Deepam shine @ 25

It began in January, 1992, in the Kuilapalayam tamarind grove beside the Auroville bakery. Concerned at the plight of the mentally-challenged and polio-affected children from the village, Aurovilians Marika, Franca and Appie started a play centre three afternoons a week. They were soon joined by Angelika, an experienced occupational therapist from Germany who had come to visit Auroville for a year to offer therapy to Auroville children at the Kindergarten and Transition School. “The playground’s location was far from ideal,” she remembers. “It was next to the village’s defecation ground and out in the open, except for a small dark thatched room with a veranda where we could do a little something with the children.” While the others gradually dropped out, Angelika continued – to this day.

Around the same time, Dr. Lucas and Dr. Assumpta developed plans to start a children’s hospital as an annex to the Auroville Health Centre. They invited Angelika to join. The Children’s Home materialized three years later and the project for children with special needs moved into a beautiful large room and became part of the Auroville Health Centre.

Selvi, who was a nurse at the Health Centre, joined a few years later. “There were many children with hearing aids and articulation difficulties and Angelika needed a Tamil-speaking person who could do speech therapy,” she says. “She invited me to join, on the condition that I had to be committed.” Selvi accepted, though working with children with special needs was an unknown area for her. She received training and soon developed the required expertise and has meanwhile taught many children to speak, read and write Tamil.

In later years, the Children’s Home no longer functioned as planned and the management of the Health Centre changed. There were ideas to turn the space into an Auroville hospital, but Angelika and Selvi, after a long struggle, managed to convince the Auroville authorities that all donations had been specified for the benefit of children from the villages and that the donors wished the entire building to be allocated to the project. In 2003, the project became an independent Auroville service unit with the name Deepam, meaning ‘light’, “a symbolic name chosen because we intend to bring light into the lives of differently-abled children,” explains Angelika.

As the facilities expanded, so did the work. That same year Deepam got its first school van, which made it possible to provide a door to door service for pickup and return as many children cannot walk. Deepam’s day-care programme began to cater to the individual needs of over 30 children. The subsequent years saw several additions, such as a dining hall, an upstairs space and covered terrace for group activities and a caretaker’s apartment. More recently, thanks to SAIIER, ‘Super School’, a building from the former Last School compound, was added. It will become Deepam’s vocational training centre.

Really special

Asked if Deepam is unique, Angelika and Selvi smile in response. “It is,” says Angelika. “And not only because it is probably one of the most beautiful places for this type of work in India. Also some of the work we do is unique and of high quality. Broadly speaking, we have three fields of activity.

“The first – and the one as yet largely unknown in India – is the work with babies and very young children. This is a very specialized work. Early intervention is important, for at that age the nervous system still develops, new synapses are forming and the brain is still growing. When a baby is brought in, we observe if it is alert, if it has good muscle-tone, how the head position is. If it is a young child, we see how it moves – a child of 8 months should crawl, of 12 months should walk and by the latest at 2 years should say its first words. Then there are the routine medical examinations such as a blood test, the stool test and the check-up of the ears and eyes. When the problem has been diagnosed, we immediately start our intervention programme. The child then comes with its parents or grandparents for one or two hours a day. Hopefully, if the condition is something that can be treated, the child need not come to our school later. Most special schools elsewhere in India start dealing with children at a much later age – but for many children, this is already too late.”

Deepam’s second area of activity is providing day-care. Here it aims at a holistic approach. “In our day-care programme we only take older children,” says Selvi, “those who can be without a caretaker for some time and who can – to some extent – feed themselves, go alone to the toilet, and be mobile in some way so that they can participate in group activities. This programme is like a school and caters to those with a broad range of disorders – severe types of epilepsy, cerebral palsy and mental retardation, hearing impairment as well as children with autism and socially-impaired behavior. About 30 children and youth are currently enrolled in Deepam’s day-care programme. We provide specialized education and individual therapies, such as physio-, speech,- and occupational therapy. Plus there is a social skills improvement component through teaching handicrafts, and involving them in group activities such as singing, dancing and painting. And one day a week, a yoga teacher gives Hatha Yoga exercises.”

As the children grow older, appropriate activities need to be made available for them, and it is for this reason that Deepam has started its third area of activity, vocational skill development. “We teach all of them basic manual skills, for example how to use scissors, brushes, paint and different tools, in the hope that some of them will be able to join the outside work-force. The techniques we use are clay, candle-making, greeting-cards of different kinds, woodwork, stitching and jewelry.” The training has seen successes. One boy has joined a local carpentry workshop. Another boy now helps at the puncture repair service as a mechanic; a hearing- impaired girl who came as a toddler has now, at 20, become a tailor trained by Auroville’s Life Education Centre. And then there are those who remain with Deepam and become part of the team, such as the deaf girl who came in 1993 undernourished with a dislocated hip and a host of infections, and who today has grown into a bright young woman who helps with the younger children.

The parents

When approached to take in a child, Deepam takes its time. “We observe the child, its family, and we try to understand what’s going on. This can take five or six sessions. We ensure that a medical examination is done and that we get the medical records. We look at the psychological aspect – is the child properly taken care of, is it given affection? For most families it is extremely hard to have a child with special needs, particularly when the child has multiple disorders. Often, we have to do a lot of family-counseling. Many parents hesitate to come, even if they know something is wrong. They are ashamed; they are afraid to admit that the child has a problem. They’ve often gone from hospital to hospital and visited temples and priests, most of it to no avail. And, of course, family relations get fragile and couples break up, the husband accusing the wife and so on. We could write a book on some stories,” says Angelika.

“But we demand an absolute commitment from the parents – we don’t want them to dump the kid and go,” says Selvi. “They have to take responsibility. For example, if they come with an under-nourished child, they will have to ensure that it is properly fed before we can even start physiotherapy. And if a child shows bad behavior, is aggressive, or hyper active and difficult to guide, and cannot be integrated in a group, we may need months of individual sessions and also guide the parents about how to deal with the child. At Deepam we have a rule of ‘no-beating’, which is still common in Indian schools and families. But how do you deal with such children? For some, it can take a long time before they can be with others in a group without harming themselves or others or destroying the toys. We have to patiently teach the parents that they should give the child not a negative but a positive attention.”

The staff and volunteers

Deepam now has a team of 15, including four Aurovilians and one Newcomer. The team lacks Indian professionals – few are interested because of the low salary Deepam can offer and many don’t like to work in rural areas – but this is compensated by an intense cooperation with the pediatric department of PIMS, a nearby Pondicherry hospital. “It’s quite a relief that the Pondicherry hospitals have developed so much,” says Angelika. “We refer our children to specialists and help in arranging for surgery or providing medical appliances, such as hearing aids, calipers and wheelchairs. Earlier, for any specialized medical check-ups such as audiometry you had to go to Chennai. Now all this can be done right here.”

Over the years, scores of extremely motivated volunteers have helped Deepam, particularly through the German Weltwärts programme. “What was especially beneficial was our exchange with highly committed professional volunteers, such as occupational therapists and psychologists who joined our team for a year or longer,” says Angelika. “Most keep contact with us and help raise funds and bring materials. Those who left last year at the end of summer are now back again – they have fallen in love with Auroville and Deepam. It has become a large extended family.”

The future

Like many Auroville projects, Deepam functions largely without financial help from Auroville. So far, Angelika has managed to raise sufficient funds mainly from her donor network in Germany. “Most of the donors are not particularly interested in Auroville; they want to support us in our work. They consider Deepam a sustainable project as we have been able to manage it for so many years,” she says.

“But we are concerned about the future,” says Selvi. “This project must run for decades to come. Donations from Europe may dry up as India is no longer considered a developing country. We hope that, increasingly, donations will come from within India, for we cannot drop the kids when the money runs out. Some of them may be able to continue their lives without our support, but the majority will not. This long-term sustainability has to be assured. Today, Deepam shines for all these children. It must continue to do so.”

For more information visit: 

www.deepam-auroville.in