Day 8: Divon, Assam (1476 km)
25th June, 2011
It is still midmorning in Assam when we arrive at a small village, Divon, about few hours outside of Guwahati, the second largest city of the eastern India. We have come over dirt road, passing women & children walking barefoot with water jugs, fuel wood, and other bundles. The mid-morning temperature is bitter. In this subsistence tea growing region of an impoverished landlocked state in eastern India, house holds eke out survival from an unforgiving terrain. Couldn’t see the exact reason, but whatever the cause, the crops are withering in the field that we pass. I guess, this year had been a lot more difficult than usual because of errant downpour.
If the village were filled with able-bodied men who could have built proper harvesting units in around fields, the situation would not be as dire as it is this morning. But as we arrive in the village, we see no able-bodied young men at all. In fact, older women and dozens of children greet us, but there is not a young man or woman of working age in sight. Where, we ask, are the workers? Out in fields? The man who has led us to the village shakes his head sadly and says no. they are nearly all dead. The village had been devastated by the struggle between rebels & local authorities, which has ravaged this part of Assam for several years now. There are just five men between twenty & forty years of age left in the village. They are not there this morning because they are all attending funeral of a fellow villager who died a day before because of infection he couldn’t tend to.
The presence of death in Divon has been overwhelming in recent years. The grandmothers whom we meet are guardian for their orphaned grandchildren. Each woman has her own story of how her sons and daughters have died, leaving her to bear the burden of raising and providing for five or ten, sometimes fifteen, orphaned grandchildren. Those women have reached an age where, in more prosperous places like Delhi, they would be revered matriarch enjoying a well earned rest from a lifetime of toil. But there is no break now, no chance for even a moment’s respite, because the grandmother of this village, and countless others like it, know that if they let up for a moment, these young children will die.
The margin of survival is extraordinarily narrow; sometimes it closes entirely. One woman we meet in front of her mud hut has fifteen orphaned grandchildren. As she begins to explain her situation to us, she first points to the wasted crop that have died in the field next to her hut because of lack of proper care. Her small plot, perhaps a half hectare in all, would be too small to feed her family even if the care on it had been plentiful. The problem of small farm and lack of farming care is compounded by yet another problem: the soil nutrients, because of non changing nature of cash crop agronomics, have been depleted so significantly in this part of the Assam that productivity is real low.
Whatever she will get from this field would not be sufficient for proper nutrition and would provide precious little, if any, market income. She will get almost nothing. She reaches into her apron and pulls out a handful of semi rotten, bug infected millet, which will be the basis for the gruel she will prepare for the meal that evening. It will be the one meal the children have that day.
I ask her about the health of the children. She points to a child of about four and says that the small girl contracted malaria the week before. The woman had carried her grandchildren on her back for the ten kilometers or so to the local hospital. When they got there, there was no quinine, the antimalarial medicine, available that day. With the child in high fever, the grandchild and grandmother were sent home and told to return the next day. In a small miracle, when they returned the next day after another ten-kilometer trek, the quinine had come in, and the child responded to the treatment and survived.
As we proceed through the village, other grandmothers share similar stories. Each has lost sons and daughters; those who remain fights for survival. There are only poor in this village. No clinic nearby. No safe water resource. No crop in the fields. And notably, no aid which our government promises in the name of incredible India and various other schemed distribution channels, NREGA, and likes. I stoop down to ask one young girl her name and age. She looks about seven or eight, but is actually twelve, stunted from years of under nutrition. When I ask her what she dream are for her own life, she says that she wants to be a teacher, and that she is prepared to study and work hard to achieve that. I know that her chances of surviving to go on to secondary school and a college are slim under the circumstances in which she lives. Attending school is a hit-and-miss affair. Children are in or and out of school with illness. Their attendance depends on how urgently they are needed at home to fetch water and firewood, or to care for sibling or cousins; on whether they can afford to buy supplies, a uniform, and pay local fees; and on the safety of walking several kilometers to the school itself.
I was discouraged by the belief that there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world’s ill, against misery & ignorance, injustice and violence.
We leave the village for the Guwahati in the evening and fly later that evening to Kolkata.
On our journey back, I realized, it’s up to us and only us to bend this, if just each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total, all those acts will be written in the history of our generation. We must not forget, it is from the numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time somebody has to stand up as an ideal, or act to improve the lot of others, or strike out against the injustice, he sends a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
Posts
