Bringing change, gently

Auroville Today wrote about Thamarai in January 2019. Since then, there have been some new and positive developments.

Since its inception, Thamarai has been moving from place to place (either rented or freely offered by generous friends and supporters). The team wanted to settle down and put down roots. This happened in the year 2017, when Bridget and Alok (from Auroshilpam), applied for and were granted joint stewardship of Auroville land  in nearby Annai Nagar village.

This land consists of two parcels facing each other across a municipal road. One parcel of land became a sports ground. This happened because Thamarai, which encourages children to articulate their dreams and aspirations, decided to implement a child’s wish. This was to bring peace and harmony in his village through sports.

The other parcel consists of a narrow piece of land which had been encroached, and which was then cleared with the help of the Auroville Land Board and the local Panchayat (village council). Thamarai is using part of this land for building the new Learning Centre, a garden and a small playground. The remaining part can be used for other Auroville projects and activities which benefit the surrounding villages.

The new Learning Centre was inaugurated on March 7th, 2021 when construction of phase I was completed. This includes a large classroom.

The new centre will eventually consist of three classrooms, one of which will be a fully equipped STEM (Science, Technology, English and Maths) classroom, a kitchen with a wood fired oven, a block of Ecosan waterless toilets, one fully accessible toilet, a garden and a playground.

Designing the new Learning Centre was an interactive process as Thamarai involved the children and asked for their ideas. Based on that consultation, the centre is incorporating features which meet the children’s commitment to protect the earth and save water, such as water harvesting, a garden of edible plants and trees, bathroom doors made from recycled plastic from Quiet beach and bottle caps, and a compound wall from mud blocks and recycled plastic blocks.

Waterless toilets make a lot of sense as Annai Nagar gets water only for 45 minutes a day. In fact, on the day we spoke to the Thamarai team, there had been no water for three days as the pumps had broken down!

Thamarai is a good example of how co-operation and unity can do so much good.  Many individuals and some organizations from all over the world are helping this newly hatched Learning Centre and sports ground become a full fledged reality. The draft annual report of Thamarai for 2020-21 shows that 40% of the funds came from France, 28% from Ireland (Bridget’s home country), 15%  from India (about half of this was from Auroville), and the balance came from several other countries.

Aurovilians have come forward to support Thamarai in many other ways. Hedia manages the website, graphic work and takes classes for children and facilitators. Stemland, Auroville Teachers Centre and Child Protection Service offer training. Alok provided temporary space for the last three years on the ground floor of his building in Annai Nagar to hold classes till the Learning Centre came up. The Tree House community has built a beautiful treehouse-cum-slide and climbing frame for the children in the playground; Auroville architect Raman, Divij and  Krishnaraj builders are providing their expertise and support for the construction; the Ecosan team and Guary supported with the design of the  waterless toilet block, Yatharth built the wood fire oven with some of the children, Sathya painted the symbol and Jorge and the Min Vayu team are making the recycled plastic doors for the toilet block.

Though Thamarai has been holding regular leadership workshops with the Stemland team for some time, a new development was its translation into Tamil which made it possible to include the village community. The Radical Transformational Leadership (RTL) programme designed by Monica Sharma is the base for the leadership workshops. Srilatha Juvva of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai and Suriya Prakash help Thamarai conduct these workshops. These workshops, held in the village, are attended by the panchayat (village elders), women, youth and the children, during which they talk about what they care about, the norms and systems that need to change and what they want to manifest in their village. From these discussions projects are co-created and implemented.

In one of the meetings, a child expressed in front of the adults that it is not right that they send children to alcohol shops to buy alcohol. Women protested against the three alcohol shops in the neighborhood of the village and since then one shop has closed. In another example, a Thamarai  facilitator has stopped two child marriages in her village. In this way, RTL workshops are helping people find a voice and stand up for their rights.

This year, Thamarai plans to increase its focus on alcohol de-addiction as this is a continuing source of stress and even violence in the village. According to Thamarai youth, 30% to 40 % of the males are addicted to alcohol. Bridget explains that Thamarai has a donor who supports those with addiction to go through a 30-day rehabilitation programme. “Over the last three or four years we’ve been doing this and we’ve had quite a few success stories. But we have also had some participants who went through the programme and have gone back to alcohol again.” Bridget and Muthukumari are designing a holistic programme on health and wellbeing which will be focused on the males in the community.

Another new development has been the use of the newly-minted sports ground where local Annai Nagar youth, who are national champions in volleyball and football, are starting daily training with the children, and Aurovilian international frisbee champion, Selvi, with the support of Smithi, has  plans to start training the girls in this sport in September. “So now our girls can aspire to be an international frisbee champion like Selvi, who is an amazing role model,” says Bridget.

In 2019, Thamarai decided to re-open its ‘After School’ programme in Edayanchavadi, which had closed in 2017. This time, they started the outreach centre on neighbouring Auroville land offered by the Joy of Impermanence (Anitya) community. Vignesh, an architect and facilitator with Thamarai, modified the structure, built by Bamboo Centre, which houses the After School hall.  Children were involved especially in making the flooring of this hall. Vignesh says “this was a test for my ideology of co-creating with kids and working with rural transformation.”

Today, Thamarai supports about 130 children in its two After School centres. The After School programme continues to be the mainstay of their outreach work. It runs from 4.30 pm till 8 pm on all weekdays. On weekends, special programmes are offered, and sometimes external  trips are arranged. Recently, the older children enjoyed a trekking trip to Kalvarayan hills with the Auroville Botanical Gardens Team.

On a typical weekday evening, children come at 4.30 pm, play for half an hour, then eat a nutritious snack. After this, they attend an English class and do their homework with support from the facilitators. The children who finish quickly have the freedom to play games like chess, read books, use computers with access to the internet, or do art work. The last 20 minutes are devoted to circle time where they all come together to share learnings and acknowledge each other. Children lead this session with support from a facilitator which always ends with three minutes of silence and the Thamarai rhythm clap.

Even during the COVID lockdown period, Thamarai continued to provide daily educational support to the children. It has moved from daily telephonic calls to the online platform. However, some of the children do not have smartphones, so telephonic calls are also ongoing and Thamarai is trying to acquire used android phones by posting a request for these on its Facebook page.

In fact, support has come pouring in during this lockdown period from its many friends and supporters from all over the world. Thus, with these volunteer facilitators, they have been able to offer online English classes, Maths workshops, mind mapping, chess tournaments, graphic design workshops and many other things. They even had an online talent show with the children.

M. Muthukumari is the co-ordinator for the health programmes offered by Thamarai. She offers yoga and well-being workshops to children and adults in Auroville units, surrounding villages and schools. In a recent three month programme for children of Auroville outreach and Government schools, she taught yoga, personal hygiene, nutrition and safe drinking water. She did tests on the children and found that 77% of the children were anaemic. Then she worked with the school authorities on improving consciousness about food to increase the levels of iron and protein in the food they provide. She also worked with the teachers and the students to address the water supply in the schools which was unfit to drink because of the presence of E coli.  Together they cleaned the tanks and she showed them how to keep the drinking water system clean. She did this work in 12 schools over a period of one year.

She also conducts yoga and well-being workshops for adults. To make them more beneficial and targeted, she does an initial survey to find the issues troubling them. For example, in a recent survey she found that a number of women felt stressed and many had diabetes. So she designed the yoga class around these issues. She takes pre-course and post-course tests for parameters like blood pressure and  sugar and shows the difference, which for most of them is quite marked. She also trains some of the more enthusiastic participants to teach yoga to others in their villages and communities. Muthu says “ it’s about awakening their potential”.

The most important learnings

What has Thamarai learned over its 16 year journey? Bridget says the main learning over the years has been that everyone has potential and that it is really important to work across the whole community and engage all the stakeholders as a co-creation. “In Edayanchavadi we did not do that, so we are doing it differently in Annai Nagar. We have  established a village committee in Annai Nagar which has members from the  panchayat, the elders, women, youth and children, and we decide together on issues we care about and need to work on in the community.”

Another learning is that the teachers (known as facilitators) should come from the local village so that they can spread the knowledge they acquire in their area. The facilitators are all graduates from the villages (with the exception of Bridget and Vignesh). Currently, there are 12 facilitators from the two villages, and they are given continuous training in how to unfold their own potential and to support the children.

Thamarai also consciously locates its outreach units in the most marginalised sections of a village.  Annai Nagar is a marginalised Dalit community, and when they started, all the children came from Annai Nagar itself. However, because Thamarai always tries to make its unit attractive and deliver a high quality of service, slowly children of other castes and from surrounding villages want to join. Today, about 30% of the children who come to the Centre are from other surrounding villages, and children of different castes play and work together harmoniously. In fact, caste is never mentioned. Instead, everyone is encouraged to respect each other and to treat as equal.

Bridget emphasizes that “this is our actual work, to bring about change in society, gently. It is not just about teaching English or Maths or computers. It is about creating an enabling environment so that inner capacity can unfold. This will support a counter-culture of well-being dissolving gender inequality, caste and other social constructs.”

For more information on Thamarai visit https://thamarai.org/ or https://www.facebook.com/AV.Thamarai