Slum City
Trip Start
Feb 24, 2007
1
9
14
Trip End
Mar 09, 2007
Gwalior,
India
Monday, March 5, 2007
Clean Slum
. In some communities the population is now so unbalanced that villages have resorted to buying women and girls in markets. We then listened to another presentation on the Slum Environment Sanitation Initiative (SESI), a joint programme with WaterAid, Sambhav, United Nations Habitats, and the local government. WaterAid have carried out a major excerise to map the 32 Gwalior slums and identified poverty pockets. All of this information has been complied in GIS and is being used to plan future work. During the 2 month survey they identified more poverty pockets than the government had previously recognised. 37% of Gwalior is living in slums and of these slums82% have no access to piped water supply. The SESI project initially included 5 poverty pockets but this has been extended to 16 and will benefit 3857 homes and 5021 families.
After lunch we traveled to the Awadapura Slum to see the challenges of working in the urban communities. We received a very loud and excitable welcome (including loud drums and dancing paper horses) from this predominately Muslim community. A group of girls sang Shipra's Har Doh song, which we can now all sing along with. We were also addressed by the womens group who explained how before they didn't care about hygiene, but then Sambhav helped them form self help groups for each lane
Dancing Horses
. We were given gifts of beautiful cards prepared by the children and hand made note books in honor of our visit. It was really humbling to be accepting gifts from people living in such appalling conditions who really had nothing but their warmth to be giving away. We were taken on a tour of the slum, and followed by an increasingly large and volatile crowd, and literally forced through the streets. At this point I have to mention Johnson and his superior bouncer skills, at one point he seemed to hold back the whole crowd! We later discovered that there had been a political meeting in the slum and we arrived as this broke up, which is why the crowd were so worked up and intimidating.
The leader of the womens groups, an amazingly enthusiastic and engaging woman, showed us around the slums. The women were really keen to show us their clean homes and new latrines. Before they used dry toilets and disposed of the waste in the streets; this really reminded me of learning about England in the middle ages, with people chucking chamber pots out of upstairs windows on to passers by in the street. Through the project sewers are being installed in the street and household latrines constructed and connected to the sewers.
It is amazing how enthusiastic the women were, one lady, who was desperate to show Rian her home explained that just by visiting her, we had shown our interest and now others would listen to her and build latrines
Hand made books
. I chatted (Hindi is slowly getting better) to some of the members of one of the womens group and they showed me the minutes of their meetings and asked that we sign to record our visit and what we thought of their work. We sat and talked to some school children and were presented with a model of what they wanted there slum to look like - CLEAN with little gardens and even a few animals (though I'm not sure about a pet tiger).
Leaving the slum was really hard, it was fantastic to see the changes happening and the motivation within the community to help themselves, but the level of poverty was extreme. Apparently the slums of Gwalior are some of the better slums in India, but leaving people living in such filth, as we got back into our cars was really difficult and made us all question the huge gap between rich and poor.
