Community Sundays

This Sunday we had the first of our bi-weekly community meetings. This was a chance for us at Adhyayan to interact with about seventy senior members of the community including community leaders, the local political representative and the parents of the students at Adhyayan.
Though I had been exploring the neighborhood and talking to people on my own these past weeks, this allowed us all to collectively meet and communicate, as well as for us to show the adults some of the work the children had been working on and engage them in an experiment whose success lies in the active collaboration of the whole community and not just kids at Adhyayan. We have been lucky to secure space in the community hall Chaupal, which will serve as the venue of our meetings, screenings and exhibitions in the neighborhood.

Through the meeting, we explained some of the goals of our project – making the neighborhood more accessible and safer for any outsider, from a guest to a potential customer and business, and thereby breaking some of current stereotypes and prejudices that Zamrudpur village faces. By introducing the adults to the initiative, we hope to involve them in the upcoming weeks’ work in which we’ll take to the streets – painting, installing and scattering graphic markers throughout the neighborhoods.

Most importantly, the aim was to address the urgent and immediate issue of community ownership and neighborhood pride in the form of tackling the garbage and hygiene issues in the area. “We ourselves are the perpetrators and we ourselves have to live in the conditions that we create. Why is that we understand the importance of cleanliness and hygiene and thus take great pains to clean our homes, but don’t recognize the street outside as being the forecourt, the ‘aangan’ to the home.” Instead of us trying to preach about systematic cleanliness, we showed the children’s’ work where their capture of the everyday conditions from watching their own parents throw out trash to their choice in mapping the ways to their homes showed their astute observation and impact of the actions of their parents.

Movement through street submerged in water because of clogged drains, health concerns brought from unhygienic conditions and the loss of potential business from neighborhood communities due to unfavorable conditions harms the residents themselves. Therefore addressing the issue has direct and immediate consequences on their own lives and livelihoods.

An important consensus that came up was the need to include the shopkeepers in understanding the potential of our project in directly affecting their businesses. “Why is that kids from neighboring schools and Lady Shri Ram College don’t just walk up to their stationary and sweet shops? Why don’t residents of the next-door Greater Kailash and East of Kailash colonies frequent their grocers and corner stores? All of them harbor certain biases and instead choose to walk or drive a greater distance in another direction.”

The food and party afterwards was a good way to chat with some of the ladies who seem to have finally stopped eyeing me as a suspicious outsider and for the amazing kids to have an afternoon of fun. There’s nothing like samosas to get us Indians in a good mood!
Though we received a positive response from the community, there wasn’t an impulse for active participation from the adults yet. I hope that in the coming weeks, once people start seeing the installations come up in the streets, that there will be a greater interest and engagement.

– Zoya