South India – Day 4, part 2
Saturday, February 8, 2025
35 families
The second Saturday of each month is a national holiday, and the day all the families come to SEEDS India. “Families? What families?” The families of the children being sponsored for their education, of course. There are 35 of them in total. Always 35. When a child reaches 18, that child graduates and another is invited into the group. SEEDS has been doing this for 25 years.
SEEDS doesn’t just pay off the kids’ school fees and be done with it. No, they form a long-term relationship with the whole family, providing books, uniforms, even desks for the girls and boys to study on at home. They will even assist a family with housing and toilets if needed. When difficulties arise, like illness or an accident, SEEDS helps them through. After graduation, SEEDS continues to check in and make sure they are doing okay. It’s not detached help, but fully involved, long-term, loving care.
By the time we arrived, the hall was abuzz with chatter and laughing over tea and snacks. At the end of the meeting each family will take home a big bag of food crammed with fresh vegetables as well as grains and other staples. It’s a hefty amount, good for a week or two.
Thomas Mathew knows every family, and every person in that family. He can tell you their names and their family news. One man, for example, has a disabled son who couldn’t be there that day, but normally he comes. One woman, in a beautiful orange dress, grew up in their orphanage. She is married with three kids, but is struggling now because her husband left. She was super eager to talk with me as she could speak English well and even some Japanese. Most of the families in this program rise up to a “good standing” as Thomas Mathew puts it. They become self-supporting and independent. They are all from the lowest levels of society, Dalits and Adivasi (whom I will tell you much more about later), but in this setting, there is no way you would know this. All are treated with dignity and acceptance.
Thomas Mathew gave them a talk in Malayalam, the gist of which, he told me later, was to encourage them to be better than he is. They respect him because of all he does for them, but he does not want their praise. The best way to show their thanks is to go and do the same for others. “Be better than me!” He then asked me to address them, which I was expecting. Not sure what to say, I pulled a trick from my hat I had learned long ago for such situations. Find something beautiful about them, and tell them how beautiful it is, in this case, their brightly colored saris. When question time arrived, the three cheeky girls in the front row asked me to sing a song. Oh, my. Panic set in and my mind went blank. I tried to avoid it by asking them to teach me a song. But they wouldn’t have it. Then suddenly, magically, a Japanese melody came to me, “aki no yuuhi ni…” I asked Yamanoshita san if he knew it and he did, so we sang it together! Wow! Then the woman in the orange dress sang a Japanese song she had learned in primary school, followed by a solo from Yamanoshita san.
The meeting concluded with the customary group photos, and lots of laughing and smiles and fist bumps with the kids. Later Thomas Mathew personally delivered one of the food bundles to a blind lady who was not able to come. Usually someone from her family picks it up for her, but they couldn’t make it today.
Even more SEEDS programs
Mobile chicken cages
At ARI we do a summer project where each Participant can focus intensively on one skill or project. In the case of Thomas Mathew, it was poultry raising. Later this inspired the idea of helping people earn some income through rearing chickens. Since space is an issue for Dalit people, that is, they don’t have much space, he decided to provide them with mobile Chicken Cages. SEEDS India gives the cages for free along with instruction on caring for the chickens. The family buys the roof tiles for these pens on wheels and the actual chickens.
Adivasi assistance
About eighty kilometers away lives an Adivasi community. These people are also referred to as forest dwellers, but the word Adivasi actually means “first dwellers,” – the first people of the land. They are truly ancient. We didn’t have enough time to go there, but don’t worry, in a few days we will meet another graduate who has spent his whole life championing the causes of the Adivasi and you will learn more than you ever wanted to know. Here I will give a small precursor of what is to come.
Once a month, Thomas Mathew brings this community food packets filled with vegetables, potatoes, and millet, milk and yogurt, and some tea and sweets. He also carries them medicines for pain, fever, and diarrhea. He coordinates his visits with the community head, who has a cell phone and solar charger. The Adivasi tend to be shy and quiet. They have their own language, which is a kind of mix between Malayalam and Tamil. Traditionally, they lived solely from the fruits and honey of the forest, but nowadays their forests don’t produce as many fruits. This is because greedy folks have cut them down and turned them into commercial monocultures. My fingers want to keep typing more, but I will be patient and tell this story when the right time comes.
The Aranmula Temple
After waving off the last of the families and dropping off the food packet to the blind woman, we paid a visit to the 1,500-year-old Aranmula Temple, next to the Pampa River, to greet Lord Krishna. Each temple is dedicated to a specific Hindu deity and this one was specifically for worshippers of Krishna, the god of compassion, protection, and love.
A line of oil lamps burned along the base of the temple’s outside wall. The shadows cast by the dainty flames into the seeping twilight provided an unearthly aura. On closer inspection I saw that the entire wall was constructed with niches to hold oil lamps and Thomas Mathew told me that during festivals all of them in their hundreds, maybe thousands, are lit. I can only imagine it. Only Hindus are allowed to enter the inner temple, and the men must remove their shirts. All of us removed our shoes.
At the temple complex entrance there was a guy in orange stretched out in full relax mode. I later learned that he is a Sadhu, a person who has given up his worldly life for a spiritual life at the temple. He has left his family and all material possessions and survives only from the food given by visitors.
Since the temple is beside a wide river, I wondered if they practiced a similar ritual to the one I saw at the Pashupatinath Temple in Kathmandu. There, I saw the dead being cremated, and their ashes thrown into the river. In Kerala, however, they take the ashes home. Only one day a year are they allowed to throw them in the river, in designated areas, and only if they want to. Some families prefer to keep their loved ones close by.
The forgotten people
It was long after dark when we arrived at a place called Pannivelichira. Few people come here because it is where Dalits live. The community we visited stays in a compound consisting of three blocks of row houses. I say house, but they are really square concrete rooms. A couple of them have electricity, but most rely on the shadowy illumination of oil lamps. Running along the center courtyard is a cooking area, equipped with pot stands designed for cooking with firewood. At the far end is a well. I also saw buckets strategically placed to collect rainwater. Two toilets, shared by all, are at the back corner and a little behind the compound is a washing area that affords bathers a degree of privacy.
We came at night because that is the only time you will find them at home. They go out before dawn to collect recyclable waste on the streets – metal, bottles, cans, papers, whatever. Sometimes they will knock on doors of houses to ask if they have anything to throw out. It is usual to walk 20 kilometers in a day, sometimes 30 or 40, because they can’t stop until they have found something that will bring them some money. A typical system is for the women to take a bus to a distant location and start walking back, collecting materials on the way and leaving them in piles on the roadside. Then the husbands will follow the same route to pick up the items and take them to sell at a shop. They get home much later than their wives, which gives the ladies time to cook. I’m not sure how much money they can get in a day, but it seems to be enough to earn a meager living.
There were no children around, but they do indeed have children. It is just that there is no way to care for them properly in this environment. So, the children stay in their hometowns with relatives or in orphanages, and they go to school. Education is a must. These parents want much better lives for their kids, so they send every rupee they can for this purpose. SEEDS India is also involved, with awareness programs for education and health. During the holidays in June or July, they go to be with their children, about one month each year.
Thomas Mathew has known these people for a long time and they welcomed us as family. They all come from somewhere else, somewhere around the border of Tamil Nadu. About half are Adivasis who were driven off their forest lands and the other half are Dalits who have no land. As we walked around, Thomas Mathew was telling me about their lives, and chatting with them at the same time. Several people gathered around and motioned me toward their rooms, inviting me to look inside. There was no shame in the fact that they lived simply and had few possessions. Mostly they owned pots and pans and spices on a single shelf on the wall, clothes, a bag for collecting stuff, and a sleeping mat. That’s right, a thin straw mat between the body and the cement floor. After peering inside one room, others began pulling us to look in theirs. One woman was thoroughly scrubbing her floor with soap and water and Thomas Mathew asked her if she would sleep on a wet floor. She told him she would spend that night in a friend’s room. Another woman was boiling water to make hot compresses for her aching back, her smile disguising her pain. As we walked, a man kindly held a bright light to show us the way, shining it on roots or other obstacles we might trip on in the darkness, and pointed it at my notebook every time I wrote something down.
Thomas Mathew had brought a package of cakes, and one lady distributed the pieces to all who had gathered. She offered the first piece to Thomas Mathew, who declined on the grounds that he is diabetic, and the second to me, who accepted, before passing out the rest. This small gesture really hit me, and I immediately recalled Takami sensei’s story of “sharing scarcity.” In his young days Takami sensei went to Bangladesh to help people recover from a terrible cyclone that had passed through. The people invited him into their homes, and no matter how little food they had, they would share it with him. “Sharing scarcity,” is what he called it.
It will take me time to process this visit. They welcomed me as a stranger and Thomas Mathew as a friend. They opened up their lives to me for a few brief moments. I don’t want to romanticize this place in my mind, saying something stupid like “they are poor, but they are happy.” No, they are poor and life is hard and cruel, but here, they can let their hair down, kick off their shoes (if they have them) because here is a safe place. Like family, everyone knows and understands the pain of the others because they have the same pain. And within the comfort of this understanding, they can simply be themselves. Laugh if they want to, cry if they need to, but most probably, just rest from a hard hard day, knowing another hard day will come tomorrow.
