The Gender Blog

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?

My lovely Goan taxi driver, Satish,  is now so on-board with the type of people related images which interest me when we’re out and about that he often spots them first (usually because I’ve got my eyes clamped shut) when we’re bombing along – and then screeches to a halt.

“Cleo Madam! Good picture for you here!”

And here’s one such example,  spotted earlier this week. It’s part of a nationwide campaign to persuade families of the value of having baby girls, in an attempt to reduce family sizes and prevent gender selective abortion or post-natal infanticide.  

The fine in question is huge: it represents c. £1400, which in a society where a working man can earn and raise a family on £40 per month,  is an almost unimaginable sum.

I’d love to know what statistics, if any,  exist to indicate the success of this campaign;  Satish tells me it’s been running for quite some time.

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.

This is Chandra.  Aged 24, she works on the beach, providing sun lounger based body massages to tourists.  I first got to know her last November,  when she was shadowing her older sister and learning how to give a massage. It’s a popular career option here in Goa;  you learn from another woman and the only investment you need to make is in a large bottle of coconut oil (about 10p) and a flannel with which to remove the sand from your clients’ feet.

At that point, her sister Geetha (aged 37) was the Queen of the Sun Lounger and ruled her section of the beach with a rod of iron.  Geetha had been providing massages for 12 years and charged 500 rupees (c. £6.50) for an hour;  while she slapped the westerners around with coconut oil,  Chandra would crouch at the end of the sun lounger,  watching,  learning and occasionally making herself useful by fetching drinks from the nearby beach shack or adjusting an umbrella.  The beach shack owner paid her around £3.50 per day for helping out. 

On a good day,  Geetha would do 10-12 massages and refused absolutely to allow herself to be bargained down on price or to comply with requests,  usually,  so I was told, from male Russian tourists,  for a massage “around the side” – a euphemism for a “private” massage undertaken without swimwear.  I learned all this at the time and was impressed by her strength of personality and awareness of her own value.

When I came back this year,  there was no sign of Geetha and Chandra appeared to have graduated to Masseuse. When I asked after her sister,  she told me that Geetha has returned to Karnataka in order to have her 7^th child; I was very surprised,  as I’d had no idea that she was pregnant,  but Chandra just shrugged and said “she hide it in sari”. Chandra told me that Geetha would be returning to Goa next November when the 2010/2011 season starts and was keen to retain her pitch on that bit of beach,  so they had agreed between them that Chandra would take over between Christmas and March – providing maternity cover,  I suppose.  

Of course,  Chandra lacks Geetha’s expertise,  so she charges a little less (£5) and is also much less busy – yesterday she did three massages; today, only one.  She manages to keep up with her shack based duties so she does earn that money as her basic wage,  but she’s clearly worried about cash.  Unlike Geetha,  she has more time to chat and is grateful to sit next to a friendly face and talk,  especially if you buy her a Coke or a bottle of water, or both.

Chandra can’t read or write and never went to school;  she has learned (quite good) English and some Russian from working on the beach for the last 8 years. She told me that she and Geetha are the top and tail end of a family of 8 children – Geetha’s the oldest, Chandra is the baby. She also told me that her father drank; he  died when she was 13, leaving Chandra,  the only child still living with her parents, and her mother, virtually destitute.  To help the family finances,  Chandra married aged 14 and went to live,  as is the custom,  with her husband’s family. Shortly afterwards,  her mother moved to Mumbai to live with a cousin and find work and Chandra hasn’t since seen her.  She had her first baby aged 15 and now has three children – two girls and a boy.

She is extremely proud that her children go to school and can read and write;  she wants them all to stay at school until they are at least 16 and to then get good jobs – “never ever work on beach,  not be like me!” she said, with great passion and fervour.

Each October, Chandra and her husband leave their children with his parents and take an 18 hour bus journey from Karnataka to Goa. They rent a room in a village about 5 miles inland and live there until early April. Chandra’s husband works in a clothes shop in the nearby resort of Calangute and seems to keep her on a tight rein; he calls her several times a day to see how much money she’s made and she has told me that he’s “not a good man”. One day, she had a black eye; he’d hit her the night before when she returned home with one thousand rupees (about £13.00) less than she’d previously told him she’d earned;  she thinks that she lost the money from her waist purse when she opened it and the wind blew the notes away.  Like her father (in fact,  like many men, according to other stories I’ve heard here), he drinks and,  in that regard, Chandra is happy that her children are away from him for half the year,  as she tells me that her in-laws are “very good people”.

Back in Karnataka, Chandra doesn’t work and told me that she enjoys being at home with her mother-in-law, cooking and cleaning. Her husband takes work on a day to day basis as a labourer and she says that they rely on their savings from Goa to tide them through between April and October, as sometimes her husband will only work for a few days each week,  or not at all.

Goa is full of Chandras, Geethas and women like them; just another aspect of the prism of womanhood in this vast, mysterious country.

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.

These girls are named Priya and Lakshmi – here they are waiting for the school bus at 7.30 one morning. The bus was late,  so I tested them on their English vocabulary homework while we waited – they for the bus,  me for my lift to my yoga class.

As I sit and type this on a sunny Sunday morning,  this is my view -

I have taken up residence at a table located in a corner of the bar attached to my guest house; the busy street is to my left,  and the bar lies ahead of me.  I came down this morning for my breakfast of black chai, fresh juice and an idli to discover a “Reserved” sign on the table – just for me,  so that I can use the one power point available this side of the bar.

It’s fascinating to see the street come to life as the day begins – and I can’t help but notice that all the early day labour is being undertaken by women.  They are outside from 7am – sweeping,  putting out rubbish, opening up their shop’s shutters, setting out their tables of jewellery and souvenirs. Anita and Savitha, who have shops opposite this bar, are open for business at 8am and never close before 11pm,  7 days a week – and they both have four children each and do all the cooking and cleaning for their families. Josie,  who runs the adjacent beauty salon,  has been out to sweep the path and put out her signs advertising facials, massages, manicures, pedicures and skin whitening (more on this in the future).

By way of a contrast,  I am sitting here researching and writing an article on the Downing Street Project which will be published on The GlassHammer website later this month, having also just read the opening chapter of Avivah Wittenberg-Cox’s (wonderful) forthcoming book, “How Women Mean Business”. 

The issues faced by women in India, the UK, the USA and elsewhere are so different in some ways and not in others and I feel,  as I sit here with a glass of watermelon juice,  that I can see a microcosm of them all in front of me,  on my laptop and around me in the street.

Politics. Work. Balance. Family. Economic independence.

I’ve written a lot about children on here; yesterday, I started thinking about women in India at the other end of the age spectrum.

On my last visit,  I blogged about one of the beach based fruit sellers, Mama, who walks the beach every day,  carrying a 30kg/66lbs basket of fruit, nuts and coconuts on her head.

I saw her again yesterday,  at the end of her day,  when her basket was considerably lighter after 8 hours of walking up and down the beach, but still pretty heavy.  She looked absolutely exhausted and I sat and had another chat with her (she remembered me from November) and bought her a snack and a drink.

During the course of our chat,  she told me that she is aged SEVENTY. I was aghast – imagine working so hard at any age, carrying that heavy basket in very hot and humid temperatures,  but especially when you’re 70. I asked her when she might retire and she shrugged and said “never” – so I guess she has to keep on working.

What a hard, hard life for any woman,  but particularly for someone of that age.

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.