Akkarapettai

“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. If you have come here because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” – cant' remember...





I spent two days visiting my friend and Indicorps Fellow, Alesha, down at her placement in Akkarapettai, Nagapattinam. She is working on empowering teachers who are involved in an activity-based educational centre there. I saw the center, and where she lives and the people that she is interacting with. It was great, after months of hearing so many stories about all of it, to put it into an actual context.

Alesha is living a village life there in Akkarapettai. Whereas I am working with people of fishing communities, Alesha is integrated into one. But the biggest difference of all is that she is living with an actual, real life family. Her life has some sense of normalcy, of routine. She has her daily chores (refer to picture of her helping to carry in the daily dose of water – needed for cooking, drinking, washing dishes, bathing, washing clothes… would take one person well over an hour to bring a sufficient amount of water to the house, making repeat trips). She has her place in the life of the family.

She sleeps on the floor. They go to sleep by 10. The mom wakes up around 5ish to start the daily chores before she has to get her kids up, get them ready for school, send them off, then be at work herself. Around 5:45 she starts yelling at the kids to wake up. I refused to actually sit up until 6. It’s at this time that Alesha’s water carrying activities seem to generally begin. I went with her the first morning and offered to carry the small pot of water back, but was reluctant to help again after all the women started laughing at me. So I swept instead.

Then of course, there was the fact that I didn’t sleep AT ALL the first night. There is no real door on the house. Just a metal grate with BIG openings, that BIG things could run in through. We were sleeping right in front of this. It was a restless night where I probably got 1 hour of sleep, off and on. Then there was the second night. Even despite mongoose incident (yes it was an incident, Alesha!) and waking up to find myself laying on top of a colony of ants and being bitten, it was amazing to me what exhaustion can cause you to overlook.

So apparently Alesha’s villages has mongooses—mongeese?—and I really don’t know if this is true of all fishing villages. We decided that they eat eggs, but probably not fish… As we were walking around in the evening, a HUGE animal ran across the path in front of us, in between the houses. When I lay down to sleep on Night #2, I saw the mongoose (I wouldn’t have known what the oversized ugly rat thing if Alesha hadn’t mentioned it earlier) run into our house compound. It ran around the bathroom area, literally a few feet from where I was. Alesha pretended to be unconcerned. (I really do applaud her for this.) I was a bit nervous, and tried to use Alesha as a shield from any potential rodents or mammals for the rest of the night.

It was great to see a Fellow’s project – their challenges, but mostly their triumphs. Their hard work. Their integration into a community. Their understanding with the people there. Their camaraderie. Their common spirit of service.