Field Visit 1: Pareda

I'm back from my first trip to the field!

We left bright and early Friday morning and took a two hour car ride to Kherwara block, where Kojawara is located. We ended up getting in later than we planned, and because it was soon going to reach peak heat of the day, we decided to take it easy, eat some lunch, and wait until 5 or so to head out and meet the villagers. In the meantime, we spoke with numerous officials who work with Seva Mandir (my group's partner NGO) and got their perspective on what were some of the major cultural, health, and environmental issues in the area. We also learned about five or six of the surrounding villages and how big they were, etc.

Some major issues that stuck out (in my opinion):

1. Migration (both seasonal and permanent). Men will leave their families sometimes up to one year at a time to find work in neighboring states like Gujarat. Other times, whole families will pick up and migrate to new states in search of more work and better opportunities.

2. Child marriage. It used to be common to marry girls around 7 or 8 years of age. However, the government cracked down on this some time ago and wrote a law that says girls can't be married until 18 years. While many people do follow this rule, there are still some girls who are being married at 13 and onwards. This means they are having children very young (which comes with a whole host of other complications).

3. Education. Most children in these areas do not make it much past 8th grade before they are forced to drop out and help the family. This is especially true for girls, who are expected to stay home and help their monthers with housework and childcare.

4. Climate change. Numerous people commented to us on the changing weather patterns in recent years. Many agree that Rajasthan is getting hotter. This is having a ripple down effect on agriculture and livlihoods.

Those are just a few of the major ones - there are many others as well! Our project is supposed to focused around the climate change aspect (per the request of our NGO), so we may go forward with something around irrigiation or somehow adapting village life to climate change.

My team and I decided to focus our interests around a village called Pareda, which is actually made up of three seperate areas and about 10 or so hamlets (gatherings of smaller villages, usually by caste). I am just really learning how the caste system works myself, but essentially there are general castes, scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. Once you get into the scheduled denomination, you are getting into what has historically been considered the lower castes or "untouchables". I say historically because it seems that there is much less animosity between groups now; although, they do continue to segragate themselves within the villages. I have heard from many Indian students that the caste system is all but dead in the big cities.

We spent our mornings (6-12) and evenings (5-7/8) visiting the village and meeting with different groups in an attempt to gather some baseline information about what was going on there, and any thoughts or opinions they had for improvements. We also worked with different groups to draw something called a social map. Basically, the idea is to sit down with different groups of people (men, women, children, village leaders) to draw a map of the village as they see it. This is an interesting way of gathering information about importanct resources and village hierarchies, etc. It was quite an experience!! Super hot and sweaty to say the least!

I've included some pictures of village life below. I think most are self-explanatory, so I didn't include captions this time. Hope you enjoy!