energy, enthusiasm, and excitement than I was on my SAS service-visits in India. As much as Chennai could be frustrating and disheartening at times, you would more often find yourself being invited to someone’s home for dinner, answering friendly questions about life in the United States or receiving assistance from complete strangers. I often found myself returning to the words that our Indian interport lecturer, Dr. Hamsapriya, said to me and that I reported in an earlier post. “For those on the trips that involve human contact, they find that people are very open, generous, friendly, and go out of their way to do things for students.”


During our post-port reflection session yesterday evening, the general themes of kindness and hospitality were juxtaposed with the poverty and a general difficulty of being able to mentally digest what was seen in India. Through all of the experiences that were recounted by students and shared since our return to the MV Explorer, the question being grappled with by all is, “What now?”

How do we help? Can we help? Towards the end of post-port, one student pointed out that learning from each other and spreading awareness is the first step. The first experience that I would like to share is an overnight service project that I participated in with about 25 other SAS voyagers. The trip focused on learning about child labor and life in rural India.


On our first afternoon, we traveled to Kanchipuram, located about two hours away from Chennai. Our first stop was a school operated by the Rural Institute for Development Education (RIDE) that serves as a “bridge school,” which transitions children out of labor and into school. To give you a brief background on what I found to be a remarkable organization, RIDE was founded in 1984 as an NGO “dedicated to empowering poor and disadvantaged residents of rural Tamil Nadu (the Indian state Chennai is located in) to improve the quality of their lives,” as described in their mission statement. The organization's motto is “Help Others Help Themselves,” and it operates under the concept that “people cannot be developed but they can develop themselves, if they have access to education, counseling, guidance, resources, and opportunities.”

RIDE uses a two-pronged approach to address poverty and child labor in Tamil Nadu. First, there is the education of children, which we witnessed at the Bridge School. We received an incredible welcome from the students, teachers, and director of RIDE, S. Jeyaraj. As we were led into the school compound by a swarm of excited children who were singing and excitedly running all around us, Jeyaraj began to explain how RIDE strives to empower children and families through education. The impact that we could make began to sink in when we were led to the first school building, where a sign hung outside, “Donated by Semester at Sea, USA.”


RIDE is able to fund two thirds of the education of all of its students and parents cover the remaining the costs. From what we could see, the children have quite an extensive curriculum. During presentations they made for us, the Indian students covered topics such as their national freedom fighters, world history, the planets, solar and lunar eclipses, and the composition of soil. The students also spoke great English and it was wonderful to see what they were learning.



In addition to these students, who had been fully rescued from child labor, we met a second group of children who were not as fortunate. These kids, ranging in age from 5 to about 10 years old still work in stone quarries, and had put in about six hours of work earlier that day. They attend classes when they can sneak away and RIDE even offers courses and lunch at the quarries when possible. I had trouble imagining what kind of work they could even be doing at a quarry, and I learned that they are used to hammer larger stones into gravel, which is then used for building roads and sometimes in construction projects. Those that are strong enough also carry the smaller loads at the work site.

In most cases, the entire family works at the quarry together – parents and children. There is just no other way to survive unless the entire family is earning money. Some opted out of government schools, where beatings from teachers can be a regular occurrence. The second part of RIDE’s education program, in addition to the Bridge Schools, is the education of villages on consumption, conservation, agriculture, and money management. This is what allows parents to remove their children out of the labor sites and send them to school.


During our second day with RIDE, we visited a village where child labor has been completely eradicated thanks to the organization’s work there. It is estimated that in the past 10 years, child labor in Kanchipuram has been reduced from roughly 40,000 to 4,000. Although these results are incredible, child labor in India is still pervasive throughout the country and continues to be a problem. The village that we visited is an example of how program’s like RIDE can succeed in implementing a solution.


Jeyaraj explained that as the villagers learn to conserve their resources, both natural and monetary, their lives begin to improve. RIDE taught them how to farm sustainably, create their own fish stocks, and set up small businesses and save money. Now, instead of working in the silk looms or quarries for a pittance, most villagers operate their own looms, work in local factories or for multi-national corporations such as Nokia, or farm.

If you would like to learn more about the Rural Institute for Development Education, please visit their website at www.rideindia.org.


Photo #3 by SAS Photographer John Weakley