It Only Takes One Child To Raise A Village

Manappe sits on the verandah of her home at Thekkupana Ooru. She is unlettered she says

Manappe, an old woman, sits on the verandah of her home in Thekkupana Ooru (hamlet), Attapady, a tribal belt in Kerala, clutching a bag of beans that she has foraged for in the wild. We ask her age, she shrugs saying she does not know. With a sigh of resignation, Manappe says she has no padippu (education). She gesticulates with her thumb, explaining that she uses her digits for everything, including “voting”. For a moment, one confronts a Newtonian dilemma (as in the Hindi film) and wonders if it’s a thumb impression that sets the electoral exercise of the largest democracy rolling. Of course, it is. 

 

Kalliamma feeding her goats at her home in Thekkupana Ooru. She pins her hopes on 10-year-old Rangappan, who is attending classes at Project Shine

But, times are a changing and, the winds of learning are ruffling and shaking up the backwardness of sleepy, laidback Attapady and propelling it to newer vistas.  Not knowing your age will be a thing of the past or navigating the multi-tier system of our democracy will soon be child’s play. Behind Manappe’s home reside Kalliamma and Nagappan who have three children. One of their children, Rangappan, 10, attends the weekend class of Project Shine, which is training tribal children, below the age of 12, to appear for the national level entrance exams for admissions to Sainik and Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya schools. Kalliamma comes down from the forested hill, with a heavy bundle of firewood on her head, to greet the facilitators of Project Shine who are visiting the homes of their students. Kalliamma, bone weary, wipes the sweat off her face with a cloth. Even as she mixes the feed for the cow in a bucket she tells us that Nagappan is not inclined to doing much work. Bereft of any whining, in a matter-of-fact tone, she adds, “He hardly has any work, besides he does not like to help with the collection of firewood or herding of goats.I help out in the anganwadi for which I get a monthly salary of Rs 3000. My two older sons are in the boarding. My hope is pinned on Rangappan. He’s studying well.” 

 

Nagappan, Kalliamma with their 3-year-old son Kailash at their home in Thekkupana Ooru. Their older son Rangappan, 10, is attending classes at Project Shine.

The other parents too applaud Project Shine’s efforts and hope it would lift their children from this social and educational morass to a realm of knowledge and better life. The most astounding change is that the children’s aspirations are not corralled but see a huge leap: A goat herder’s child dreams of becoming a teacher, a jeep driver’s son is determined to be an army officer while a labourer’s son stresses he must become a doctor to tackle the health problems in Attapady.   

 
Sivakami, 10, (lying down), who wants to become a collector, listens to Lekhamol P T as she talks to them before class starts at Project Shine.

Ask V Vismaya, 11, of  Dhaivakundu ooru whose mother Lekshmi is a goat herder and she says she wants to become a Malayalam teacher while 10-year-old Sivakami, from Kookampalayam ooru, says her dream of becoming a collector just grew in her mind one day. “I did not know what I wanted to be so I thought hard about it and then it came to me. As a collector I can build houses for the poor,” she says. Litty Mathew, co-founder of CARSEL, says that when they started Project Shine in June 2015, the children’s dreams were then limited, at the most they could think of was becoming a driver or a teacher. “They had seen little of the outside world.”
 

Morning Walk is a ritual at Attapady: From Left: Facilitator Shanesh V N, Co-founders of CARSEL, Manoj Gopalakrishnan, Babu Mathew, Litty Mathew, Facilitators Uma VN, Pranav Ramachandran, Nikhil P S, Ashwini P J

Project Shine came to Attapady on a lark- a kind of nostalgic whim that sprouts at alumni meetings where old students bounce off grand ideas and visions of giving back to society. So it was at the Sainik-school-1991-batch-hosted- alumni meeting. Babu Mathew, researcher and co-founder of CARSEL (Centre for Advanced Research in socio-emotional learning) was at the meeting with his wife Litty, a data analyst. Someone in the group pushed the thought that it would be good to teach the tribal children of Attapady and help them get into Sainik school. Babu and Litty readily volunteered to give it a try banking on their experience of conducting socio-emotional learning workshops for school children and teachers. According to the Mathews, they reckoned it would be a simple feat: rent out a building, hire a couple of teachers and run a full-fledged tutorial with the alumni funding the project. Thus began Mathew and Litty’s many trips to Attapady to find children below 10 years to groom for the exam and, after five trips they were up against a blank wall: “No school, government or private, was interested in the children leaving their school to go off to a military school even if it meant improvement in their overall personality and welfare. We would go to the various hamlets and come back empty handed.” says Mathew. 
 At that time the tribal area was steeped in multiple problems of malnutrition and infant deaths, joblessness and alcoholism and much more. These problems had confounded successive governments and in 2013 it particularly came into national focus when as many as 31 infants died in a single year. Attapady’s human development index was stunted compared to the rest of Kerala and government ineptitude to deal with this special region and their complex problems only widened the chasm. A massive governmental intervention of Rs 125 crores saw the appointment of Dr Seema Bhaskar as the CEO of National Rural Livelihood Mission. The Kerala government’s imminent need was food and nutrition, social development and capacity building in the area. Even as various projects under the aegis of Kudumbashree were being rolled out full steam, the then sub-collector, P B Nooh, felt it pertinent to lend the Mathews a hand when he heard about Project Shine. “Here was a couple who was confident that they could do make a change in the children’s lives, I took a quick decision and gave them permission to go to the hamlets, the government schools and speak to children and teachers. There seemed no harm in it because they needed no financial assistance. They were extremely committed and it was not easy. Though I was not part of Project Shine, I would visit often and saw the children transform.”

Finally the Mathews made a list of 24 children and to evaluate the standard of these class five students they were given a simple exam. Many of children did not know how to read a question paper or do simple mathematics and the language exam was beyond the comprehension of 90 per cent of the children. The Mathews were dismayed and they knew they had a tough job on their hands. Nevertheless, the alumni decided that Project Shine should not be abandoned and if it could help even one child the effort would not be wasted. That was when the Mathews decided that they would make the seven-hour journey every weekend to coach the students themselves.
 
 Uma's class

Lekhamol P T, 28, a guest teacher in Sholayur HS School, heard that Project Shine was scouting for teachers and she joined up. “The children were divided into sub-groups of eight and we had only a few weekends before the entrance exam. Majority of the children could not read a question paper and our task was to make them understand the mathematical concepts and help them join the letters of the alphabets into words as quickly as possible,” says Lekhamol. “Even as we coached them intensively, we also had to deal with their hygiene, health and emotional well being. We designed the modules in such a way that it would be group activity and each child would help the other too. Unlike the regular schools where the curriculum encourages an unhealthy competition, here learning is not an individual activity. The children look out for each other.”  Using socio-emotional learning techniques, the Mathews started getting engaged in the learning process. Four areas need simultaneous development: academics, behaviour, relationship and decision making. It is in the pre-teen years that the child begins to self-identify and often familial conflicts create an emotional disconnect between parents and the child and for tribal children it’s worse because they cannot cope with the others in the classroom either. Says Saji Bomman, 33, the trustee of Kannavu Makkal Trust at Wayanad, run by the tribals who studied in the Kanavu gurukul started by K J Baby, “I dropped out of school in 1996 when I was in class five. The mainstream education is very rigid and in our hamlets we speak our own dialects so learning Malayalam is strange to us. My parents were uneducated and they could not guide me either. When I joined Kanavu Gurukul I realised I did not know how to read and write. So I had to relearn. We have around 30 children here and we give them basic training in languages and maths. Then they decide if they want a mainstream certification or go for skill development.”
        Maths is a social activity: Tribal children have fun with stones as Facilitator Ramesh guides them

The first batch wrote the entrance exam in January 2016. The exam centre was in Kozhikode and many of the children had never left the Attapady hills and this was their first journey into the outside world. The long wait for the results was equally excruciating and according to Nooh the tension was the same as “when my own child is awaiting the results. Seven children made it to Sainik school the first year. I was overjoyed.” That was not the end of the story. The data available gives a mean picture that in the past fifty years as many as eleven tribal children from Attapady had got into Sainik school but had failed to complete their education there. So the Mathews know it is not just the admission but the completion of the schooling also has to be ensured. They took the seven children to their home in Piravom for three weeks to acclimatize them to boarding school rules and modern gadgets. 
         Maths is a social activity: A child hugs facilitator Shanesh V N as he helps them understand a concept

The seven children were put in Rajaji house at Sainik school under housemaster Mascon M. “Initially, these children had a lot adjustment problems but they have improved vastly and most of them are brilliant in sports. When the second batch came this year, we have asked the older children to take one child under their wing and mentor them,” says Mascon. In 2016-2017, a hundred children were trained by Project Shine and four children got into Sainik school and five into Navodaya Vidyalaya school including two girls. 

 Shivakumar, best footballer in the sub junior level at Sainik School

Meanwhile, Shivakumar B, 12, from the first batch in Sainik school, picked up medals as the best footballer and in athletics. Almost all the tribal children have a love for football but back home in Attapady, none of the schools have proper play grounds. “True,” says M B Rajesh, Palakkad MP, “Attapady is a treasure trove of natural sports talent. Even without proper training many of the tribal students win medals at the state school meets. We want to rectify the deficiency that there are no grounds so a sports school by NABARD is on the anvil. Currently, football and volleyball coaching camps are being conducted during vacations and this will be expanded to all the hamlets with the aid of Kudumbashree’s network of youth clubs.” 
 
 Cadets @ Sainik School

In 2016, Ramesh G A, from the Irula tribal community in Attapady, was one among the seven new facilitators to join Project Shine. Though he was a guest teacher at Agali government school, his experience with the children changed his approach to teaching. “Unlike in the regular schools, we connect with the parents every weekend and even visit them to enquire about their well being. Though what we are going to teach is pre-determined, the facilitators are given the freedom to design how it should be taught. I may use stones or chairs or paper money to create a market or bank atmosphere to teach the child the concept of addition and subtraction. The fact that so many children got into these two schools is validation that it’s effective. I feel good to give back to my own community.” 
 
 Kids in Nikhil M Z's class use Manisha's concept for subtraction

Another facilitator Nikhil M Z, affirms the approach is different and the facilitators have to come down to the level of the children to teach them, one of the reasons that everyone sits on the floor while learning. “I too have learned from these children. In fact, this year one child named Manisha, devised a new method of subtraction of big numbers. It is so simple that I then taught it to the others. We call it Manisha’s concept. If we leave it to the children they will come up with their own method of learning.” Project Shine is training the third batch of a hundred children and both government and private support has been extended to them. Though only ten per cent manage to get into the two schools, the training at Project Shine improves the social behaviour and academics of the other children vastly.

There have been tangible changes on the ground level too. One of my students, says Lekhamol, has told her mother to always boil water before drinking. After the first year, the children always come dressed in their best to the weekend classes, the older children have advised them to do so. If the aphorism “it takes a village to raise a child” holds good then it can be equally said that it only takes one child to raise a village.

  In uniform at Sainik School

 (An edited version was first published by Outlook Magzine)