A Field Worker’s Diary – 58
“The training sessions conducted there were related to the group leadership, management, rules and regulations of committees. I can’t say anything about the subjects the women managed to learn at the Centre, but the inspiration that I got from those women coming from different backgrounds and places and the things I learnt from them were some things that I never learnt at any training.”
When we hear the name Kotappakonda in Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh, we all remember the famous village temple festival. The hill-village, which is usually tumultuous with lakhs of devotees thronging the village, the electric ‘Prabhalu’, the recording dances, etc., during the Mahashivratri festival, is quite a sleepy village the rest of the time. Lying exactly in the middle of Chilakaluripeta and Narasaraopeta towns, the village is home to a Technology Training and Development Centre (TTDC) set up by the District Rural Development Agency (DRDA). Dormitories that could accommodate almost 100 people, kitchen, dining hall, training halls with all sorts of facilities, this Centre is convenient for residential training. It is said that the centre was established due to the aspirations and efforts of Late Sri. Kodela Siva Prasad to develop Kotappakonda. While I was working in DRDA’s poverty reduction project, I had to work for some months as the coordinator of this Centre. As we had already formed women’s Self-Help Groups (SHGs), their village level federations and mandal level Samakhyas through the project, this Centre was selected to give training to the representatives of these federations. There were 23 mandals under our project at the time. Under them, there were 23 Mandal Samakhyas, with every mandal having at least 25 village organizations with their office bearers; every village and mandal level federation also had various committees. All these Samakhyas and committees’ representatives received training in Kotappakonda Centre only. As the Centre in-charge, my work was to prepare monthly training schedules and coordinate the training sessions as per the schedule.
The project director instructs as to which Mandal samakhya members need to be called for training in that month, which committees require special training, etc. Based on the instructions, we had to prepare a schedule and inform to the district resource persons and mandal level coordinators.
Every Monday morning, my work started by receiving a large number of women coming from various mandals, allotting them dormitories, making arrangements for their snacks and meals, with the week going by without giving me a few minutes to spare till the weekend. There were four training halls in the Centre. Resource persons used to come from the district headquarters and conduct training classes. In addition to providing them the necessary equipment needed for training and helping them with their training, I also had to take care of the center’s facilities and arrangements; thus, my weekdays went by in a hurry. Most of the training programs went on for 3 days. Once every three days, one batch went back after completing training and a new batch came. Sundays were holidays. But if I go home for Sunday, I can’t be back early Monday morning; so, in those 4-5 months at the Centre, I went home only two times. In the rest of the weekends, the Centre became my workplace and home.
On Sundays, there is no movement of people around the Centre. Watchman and his family, the cook and I used to be the only people there. “Oh, no! There is nobody nearby. What are you doing staying here alone on holidays?” Many of the women who came for training used to ask me. But it had a great facility. Every Saturday evening, after all the trainees left, I and the watchman’s children used to go to Narasaraopet town on a bus. We used to return the DVDs that we had rented in the previous week and search for new movie DVDs and take them. Since it is considered almost a sin to come to Narsaraopet and not eat the famous pulibongaralu, we used to have them and then only return back to the Centre. All the Sundays were spent watching those DVDs on the TVs in the vast training halls and making our cook prepare my favorite dishes; I spent my Sundays like some sort of a queen.
Keeping aside my personal escapades, all the women who came for training also spent their time at the Centre equally happily. They were all rural poorest of the poor women. For most of them, it was the first time travelling without families and spending time in a different place. Before starting the training sessions, we used to make them play various games in the ice breaking session. We used to ask them to recollect the happiest and saddest occasions in their lives and share them if they wanted to. They used to be shy, some would laugh a lot, some would cry, but in contrast to their everyday lives, they enjoyed spending time with women like them. The women, who came in alone, fearfully, used to go back with collection of friends and many wonderful memories.
After the mornings were over with training sessions, the women used to finish their dinner and lay back on the grass in the huge lawn in the middle of the Centre and chit-chat. Quite a lot of them had never been to a school. It was a great relaxing period in these women’s lives, who spent all of their days cooking for their families and going to daily wage labor without a second to spare for leisure, to listen to lessons in a classroom, eating food cooked by somebody else, and sitting down to talk with friends in the evening. Even I used to lie on the lawn along with them and see them. Our Centre was right below a hill.
From our vantage point, we could see the huge statue of Lord Shiva that was built beside the ghat road on the hill. On full moon nights, if we laid back on the lawn in our Centre and looked at the sky, it would look as though the real moon was really sitting on the matted dreadlocks of Lord Shiva himself. Just looking at Shiva carrying moon on his head and the women putting the burden of responsibilities off the shoulders for a few days was a very lovely experience for me. The training sessions conducted there were related to the group leadership, management, rules and regulations of committees. I can’t say anything about the subjects the women managed to learn at the Centre, but the inspiration that I got from those women coming from different backgrounds and places and the things I learnt from them were some things that I never learnt at any training.
Bharathi Kode