Sons and Daughters

Erin and I spent the past week in Bolaigaon, about 45 minutes from Raiganj where we stayed in a convent with the Sisters of the Divine Saviour. Most of the convents or missions here have the same formula: somewhere for the priests/sisters/brothers to live, a dispensary where they provide free healthcare and hand out medicines, an elementary school, and a hostel for children from the villages who go to the school. There are four sisters that live in the Bolaigaon convent, Sr. Mini who runs the dispensary, Sr. Solly who teaches third grade in the school, Sr. Mukta who runs the hostel (if you’ve never had 90 elementary aged girls as your upstairs roommates, it’s pretty fun) and Sr. Anisha who brought us to the different villages everyday.

We had come to spend the week traveling to nearby villages and seeing the health programs that the sisters were implementing. When we arrived, Sr. Anisha had called all their health workers to greet us and to have a meeting to plan out our week. Let me back up for a minute. The programs in Bolaigaon (and most of India from my understanding) are based off of self-help groups. These self-help groups consist of 5-10 people (usually women, although more men’s groups are starting) in rural villages who join together to open a savings account. They are based mostly on economic reasoning, so each person in the group will pay a set amount each month (most of the groups we met were saving 30 or 40 rupees per month) which the group will then deposit in a bank account. Then if one of the members needs a loan to buy some land or a cow or something, they can get a loan from the group. Lots of NGOs (non-governmental organizations) have been starting these groups all over rural India (SWI has about 2000 self-help groups that they oversee) and the government has been working to start them as well. The health workers in Bolaigaon are women from the villages who are involved in these groups; each worker oversees about 10 groups in villages near where they live. So the health workers not only help to run the self-help groups, but then they also teach lessons during the group meetings. The topics for the lessons range from health and hygiene to social issues. The workers are all women from the villages, and it’s a very blended group; some of the women have never been to school, some got through first or second grade, and some got all the way to tenth. The sisters have about 28 health workers and four supervisors who run self help groups in every village within 3 panchayats (counties) and have seen a lot of successes in their programs. It was amazing to see the health workers during our meeting, they were so excited to meet us and ask us all sorts of questions about where we’re from and what we do and tell us all about their programs and what they’ve accomplished. It was really incredible to be surrounded by so many empowered women.

Every morning Erin and I would wake up early for Morning Prayer with the sisters, have breakfast, and get ready to start our day. Around 9:00 one of the supervisors would come to meet us and then we would head out with Sr. Anisha for one of the villages. The first day we visited the nearby villages, the other days we would walk for about an hour, hour and a half. When we got to the villages we would walk around to a few people’s houses, and then meet with most of the women in the village. They would ask us a lot of questions, like whether we grow rice where we’re from and what our climate is like and we would ask them questions like what type of agriculture they had and what other projects their groups had been involved in. We probably visited about 8 or 9 villages during the week and it was amazing to see all the differences in how they built their houses, what language they spoke, and the different ways that they have incorporated these self-help groups into their villages.

Bondita, one of the supervisors that had been bringing us to some different villages, invited us to her home. It was very similar to most of the homes that we visited: it was built sort of like a compound, with a courtyard in the middle that the rooms opened into. There would be one or two rooms that the family lived in, a kitchen, and a storage area. Most of the homes are built out of mud, some have bamboo supports within the mud walls (sort of like re-bar) and they mostly have straw, clay, or aluminum siding for roofs. Bondita’s house was the first one that I had been in where they had built their walls of aluminum as well. When we got there Bondita surprised us with some lunch, which was quite the feat considering that she had been with us since 9:00 that morning which means she had woken up super early to prepare this for us. We didn’t eat much, but she had made some wonderful treats for dessert, kind of like mini crepes with cinnamon which we filled our mouths with while her adorable 7 year old daughter Birnali danced for us and played with my camera.

Scott came out to join us during the weekend and it was fun to fill him in on some of the adventures that we’d been having and show him some of the villages. We got to take a boat on a rope across a flooded road, ride on a bicycle van (kind of like a bicycle with a truck bed on the back of it), eat sugarcane that we got fresh from a field, all sorts of fun stuff. On Sunday we went to a blessing of a new chapel that had been built in one of the villages, and to get there we each got to ride on the back of a different priest’s motorcycle. After Mass the kids from the hostels performed some dances which were all really good, I’ll try to get the videos up when I have a chance.

All in all it was a really great week. It’s nice to be back in Raiganj and we’re planning a lot of exciting things for the near future, but I’m definitely going to miss the Sisters and all the people in Bolaigaon and I’m sure I’ll go back there at least once more while we’re here.