From the Field: Volunteer Essay
July 9th 2009
We will not get used to this place. We will not get used to these sights. We will not get used to these sounds and these scents. There is newness here in Tamil Nadu, India, that permeates through all life—through every peripatetic piece of trash, every sad-eyed, broad-smiled face of a child, every village road and every vein. The passing richness flows openly through Kanchipuram, amplifying life, empowering everything we do. This place is so peculiar, so radically different that we will not become accustomed to it. Rather, we will drink in these sights, smells and sounds with no regard for our own limits, no thought given to our mental threshold, because in this case, bigger is better.
The mission of our Volunteer Summer group is serious and multi-faceted: to aid RIDE—a grassroots NGO—in improving the quality of life in and around Little Kanchipuram, the community that has welcomed us. As we have learned from our host Jeyaraj and his infinitely generous daughter Jeno, RIDE gives its support to over 1,000 groups in Tamil Nadu, among these, self-help micro-loan groups for women. We were truly fortunate to have met with some of these groups. Seated in the courtyard of a temple, our group of volunteers sat across from a crowd of women draped in saris of every color, their eyes and smiles as bright and warm as the Indian sun. As our translator and guide, Jeno explained to us that RIDE taught these women to save and manage their finances, to use their money wisely so as to directly improve their lives.
The women have used these tactics in their own entrepreneurial endeavors. One woman received a loan from her group to buy silk so she could sew and sell saris; another to purchase fish from the coast to be resold in Kanchipuram. If anything, the fact that these women took time out of their days to meet with us was evidence enough that RIDE is doing genuinely good work here.
Our involvement with RIDE mainly comes into play at the construction site. Each day as we work, a new building for women's self-help groups grows steadily. Once completed, women will be able to use the building to learn, train and work. They will be able to cultivate skills that may in turn help them to help themselves, in true self-help practice.
It is difficult to imagine that we have only spent two weeks in little Kanchipuram. The days creep by slowly; they are fat with experience, plump with richness. The weeks still manage to dissolve before our eyes, like parts of us do each time we walk on Temple grounds, amidst great stone statues of Hindu gods, entrenched in the thickness of historical and contemporary Hinduism.
Our lives here hold meaning, even if we grapple with the dichotomy between our expectations and reality. Regardless of our own questions about the nature of all things, about the multitudes of straw-roofed huts that populate our windows as we drive, about the colored horns of ox that pull ubiquitous carts; regardless of the poverty and the strife we see, regardless of the struggle we experience when things don't seem as bad as we were expecting, and regardless of the reality that indeed things are that bad, we merely need to dig deeper…Regardless of all of these things, we will not ever get used to this place. We will love it intensely, we will hate it passionately, we will gawk without fail each time we pass an elephant on the road and we will be a little electrified every time we walk the ten steps to breakfast. No, we will not get used to this place, at least not anytime soon.
—Zachary Solomon
