The Gender Blog

One day during the first of my trips to Goa last year, I found myself improvising a map of the world with a balloon and then drawing a map of India in the sand with a stick; I was trying to show some of the children at Rainbow House where Goa is in relation to other parts of India and also in relation to the rest of the world.

Renuka was both puzzled and fascinated as to how England could be so far away AND in a different time zone,  so we used a second balloon to show the sun, and how it moves around the world, making it dark in England when it’s sunny in India and so on.  By the time of my second trip,  I was far better prepared and arrived with a case full of far more useful things for the children: underwear, hairbands, hairbrushes – and an atlas and an inflatable globe.  
Here’s Jyoti, the sixteen year old girl sponsored by my friend Diane, pointing to California.

I’m already planning my return trip for later this year and am far more wised up as to what to take Renuka (anything red) and what she does and doesn’t like (for the latter: anything “girly”, pink or that requires her to sit still) and also what the El Shaddai team would find useful to have as donations.

So the arrival of TV presenter Kate Humble’s new venture,  a website called Stuff Your Rucksack , struck a definite chord with me.  Her mantra,  based on her travels in the developing world is “if only I’d known before I came away” and she says:

“I’ve done a lot of travelling in the developing world through my job and I’d get to a school or an orphanage and they wouldn’t have something very simple like maps or exercise books. I used to kick myself because invariably these were things lying around at home that I could easily have stuffed in my own rucksack.”

Kate has hit on the fact that many people,  like me,  visit places around the developing world and want to do, or bring, the right thing, but are hamstrung by their lack of local knowledge and wary of, as she puts it,  ”dumping unwanted gifts on local communities”.  So she has developed a website with a map where,  if you click on a specific country,  you can link to local projects and find a list of what the people who work on the ground would find most useful.

Here,  for a great and very personal example,  is a link to one of El Shaddai’s shelters, where we can see  that they’d find it useful to be gifted toiletries, books and educational DVDs.

Fabulous work, Kate – pack a bag,  change a life.

You know that something’s really made an impact on you when it lodges in the brain and sticks with you for years, don’t you?  My “brainworm” is about the One Laptop Per Child project and I was delighted to see an update on their progress in the Sunday paper.

In October 2006,  I attended the Women’s Forum for the Economy & Society in Deauville,  northern France – a three day conference attended by women from all over the world who come together annually to discuss how to further women’s participation in business and in life.  

One of the (many, many) lunchtime events featured a speaker from OLPC,  then a project in its relative infancy.  Her name was Mary Jo and she talked about the goals of the project – at its core, to create and then provide a basic laptop for under privileged children to use as an educational tool.

(Now further refined as  “… to create educational opportunities for the world’s poorest children via a “rugged low-cost, low-power laptop” – “)

As if it were yesterday,  I remember sitting in that conference room, eating rubber chicken (yes, even in France) and listening to Mary Jo tell us  how computer access could transform the lives and the educational prospects of children in developing countries, how the laptop model on which they were working would be super robust, have an extra long battery life, come pre-loaded with all types of educational and games based software;  how it would have a special anti-glare screen (on which this lady had herself been working, with Intel) so that it could be used outside and yet still be visible in bright sunshine, and how it would eventually be part of a giant hub of wireless enabled laptops so that the children could access the internet.

And the price of this bit of kit?

$100, in 2006.

I’ve kept an eye on the One Laptop website since then and watched their evolution,  but Sunday’s Observer article really brought home their three-plus years of progress. Follow the link and see for yourself what a difference it’s making to the children of Rwanda and how 1.4 million laptops (not quite yet at that magical $100 each price point, but they’re getting there) have already been rolled out to children in 35 countries which include Haiti, Afghanistan, Brazil and Uruguay.

One of the best days on my recent trip to Goa was when I took my own laptop out to Rainbow House with me.  One of the other volunteers had shared her photos of the school’s sports day, and I thought the children might like to see some of the pictures.  I set myself and the laptop up on the verandah,  booted up the photos – and within seconds I was completely covered in children,  swarming over me and the computer,  completely fascinated by the screen and the images.  They played with it until the battery died and absolutely loved looking at the photos and playing games – so I can completely see how it, as a piece of technology,  does serve so many purposes for children everywhere: it makes learning fun,  it’s a new gadget and it’s a unifying tool.  As the article suggests:

“…computers can enable children to learn how to learn for themselves through playful problem-solving and that this will lead to their becoming better-rounded human beings.”

As my friend CJ would say, it’s “very pleasing”  to see that PinkStinks’s campaign against supermarket giant Sainsbury’s has been successful; thousands of children’s dressing-up outfits have now been cleared from shelves after complaints (via a PinkStinks co-ordinated campaign) that they promote sexist stereotypes.

As reported here in the Daily Telegraph, Sainsbury’s (“Try something new today!” – indeed …) were merrily selling nurses’ outfits “for girls” and doctors’ kits labelled “for boys”, along with pilot and “superhero” costumes – but these have now been removed and will be replaced with a new range of gender neutral dressing up outfits.

Nice work, PinkStinks – and a great testimony to the strength of their pester power social media campaign (which I joined even though I don’t have children myself, let alone daughters or even nieces).

Whenever I hear stories like this, or read about manufacturers and retailers unwittingly promoting gender and/or inappropriate messaging and stereotypes (wasn’t it Woolworths – RIP – who hit the headlines a few years ago for launching a range of pink painted bedroom furniture aimed at little girls named the “Lolita”?), I remind myself of a small boy called John and how invidious and impactful gender images can be. 

John is the son of a female friend who works as a GP; she is evidently from a very smart family, because her sister is also a doctor. One day, returning home from a visit to his aunt’s house, where my friend and her sister had been talking medical shop, John, then aged five, asked his mother:

“Mummy – when I grow up, can I become a doctor too, or is it only ladies who are allowed to do that?”

Rainbow House (RH) is El Shaddai’s residential home for girls aged 8-13 (when they’re aged 2-7, they live next door, at House of Kathleen, and there are two similar homes in the area for boys) and is currently home to 51 girls, including my sponsored “daughter” Renuka. The children sleep in bunk-bedded dormitories and are cared for by four full time staff plus Stella,  the manager.

(One thing I always have to remember when thinking about what to buy Renuka is that each child has relatively little private space in which to store things;  they each have a small, cube shaped locker and access to a hanging rail for their clothes,  and that’s it).

The children are organised into groups and Stella tells me that this is to help to teach them teamwork, responsibility and leadership. The teams are named Love, Joy, Peace and Kindness and each team has a colour which they then wear as part of their school uniform.  Renuka is in the “Love” group and their colour is red,  so she wears a red polo shirt for school and always tries to choose red clothes from the communal pile in her dormitory.  Most recently, I’ve seen her in a red Bayern Munich t-shirt and a red swimsuit bearing the Welsh flag …

Part of the way in which the charity aims to teach responsibility is by making the children part of the routine of the home; for them,  it’s more than just a boarding school environment – they are part of the very fabric of the place. And they have a long and busy day,  Monday to Friday: this is their daily routine irrespective of age.

5.45am                        Alarm call and wake up.

6.00am                        Morning prayers; apparently, these are non-denominational and mostly consist of saying “thank you” to an unnamed god or presence.

6.15 – 7am                  “Duty” – this means undertaking chores of various sorts: cooking, cleaning, laundry and so on. Each group is part of a rota and will do different things each week; one evening when I visited,  Renuka emerged from the kitchen covered in flour, as the Love group had evening duty – making chapattis.

7.00 – 7.30am             Breakfast – as prepared by that day’s duty team, who will also have organised the tiffin (lunch) tins too.

7.30 – 8.30am             Wash and dress for school; the uniform is either a pleated skirt or shorts,  topped off with an appropriately coloured polo shirt, and sandals.

8.30 – 8.45am             Medicine: many of the children have ongoing medical issues due to their previous itinerant lifestyles and poor nutrition,  so Stella lines them up at this time and gives them their medications.

8.45am                        Uniform check: are you neat and tidy? Is your hair brushed? Then off you go to school! The children travel by mini-bus, as donated by a British based charity.

9.00 – 4.30pm             At El Shaddai’s own private Shanti Niketan school,  the children are organised into groups on the basis of ability rather than age – so Renuka,  for example, aged 9 and good at maths,  is in a class with children of 12, 13 and 14. All lessons are taught in English,  which is the common language; the children end up in Goa from all over India and many have other languages as their first tongue,  but school work is always done in English. 

At 12 noon,  they break for lunch,  which they eat, seated, from the tiffin tins.

5.00 – 7.00pm             The children arrive back at RH and evening duty commences for the relevant team.  This is also visiting time for sponsors and interested tourists,  so there’s always a stream of people calling into both RH and HoK, sitting on the veranda and playing with the children.

7.00 – 7.30pm             Prayers, followed by dinner.  This is usually vegetarian food (rice and dal, or a vegetable pullao) but they have meat once a week for those who eat it. They sometimes also have laddu, a very sweet Indian pudding; Renuka told me proudly that she is “the very best” at making this.    

7.30 – 8.00pm            More duty – washing up!

8.00pm                        Homework

9.00pm                        Bedtime; lights out by 10.30pm.

At the weekends,  the regime is a little more relaxed,  although the children still have “duty” in the morning; yesterday,  they were washing sheets.  However,  in the afternoon,  it’s the highlight of the week,  when they all pile into the mini-bus for a trip to the beach; they absolutely love this and it’s truly wonderful to see them have a chance to be children.

El Shaddai set up camp on the beach, and,  with a great flair for strategy, take the charity to the people. They have very cleverly realised that the children are their best ambassadors and so simply seeing the kids playing on the beach and splashing in the sea (as opposed to begging or selling jewellery) can give people an awareness of how different life can be with the assistance of ES and other charities.

The afternoon follows a loose structure. Having blown up numerous pairs of armbands and rubber rings, we all charge into the sea and play in the waves (at one point,  I had three small girls hanging off each of my arms). Then it’s out onto the sand for a bit,  with some organised races (relay running,  bunny hopping and so on) and a sand castle building competition. 

The staff then chop up some of the huge pile of fruit donated by the visitors and the children dig in to slices of pineapple and chunks of watermelon;  there’s usually so much left that all four homes can have fruit for the rest of the week.

I was particularly pleased to see so many men joining in and playing with the kids,  as these children really need strong male role models; many of them have been abandoned by their fathers,  or mistreated, victims of neglect, violence and alcohol. And whilst they don’t lack for love and care from the (mostly female) ES staff,  there are fewer men around to provide an alternative view of masculinity,  so the work that these guys do is hugely important, I think,  for both boys and girls. They need to know and see that men can be kind, gentle, playful and fun – all qualities in great abundance at the beach.

Finally,  it’s one last play in the sea – much shrieking of “the big wave! The big wave!!” – before we get dressed, pack up toys, equipment, leaflets, banners and fruit and return back home.

Great fun – and I get to do it all over again today.  I had planned to pack to come home,  but Renuka had remembered that my flight back is actually on Monday and so could see no valid reason at all why I shouldn’t come to the beach on Sunday … so that’s where I’ll be.  Can’t wait.

- but here’s an anecdote anyway,  which I think somewhat bears out my theory that the begging culture here is supported by western tourists.

I was in a beach front restaurant yesterday where, by chance, I was the only such tourist sitting at the front, overlooking the beach.

In the 90 minutes that I was there, I was the focus of a variety of beggars – the elderly, the infirm, women holding babies – who all asked me for money and occasionally prodded me with a sharp, insistent finger – but who resolutely ignored the Indian customers (who, it must be said, also ignored them with notable consistency).  I also noticed that we had no child performers while I was there – perhaps they took a look and decided it wasn’t worth their while given the demographics.

Proof of learned behaviour? I think so.  Why waste your time with the people who you know won’t chuck a few rupees your way,  when you can instead focus on the visitors who’ve been proven in the past to be a soft touch?

I went to Anjuna market again today – not particularly to shop (there are only so many sarongs, pashminas and necklaces that one woman needs) but to say hello to the El Shaddai team, drop off my used paperbacks for their bookstall,  soak up the atmosphere and take photos.

I travelled via boat – not an experience that I’d recommend or will be repeating.  It was a small,  six seater boat with an outboard motor, piloted by two psychotics who thought it was fun to gun the boat into 20’ high waves. To be fair,  there were five other people in the boat with me – young “up for it” Russian tourists who loved it; cue much screaming and arm waving as if we were at Big Splash Mountain (or whatever it’s called).  The journey is only a mile or so,  but it took twenty minutes,  due to all of this water based chicanery.

So of course,  we arrived at the market completely soaked – I was absolutely sodden from head to toe, hair to flip-flops, and staggered up the beach as if I were re-enacting the Normandy landings.

To continue the analogy, I then had to fight them on the beaches and fend off the ministrations of the hawk-eyed female beach sellers,  who take up residence on a rock and wait for soaked tourists to drag themselves ashore.

“Hello madam! Oh you are so very wet. Come, come, I help you get dry.  Come to my shop [stall], relax, buy lovely new dry clothes.  My name is Nikita,  what is you? Where you from, how many children you have?”

Etc.

However, the amount of child beggars and performers at the market continues to depress me;  apparently,  people travel from all over western India to participate in this huge orgy of tourism,  and that includes children.

At the market this morning,  I witnessed tiny children performing on a tightrope in front of a paparazzi like array of camera and camcorder wielding western tourists, who then filled the begging bowl which was passed around by the adult ringmaster.

(For obvious reasons … I don’t have any photographs of this event – I actually felt so nauseated by it that I couldn’t bring myself to be part of the throng – but here are, I assume,  the parents,  setting up the tightrope first thing).

What do these visitors think when they get home and show their friends and family that film footage of a tiny child,  perhaps five years old,  balancing on a tightrope – how cute? Isn’t she clever?

Or: “why isn’t she at school?” Or: “what future can she ever have if this is how she spends her time as a child?”

This week,  there are more Western children than usual in evidence,  as it’s the British school holidays, and so the contrast between the children that one sees is particularly pronounced – some are in Ben 10 t-shirts and are on holiday with their parents … others are working or begging,  or both. I was staggered (and disgusted) to see one tourist filming the child performers and then sending his seven-year old son down to the beach to pay the children – with no apparent sense of the irony of this act,  as far as I could see.

Goa seems to be such an economic magnet to so many people from other India states,  particularly Karnataka.  If western tourists stopped making it appear to be so economically advantageous to be either a child who begs or to have a child who you can send out to perform (thus making your child a resource) then perhaps the influx would cease or at least slow down?

I truly believe that every time a tourist gives a child money,  be it for either begging or performing,  they reinforce the notion (to both child and adult) that begging is an economically viable way of spending time and that it is,  in every sense of the word, “worth” it to be on the beach or at the market rather than at school.

The Goans are constantly telling me that their state’s infrastructure (water supplies, electricity, the road system, food supplies, accommodation) can’t cope with this influx of workers from other states and that the Goans disapprove of the children who beg – but yet I don’t see any evidence of the powers that be challenging it – for example,  policing child beggars/performers and/or the adults who visibly control them.

I think I need to go back to Rainbow House again tonight (I’ve been going to see Renuka every few days) in order to remind myself that there is another way and that it’s possible, through the work of El Shaddai and other charities, for children in Goa to have a different, brighter, more hopeful future.

I’ve written before about the number of children I see at the beach – not messing about with buckets and spades or paddling,  but actually working: selling crisps, jewellery, trinkets, performing, begging.

This upsets me terribly,  as does seeing other tourists be,  as I see it,  part of the problem, in that their handing over a few rupees here and there contributes to the concept of children (and their connected adults) viewing the beach as an economic opportunity.

However, this weekend I saw some children from the El Shaddai homes,  who came to “my” bit of the beach and,  as you can see here,  had a fabulous time:

It so wonderful to see children behaving as children should – messing about and playing.

Namaste from Goa, where I am currently on Day Three of my stay – I’m loving being back and I’m also enjoying weather which is approximately 30 degrees (C) warmer than in London. I mentioned last month that this was my snowy outlook in early January; well, fast forward a month or so and here’s my view today:

(Yes, I know that “cows on the beach” are something of a cliché in India, but I do think that the little calf is very cute).

I’m staying in a local guest house just behind the beach, and I’ve negotiated a deal with the Goan Portuguese owner that I will help him write copy for his forthcoming website in return for unlimited access to his wireless internet – so I’m currently holed up in a corner of his bar/restaurant area, typing away, feeling hot (because my laptop is plugged in where the fan normally resides) and ignoring the curious looks from passersby.

When I first sat down and booted up, I was surrounded by six waiters, all unabashedly staring at my screen and asking me why I wasn’t sunbathing (“You are on holiday, madam! Not working!”). After trying and failing to explain “blogging”, I reached for my Hindi dictionary and announced that I am a “patrakar” [journalist] which they seemed to get (“newspaper, yes?”) and now they’re leaving me to it, just popping over occasionally to ask if I’d like a fresh lime soda.

My post about Renuka, the little girl I sponsor here in Goa, received a huge amount of hits and comments, both on and offline, the most usual one being “can you tell me more about how I can sponsor a child?” . In response, I’d like to direct you to a couple of websites.

The first one is for the El Shaddai Child Rescue charity – this is a local Goan charity which I’ve supported for a good few years and which now has an option to sponsor a child. Just follow this link and you can see details of the children (both girls and boys) and filter them by age. I notice that the sponsorship model has changed a little since I signed up, so you can now opt to make a one off donation to a specific child too, or purchase a particular item (school books, a cow, a bicycle, care for an HIV+ child) through the “Gift a Smile” option.

Obviously, El Shaddai operates in India, a country very dear to my heart for many years, hence choosing to sponsor a child here. If you’d like to consider helping children in other countries, then I’d suggest you check out Plan, described on their website as:

“ … one of the largest child-centred community development organisations in the world, helping children and their families in 48 of the poorest countries to break the cycle of poverty”.

I raised over £300 for Plan’s “Because I Am a Girl” campaign last October and I’ve also blogged about their recently published book, so hands up – I’m a fan, and the only reason that I haven’t yet sponsored a child via Plan too is due to my current “sabbatical” – but I’ll be on board as soon as I’m working again. The link is here and you can choose the region in which you’d like to support a child – Asia, Africa, Latin America, etc, or allow Plan to choose for you dependent upon need.

Oh,  and – while I’m writing about Plan, there are some photos of the recent book launch event for “Because I Am a Girl” up here on their Flickr site, complete with one of the back of my head.

Mentioning heads – a gentleman has just walked by, balancing a tower of cushions on his head. I don’t think I’m in Kansas anymore, but I am going to quit now before the usual “this time of day” Indian power cut kicks in.

Sometimes I read something and it gives me that light bulb moment feeling wherein a number of strands of thought come together in my head, as if at the hands of a skilled weaver who can take amorphous bits of thread and turn them into a beautiful tapestry.

Last Sunday’s Observer magazine had just such a piece, which featured a cover story on model Erin O’Connor visiting a home workers’ collective for women in Delhi and reporting on their ethical clothing workshops, described in the article as an “innovative and revolutionary ethical fashion experiment”.

By cutting out the middlemen, organising the skilled female home workers and dealing directly with UK and US-based retailers, to date the members of SEWA (aka the All India Federation of Self-Employed Women’s Associations) have (my use of bold):

“ … increased our home workers’ wages by nearly 100 per cent and enabled a lot of women to come out of their homes to a SEWA centre to collect their work and meet. Then they engage with other ideas, like microfinance or education for their children.”

So then I was reminded me of my trip to Bangalore last month, when, at the Confederation of Indian Industry’s workshop on mentoring, I found myself paired with a woman from M&S (my first question: “Are you wearing their clothes?” My second: “Can you get their food in India?” The answers were, respectively, YES and NO).

Her name was Jyotsna, which is a Sanskrit name meaning something like “By the light of the new moon” – isn’t that beautiful? She is in charge of supplier compliance for the south east Asia region and we had a fascinating chat about the challenges clothing manufacturers and retailers (she previously worked for GAP) face in countries such as India with regard to child labour – and the economic need for some communities to have all members of a family in paid employment. I’ve heard a bit about M&S’s Plan A campaign from friends who work for them, plus seen the branded marketing in the stores, but it was very real to hear about it from Jyotsna, particularly when we discussed the dilemmas she faces when she visits communities who actively want to have their children at work – a stance which is obviously in direct contravention to the M&S position on child labour.

There’s a quote from Erin O’Connor in the Observer piece which reminds us that when you -

“… see an embroidered top on the high street …. [it’s] … been made by a very determined pair of hands” –

- and the thought that, depending on the source of the garment, perhaps some of that very tiny, delicate embroidery might have been done by a child’s fingers is truly abhorrent.

The article’s reference to creating a greater need for children to be educated as part of generating an awareness of how to break a cycle of poverty and deprivation, also reminded me of this comment from Plan’s 2009 annual report, The State of the World’s Girls:

“Educated girls become educated mothers with increased livelihood prospects; they also have a greater propensity than similarly educated males to invest in children’s schooling.”

More on Plan’s work soon – oh, and my fundraising for their fantastic “Because I Am a Girl” campaign has now pushed past the £300 mark. Many thanks to everyone who’s donated to date and made such a difference. Some of the women mentioned in the Observer article now earn around £40 a month (compared to around a tenner, previously), just to put that £300 in context.

I wonder what it is about the current humanitarian crisis in Haiti that seems to be resonating with children at the moment?  Of course,  the much publicised achievements of seven year old Charlie Simpson (£145,000 at the last count,  including a £5k donation from Mr Moneybags Cowell) are a clear winner,  but the BBC also showed some footage on today’s lunchtime bulletin relating to schoolchildren undertaking fund raising – without in any way referencing why the children are so moved,  which is the aspect which I find fascinating.

Is it the sheer volume of deaths and impacted lives which means that our children are appalled and want to do something to help make a difference?  Is the 24/7 media culture contributing to their awareness?  Has it (thankfully) been a while since there’s been a humanitarian disaster of this magnitude?  Or are we perhaps seeing the emergence of a new generation of globally minded children who have a more keenly developed social conscience?  Perhaps it’s a mixture of all of the above.

Of course,  one of the many reasons as to why Young Master Simpson’s campaign has done so well is because it went viral – he set up an online charity fund raising page, people shared it,  he raised tons of cash,  then the media picked up on it and hey presto – £145k and rising. Excellent!

However,  by way of a low-tech contrast,  here are a couple of photos which I snapped whilst out walking this morning and which triggered my thoughts around children in the context of Haiti.

Eve, Imogen, Olivia and Grace (sisters and a couple of friends) are baking and selling cakes from their front garden this Saturday afternoon – and to raise awareness,  they have made posters and stuck them to trees in the streets near their home.  I don’t know these small girls at all – but I am very touched that they want to make a difference and help, and I’ll be calling in on Saturday afternoon.

Mmm. Cake.