Cowboys And Indians - Village People

Meet Lulu. He’s 24 and he works as a Village Facilitator in a project run by Ekta, a human rights organisation here in Koraput, India.

He’s about to start work on a project that will see him and his 59 colleagues, in total 30 men and 30 women, visit 1,000 villages over the next two months. Their job is to raise awareness amongst village people about a whole range of health issues. This ranges from simply knowing that you should wash your hands before eating and after going to the toilet, right through to HIV/AIDS awareness, the importance of breast-feeding, health checks during pregnancy, routine immunisations for children and why girls need to go to primary school as well as boys.

“There is no education to help them provide a livelihood for their children.”

They work in pairs, so Lulu will normally be accompanied by a female colleague like his friend Bharati. They are provided with a range of resources written in Oriya, the local language, and by working in male-female teams they are able to better target themselves to the audience, particularly as they are often dealing with gender-sensitive issues.

Lulu says that he does this job because he’s from this region himself, and wants to help “inter-area” people. By this, he means those people who fall through the cracks because they live in villages so remote that they are cut off from the services available in towns and cities. “There is no education to help them provide a livelihood for their children,” he says.

He’s got some long days ahead of him. “We have to manage our time,” he tells me, “because we have to do things the people’s way, not our way.” They work in two days cycles and a normal working day will start at around 6 or 7am, when he’ll meet villagers at their homes and invite people to take part in focus groups later in the day.

As Lulu says, they always have to be ready to adapt to specific circumstances, but usually from 9 until 11 he and his colleague will go to the local school to talk to the children about hand-washing and why girls should be in class too.

At lunch time, they’ll make sure everyone is washing their hands properly, and explaining about the rather unappetizing risks of diarrhoea.

During the afternoon they’ll work in focus groups with people from target groups – they’ll talk to 15-24 year olds about sexually transmitted diseases, and young women about the health checks they’ll need if they become pregnant.

In the evening they’ll show a video – or, if electricity isn’t available, they’ll rope in some local people and school children for a community theatre production.

The following day they’ll be back in town to interact with the community again and make sure that the previous day’s activities are being put into use. Then it’s off to a new village to meet with key people and discuss what issues the town needs addressing.

This sort of outreach work is the only way to reach people in a world far removed from instant global communication. The only way to spread essential messages is to go out and visit each village. For Lulu, it is a way of serving his community. As he puts it, “I just want to help people lead a healthy life.”

Words and photos: Kevin E.G. Perry

For more information about Ekta, please visit www.ekta.org.in [1]