Deep Griha Blog

Deep Griha Blog
A Taste of Deep Griha

Originally intending to stay at least a month, I found that I had to cut my stay in Pune down to two weeks – result? A whirlwind ride through numerous branches of Deep Griha Society, the opportunity to dip my finger into several pies of plenty, all spiced with the masala of getting to know the people I was living with as far as is possible in the space of 14 days.

Arrived in Pune after on a bus from Aurangabad – eerily reminiscent of the description of such journeys provided in the Volunteer handbook, complete with continuous, loud Bollywood tunes; driver plus gang cracking dirty jokes; additionally an elderly woman regaling us with family gossip tales. Loved it! Made sure to bolster my own confidence immediately by attempting to haggle rickshaw drivers down . . . from 70 to 65 rupees. Really giving those pennies the best looking-after of their lives. Oh dear.

I reached Tatya Tope in a state of absolute confusion – (my wondrous rikwallah had turned out to be a bit of a novice) – dusty and somewhat frazzled, to the most welcoming reception committee I’ve ever experienced. Thank you to the Independents, DIA and the Linklets for making me feel right at home on my first day! The Ladies of the House are surrogate aunties, looking after my every wish; passing on cooking tips, religious views and love advice a-plenty.

Wandered around the local area to get familiar with the surroundings and was rewarded with a feast for the senses; the sights – pigs and cows vying with Mercs, buses and pedestrians on the main highway, fruit of every possible colour, shape and texture, and smells I didn’t know existed . . . overwhelming but exciting. I’m still, after a month and a half in India, finding the dichotomy between modern and traditional life; rich and poor people here tricky to get my head around. Don’t know if you ever really can, or whether you have to dissociate from one side completely. Ho hum philosophy.

So on to the juicy stuff – actual work at Deep Griha. Being paranoid that I’d be of no use whatsoever with my truncated trip, I tried to get in on what was going on as soon as I stepped in, with the result that I actually was able to complete quite a few odds and ends during my time. The Tadiwala Road slum area is barely recognisable as a slum any more; Deep Griha has been so successful here. On a busy shopping street leading into avenues and alleyways of residential housing means, the Tadiwala office is a truly lively place to work in. Kids were very friendly, and very happy to meet and greet; the fulltime staff were generous to the nth degree with their time and help! All in all a really great taster course about what Deep Griha does.

So what was I doing? I spent my weekdays in the Tadiwala Road Family Centre, assisting with report writing, research and proposal drafting; occasionally shunting over to the Ramtekedi slum area for meetings with the staff, to observe some of their work with the residents there. Also managed to cram in observing a Wake Up Pune! meeting – never to be forgotten - Dr J is an Absolute Gem.

The DISHA ladies took me into their circle; several luncheon hours were spent most profitably, exchanging recipes and tiffin-box contents, alongside trying to pick up some Marati words. Incredibly garbled English, Hindi and Marati conversations were the outcome, but I think we all had fun – well, I did anyway. Not too successful on the language front, but the recipes will be attempted asap. My family’s definitely in for . . . something, dunno quite how it’ll turn out.

Tried to spend some time with kiddies in the crèche and balwadi; they seemed amused, if slightly perplexed, by my rendering of the two nursery rhymes I vaguely remember: ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ and ‘Little Miss Muffet’. But they listened with good grace, and smiled a lot, and ‘Round and Round the Garden …’ went down a bit too well for my liking. Hmm.

Free-time – a surprising amount of this was available! So we managed to fit in numerous shopping expeditions, various exploratory ambles, the Agakhan Palace, a couple of nightclubs, and regular ice-creams. Could have been even more had I not succumbed to the Lethargy Lurgie. All of which was extremely educational and interesting yadda yadda, more to the point I had FUN!

So to sum up – I don’t reckon I’ve fully absorbed or processed my experience at Deep Griha yet, but I do know that I’ve learnt a lot during my packed, albeit brief stay. Hope to come back next year –

Volunteer, London

The Chaos Within - More than protein pills

It’s been almost a month weeks since I got back from the conference in Canada.

Almost a month of frenzied activity.

Wake Up Pune meetings, Share The Vision programmes, Be HIV Positive sessions, inquiries in to stigma and discrimination at City of Child, T-shirt campaign kick off, MSM gathering, help plan an HIV/IDU conference and of course those ubiquitous reports that do not write themselves!

I finished my August report, albeit horribly late, and decided that I will celebrate with a blog! There is so much to write about that I have this ' funny feeling' - I love funny feelings... they help me focus like nothing else does - that I will end up writing about nothing. Have I just contradicted myself? Surely I have? Let’s see…

Wake Up Pune: This initiative has been postponed for November. Dr. Jasmine of Project Concern International suggested the postponement and I agreed. We need to plan it and ensure that we know what kind of impact it has made. For this we require a scientific pre and post programme survey. Have I said this all before? I am still in report mode.

Evidence base! This is crucial if we are to prove that the targeted intervention programmes we run are effective. Wake Up Pune is potentially huge, and to let it go by - effort, funds, time, - without evaluating its impact is unforgivable. The National AIDS Research Institute has agreed to help us. Brilliant!

Share The Vision: Avinash has done a fantastic job of running the Share The Vision programmes in Tadiwala Road. The vision is a model community in the battle against HIV/AIDS. Jane Zhu's research on stigmatizing attitudes and behaviour has shown us that we are miles away from realising this vision, and that the sharing of it, has had little or no success. I'd like to think different of course, and the targeted sample in Jane's study were not the groups we have made most headway with... but still, the community does not consist merely of the groups that we make headway with... as this blog goes, you will find that the groups we have ignored thus far are crucial in our bid for a model community.

Poster campaigns especially designed for the community is one idea we have come up with, and a local radio network! Sounds bizarre eh? Fuck... let's see what we can do. If we have a Deep Griha local station for Tadiwala Road and of course other communities it would be a fantastic way of disseminating information, be it about HIV or anything else?

The power of radio has often been spoken of, and a radio station dedicated to local development issues sounds like a plan... albeit a logistical nightmare when we actually explore the implementation of such a project! Is it even legal? Initial inquiries suggest there is no legislation in place for a local radio station. But, again, let’s see…

The Be HIV Positive sessions are now strengthened with the 'positive' t-shirt campaign which has the three point positive programme on the back:

• Positive about educating yourself and others on HIV
• Positive about raising awareness in your wider community
• Positive about reaching out to those living with affected by HIV

Navin from Sahara Delhi was here for the launch. He spoke passionately about being HIV Positive and put a face to the often abstract circumstances of stigma and discrimination that we fight against. The MSM (men who have sex with men) gathering that took place on Sunday the 10th of September actually deserves a blog of its own. Fuck. What a ride, and what a dance! They danced from the time they arrived until it was time to go home again. The energy and enthusiasm was fantastic. It rubbed of on us too of course and we all danced that day in our own way. The morning saw us on a bus with the DISHA team up front and the guys at the back. The journey home had us all together. Singing, dancing, laughing.

Last Friday Siddhi, one of the dancers, and I went out to dinner. A date! We talked a long time about the MSM community in Pune, about HIV risk perception etc, and of course about the choices one makes with regard to sexuality. It was a wonderfully open discussion, and we followed up dinner at La Dolce Vita with a drink at Lush, a local night club. When we started to dance I realised that Pune may still not be a place where two guys - especially one who looks as attractive as Siddhi; he was in a pair of white tight trousers and a sequined white west, wore a nose stud and hoop earrings, and had long copper tinted hair down to his shoulders - can go out an dance together without attracting attention. I had fun just looking at the expressions that followed our every move. And the boy can move.

The HIV/IDU conference was on Thursday. The HIV agencies and narcotics agencies in Pune had thus far claimed that there were NO Injecting Drug Users in Pune. Sounds naive. And the conference, which was held at Deep Griha, showed us how naive this claim is. In just over a month, the Mukti - Sangan team identified approximately 100 IDUs in the city through a rapid survey. This will form the basis for a Pune Action Plan later this month.

The MSM community and IDU community are largely ignored by agencies working within an urban slum community. They are marginalised by attitudes and behaviour. And some in the MSM and IDU communities admit that the attitudes and behaviour that marginalise them are often their own.

There are social drivers here that need to be examined. And as always nothing is black and white. Yet, even though working amongst the MSM and IDU communities is not going to be easy, is it something that agencies like Deep Griha should shy away from? DISHA will not. A model community is inclusive. A model community that ignores the MSM or IDU community has failed as a model.

We have much to learn, and much of that learning will not come from a conference, but rather from interaction with people within the MSM and IDU community.

My team was not prepared for the behaviour of some of the guys at the MSM gathering. Poor Santosh was a little traumatized I think, and the girls for the most part had their mouths covered in the common gesture of shock at what was being said by the more emboldened MSM veterans. This dissipated as the day wore on. The bus ride home was a testament to this.

We have just, today, had our first meeting with IDUs in Tadiwala Road. IDUs we never searched out before the conference. IDUs who had always been there, either by the river, or next to the railway hall. It was a preliminary meeting. We are not here to turn you into the cops. We are here to learn from you about how we can possibly help.

The team has to be prepared before we engage with these communities. They have undergone training just last week on how to approach the IDU community. More training is required. They need further interaction with MSM and IDU communities. It is not going to be easy, and perceptions do not change overnight.

Stigma at City of Child… is it possible? Yes. Perceptions do not change overnight. Sustained HIV education and sensitization programmes are required. City of Child, I believe, will one day open its doors again to HIV+ people. Until that day, we will continue to fight stigma and discrimination and educate and re-educate… re-education is crucial. The trite ‘un-learning’ is required if we are to move forward.

Major Tom to Ground Control... I think we're going to need more than protein pills.