Research Journal: India

Day 8

10.30am
Today is a holiday for everyone and a festival for the Moslem House (Ramazan). We arrange to meet the children in the Activity Room at 10.30 and they are there waiting for us long before we get there.

We take two cameras around the village, which was one of the things they mentioned on the first day they wanted to photograph and this is the first time we have had daylight hours to do it. They take us to the duck pond, to the rose garden and to the village entrance. And along the way, as always, they improvise when the opportunity arises. They can’t resist posing with the statue of Hermann Gmeiner, with the staff motorcycles and next to the Village car. The gate Watchman, tries to control them and keep them off the garden, but they are simply too quick, so he takes the opportunity to tell me that he was for many years in the British Army, and was stationed in England and Scotland, and served in Rhodesia and Nepal, and proudly formed part of an honour guard for the Queen when she visited India.

Nandini is on her own photographing the pond when she stops, holds the camera at arm’s length, turns it to point at herself and releases the shutter. I can’t see what prompted this sudden reversal of the direction of gaze. Is what she has in mind to turn the camera from an instrument for looking outwards towards the world, to look instead introspectively? I think there is something more to this moment than chance, and when later, I look at the image I am even more sure of it. For Nandini, normally the human dynamo, leaping from one thing to another, treating the world as an infinite collection of things to play with, in every other picture grinning from ear to ear, is here, her face lit up, suddenly caught in a moment of introspection, seeing herself as part of this world of tricks and games and improvised toys.

Two minutes later, when they notice one of the House Mothers drying rice on the grass, the others see this as yet another photo-opportunity in which to pose. But Nandini photographs the rice and the rhagi in a large pot. I suspect she has a different way of looking at the world compared to the others. She is naturally curious about objects, there is something of the scientist in her I feel.

We go back to the Activity Hall, where Shobha continues with the interviews that she began yesterday and I set up the laptop, at the children’s request, so that they can look through the accumulated slides. The mood today is much more contemplative and less frenetic than usual and there might be several reasons for this, it may be that the children respond well to having two activities running, it may be that they are just getting used to being here with us, and I think perhaps the evening meetings suffer a little from the fact that the children have been in school all day.

I sit for a while with Supriya, Sweatha and Roshini as they look through the slides. They look through slowly and carefully, noticing things they hadn’t noticed before and enjoying looking at the images they now find familiar. They do this for more than an hour. It makes me think that often we don’t give children enough time and space to do this contemplative reviewing of the pictures. Too often we are short of time and show them the images once and expect them to respond immediately. Here I think I am seeing something different. There is, as several writers have observed (John Berger and Susan Sontag come immediately to mind), a close connection between the photograph and memory. Indeed we sometimes take photographs to create a memory when otherwise events would flash by too fast (wedding and holiday photographs, for instance). And when we review photos, one of the things we do is refresh the memories that we have. With time, and repeated viewings, it is the memory of the photograph that sometimes replaces the memory of the event.

As the girls look through the photos, and see again those they like best, there is a simultaneous movement in opposite directions. The image becomes more familiar as their distance from it increases. At the same time they get closer, and yet further away. It is in this tension that looking back at the photos can become a deeply reflective process. In one way, the process is highly invasive, in that the photos challenge them to see themselves as others might see them as opposed to how they see themselves, and yet it is safe, in that the photos have become known and familiar. There are no surprises. They know which images catch them out in their delusions about themselves. ‘That doesn’t look a bit like me!’ one of them cries out.

Perhaps this is an over-interpretation of what the children are doing and perhaps they are not yet of an age where they are conscious of the dynamic relationship between self, and appearances of self. But I think these three girls are at the point of becoming aware. I noticed at the boating lake that they were aware that men were giving them second glances, and that women noticed that men were doing so.

2.30 pm
In the afternoon we take the bus to visit some temples. It is an interesting experience for me as I realise I lack the spiritual imagination that is so much an integral part of Hindu life. I can listen to the stories of the gods, as stories, but when the children talk about a statue, or a plant or a flower, not as a representation or symbol of a god, but as a god, my imagination cannot cope.

Last time I felt so helpless at my inability to understand was when Lynne and I visited Aboriginal sites when we lived in Australia. Aboriginal people would tell us about a natural feature in the landscape, or a cave painting, in terms of creation myth (a dry river bed might be created by the Rainbow serpent as it crossed this country in the dreamtime). We could understand this, at least at a metaphorical level, but as our guides continued talking we realised that they did not mean in it the same way at all. A cave painting of the rainbow serpent is not a representation, it is the rainbow serpent (not a painting of it). And as the story unfolds it becomes, not just a mythical animal but also a group of people for whom this animal is their totem. The climax of the story is the point at which the landscape feature, the people who are the guardians of it (for whom it is their dreaming) and the animals invoked, merge into one seamless whole.

I am not sure how much you can generalise from culture to culture in these matters, but I certainly feel that same sense of imaginative helplessness, faced with something that is beyond my grasp. At the Bull Temple there is a massive ‘statue’ of a bull ‘carved’ in granite. But the children (and Shobha) tell me that it hasn’t been carved. It was just like this, which is what makes it of special significance. And later, when we go to the Cave Temple (which is close to the Village), there is a large smooth granite rock which has some scooped out holes that resemble footprints (my reading), but which in Hindu eyes are the footprints of Lard Hunnamartha (the god with face of a monkey), made as he ran across the rock.

For the children the lines between belief, myth and reality are of limited consequence. The children seem to move much more easily between different ways of understanding the world than I can. So, I find myself wondering, what is going on in their minds when they look at a photograph? It would seem that they don’t see the photograph, as Susan Sontag so eloquently put it, as ‘a stencil taken off reality’. The process of taking the picture is not entirely mechanical, there is always an element of magic at work. Nor do they seem to believe, as Susan Sontag claims many people do, that each time a photograph is taken of you, you lose a layer of your soul. As though some essence of you has been stolen. Indeed, when Susan Sontag made a film for BBC TV, based on her book ‘On Photography”, she called the film ‘It’s stolen your face’. In this project something different is going on. Perhaps because we have given the process to the children (it is not us who are ‘taking’ the pictures), the effect is to lead them into different forms of understanding.

Day 7

8.30 am
I spent the early part of the morning getting the journal up to date and organising the photo files. I now have enough material that could not be replaced that I am getting nervous about the risk of losing or accidentally deleting files, especially when the children are playing with the laptop. I also wanted to see if I could find the best way of copying photofiles on to CD so that the Village can see them on their own computer. The problem is that if I copy straight from iPhoto then they will not open on the PC, and if I copy them as jpeg files from the finder the Office still can’t open them because they do not the appropriate software. The office machines are running Windows 95 and don’t have Photoshop or equivalent software but Shobha says they can get it. The other problem I discovered is that if I copy on to CD from an iPhoto album for my own files then once I have ejected the CD I cannot reload it and copy additional files, even if it is only a quarter full, because it reads the file as already recorded. This is something I will have to investigate further. So far the help file in iPhoto has allowed me to find out how to do most things but I have yet to check this one.

I went down the the office which was quiet today as Saumeya is on holiday and only Mrs Kaur was there. She connected me to the internet so I could read my mail. The network seemed much more stable today though I still get some mail bounced and I am having trouble reading attachments as they take too long to download but I think now that the mail problem is probably at the university, not here. The university has been having serious problems since a series of virus attacks more than a month ago. These seem to have affected the system in ways no-one can work out. In one department they found one day that the machines with alternate IP numbers would connect and the others wouldn’t, so strange drop outs are probably to be expected. Most annoying is that many of my messages home to Lynne are not getting through so I am glad now that I made a call from the hotel in Mumbai when I first arrived.

It is still a little strange sitting so far away and being able to participate in normal work. Maureen wrote to me to say that she had renewed a library book I had not been able to renew on the network (it was grey, not red she told me which makes we wonder about the state of my memory). There are comings and goings around the normal stuff of academic meetings, meetings to discuss a new policy on supervising research students, a program for a one day scenario planning exercise I will be doing when I return, two seminars I shall miss and one I wont, some correspondence about a conference we are planning next July, a note to say that did I know that England beat Australia in the RU World Cup (so that I was on both winning and losing sides), some project budget documents, a note about presentations by people being considered for two new positions, a note that someone has a new grant, a visiting professor asking me if we could set a date to examine a PhD thesis, a student writing about his thesis draft (which I have been reading while I am here) and inviting Lynne and I to dinner next week.

In between I sent two or three messages to Lynne, some long and some short, in the hope that at least one would get through. Then all the messages from outside, a colleague proposing a book on new research methods (I suggested we write about this project), a professor from the US asking me to check an entry she had written for an encyclopedia, an anxious administrator from an NGO asking for news of two modules I am writing for a distance course in research methods and which are overdue, an administrator from another NGO acknowledging a decision about completing an evaluation project. I am amazed how time passes while I am doing these things (as it does for several hours on most days) and at the same time I realise just how many things you can do in a short space of time compared to the days when everything had to be done by letters or telephone calls, which to me seems like yesterday even though it is ten or fifteen years ago. What has changed in this time is that now everyone is accessible in this space, where previously it was a small number of colleagues in universities.

Day 6

3 am
I slept soundly until sometime after 2 am, woke up from a vivid dream and then could not get back to sleep. Maybe the funfair had shaken up a few too many brain cells! Mostly I was thinking about the project and thinking about what I would have to share with Peter, Gerhild and Barbara at the end. I was now far enough into it that the project had set its course and it would be difficult to change direction. My main worry was that what I had done was give the children access to the technology, shown them just the beginning of its capabilities, and soon I would take it away from them. The idea began to form in my mind that perhaps I should leave one camera behind when I go.

In the early days of CARE (the research centre where I work) one of the principles we tried to work to was that when we completed a project we would attempt to leave our methods of working behind us so that others might use them. At this time (the early 1970s), the methodological debates in education were between testing and measurement, with their well established methods and procedures, on the one hand, and emerging forms of qualitative research on the other. In order to justify itself, some qualitative research developed a sophisticated language of justification. But we tried, sometimes successfully, to avoid doing this. We tried to make observations and collect interviews in ways that were transparent to those implicated in them. When we left, we reasoned, the research methods would be as much outcomes of the study as its findings. Of course it was not so easy (and on reflection, I don’t think we used the term ‘outcomes’ at this time), but we had the aspiration.

As we move into digital ethnography, a similar problem emerges. It is tempting to use the latest equipment and dazzling software, leaving the researched unable to follow us. (I feel some guilt at trailing around with my new G4 Powerbook – the best computer I have ever had -when the office here has earlier generation PCs running Windows 95). This is of course an area where the catch up time is short, and in buying the cameras we had deliberately gone for simpler rather than more complex devices. But there was no hiding the issue and I decided that although we had agreed to return the cameras and printer to SOS in Austria, so that they could use them in future projects in other villages, I would leave one camera behind, and replace it when I got back home.

As it began to get light I must have fallen asleep and I was woken up by the phone ringing about 8.30.

Shobha and I spent most of the day selecting and printing photos and sticking them on large sheets of paper. I also took all the pictures into an album (folder) on the laptop, sorted them and ran them as a slide show, so that anyone who had taken a photo would be able to find it. There were very few mis-taken shots, some repetitions (very professional some would say!) and one or two video clips. One of the minor problems with the camera is that if you shift the selection dial one place too many then it records in video (with sound). The problem with this is that uses up memory, though not as much as I expected because usually the children press and release the shutter thinking they are taking a still and instead get a few seconds of video. I had decided not to tell them this because I thought that once they knew they would use up all the card space (there are limits to children’s active participation!).

1.30
As usual at lunchtime I sat with Victor and he asked me how it was going and was I getting from the children what I needed. I tried to explain that the project was much about testing the idea of children’s participation as it was about collecting data. I didn’t explain this very well and realised as I struggled to do so that I had oversold the violence and antithesis of violence theme too strongly at the start. Victor asked me if I had the information I needed to take away and analyse. A good question that set me thinking.

6 pm
That evening we put up the pictures, from Thursday and Sunday in the Activity Hall and issued a general invitation for people to visit. Many did and I was struck how intently some of the small children gazed at some of the pictures – especially the pictures taken in their homes. The only problem was that, having issued the invitation, people came in and out all through the session. Plus the children were excited and the Activity Room is not the best place for reflective discussion anyway. As I mentioned before it is also used as a dance studio, so it has a large clear area and big mirrors along one wall. Add to this three computer chairs (on wheels) and it lends itself to zooming around. It is great fun and the children took care not to crash into one another but it all added to the air of excitement. I think we had brought some element of Fun World back into the village with us. And the children had been at school all day.

But Shobha did manage to get the group to select two photos each to talk about and took notes as they did so.

After the session we met Mr Lokesh in the office. He had been out all afternoon. One of the older girls had been taken to hospital with suspected appendicitis and he had to go, not just to see her but to sign the consent form for the operation (since legally he is guardian). He started to tell us about his life and career. He had trained first in English literature, linguistics and economics and later had done masters degrees in English Literature and then social work. He had been a college lecturer and had worked on a variety of research projects. At one time he had worked as a fieldwork assistant for a Canadian professor who was studying folklore in the region. Later he had done economic research interviewing scientists in government research facilities. He had researched the impact and take up of Chola (?) stoves in rural communities – a specially designed, fuel-efficient stove that was intended to reduce deforestation and which had been supplied to many rural households.

We discussed what we might do on Wednesday, which is a holiday. He had several ideas but suggested we discuss these tomorrow with the children and decide on a plan.

I told him what I was thinking about the camera and he welcomed the suggestion. The problem is how to process and present the images. The computers do not have suitable ports or appropriate software. One has a CD drive but it is read-only. Shoba could mail the cards to me to print, but this would be time consuming and cause delays.

Day 5

Sunday – our big day out. The plan was to take the children to Fun World. This is a park where there are rides (the children call them games). We travelled on the Village bus and the driver and Mrs Kaur from the office came with us, as well as Shobha and me.

My first thought was that the children would have a good time but I wasn’t sure how it fitted into the project plan. But one of our commitments was to take photographs in locations of the children’s choosing and this was definitely their first choice. My concern was that they were choosing for different reasons and that they just wanted to have fun. But then I thought that is exactly what we should be doing – giving them the chance to have fun and then thinking about what having fun means to them.

The research project needs, in this sense to be about itself. If the children stayed outside ‘having fun’ and we got them to talk abstractly about what freedom from violence meant for them, then this would be likely to become a very abstract exercise. It might be interesting for the adults but I am not sure if it would be for the children, and if our aim is learn what participation in research means, then we have to do it and not just talk about it.

In my mind I keep coming back to what Peter Egg said when we had our planning meeting back in September, that we have to create the situation and then trust the children to make it into something real. ‘Participation’ does not just mean ‘taking part in’, it means ‘taking a part in’. It means having some control over events and decisions about events.

As it turned out there was another sense in which this place was more appropriate to our theme than my adult imagination had let me see. Ill return to this at the end, but you can probably see it already.

The bus journey took us into the centre of city and past some of the major civic buildings, the parliament, the university, the High Court and the parks and tree lined streets that the Lonely Planet guide had told me were a feature of the city. When we got to Fun World we parked the bus and walked to the entrance. Getting the tickets was complicated, not just because there were twelve children and four adults, but because two or three of the girls were too tall to be admitted as children (height was what counted rather than age) and also because we had to buy tickets to be able to take photographs.

Once in the park we headed for the first ride, which turned out to be a popular choice but one which scared some of the children. The children called it the Breakdance and I think it is what in England we call a waltzer. Four chairs, each seating two people spin around on one of three arms. So once the machine turns, you spin round being accelerated and decelerated. Some of the smaller children were not allowed on and stood patiently and watched (hence the difference in admission process I suppose). Several children were scared on this game and one or two were crying. But soon we moved on the next game, the parachute. This wound you slowly up to the top of a tower and then let you fall gently downwards. This was a favourite, I think in part because of the contrast with the previous game.

We then found some smaller games – roundabouts for the smaller children but some of the minders would not let them on because they were over five. So if you were over five but small you missed out both ways. But with a bit of persuasion most of the men did let the children on.

We stopped for lunch in a large café and orders were placed. The food was a long time coming, and then did not come all at once but over half an hour or more. The children were remarkably patient, and when the food did come they shared it without any prompting or anyone asking. Nearby was family of three children and the two boys (one dressed head to toe in a Spiderman suit) were constantly quarrelling, and hitting and kicking each other whenever their mother turned her back. I realised with a shock that I felt sorry for some of the ordinary families as they seemed disadvantaged compared to our group. They certainly didn’t seem to be having as much fun, or looking after one another so well. Later, on one of the small games Rohidas was sat next to a very small child, maybe only two years old, while the child’s parents stood behind the barrier. Rohidas looked out for the child and very gently helped him off when the ride finished. I don’t think the parents even noticed.

After lunch, we went on more rides, the small children waiting when the bigger ones went and the big ones when the smaller children played. No-one wandered off or rushed off or was impatient. The group kept itself together.

We found our way to the boating lake and took out pedalos for half an hour. I reminded the children to keep the cameras dry but I need not have worried.

Before we left Shobha bought popcorn and candy floss for everyone, by then her husband had arrived and we left them together to spend the evening there while we took the bus back to the Village. Fifteen minutes into the journey almost everyone was asleep.

The missing theme I mentioned earlier, that I only realised when I looked back through the photos was about fear and fun sometimes being closely related. They are opposites, but not always polar opposites.

Day 4

9 am
I spent the morning printing the pictures from yesterday. All the photos from last night turned out well and only one was a little fuzzy from movement. The camera works well in the dark picking up background objects as well as the foreground without bleaching out close up objects too much or reflecting too strongly of glass surfaces. Later Shobha came and we printed a few more pictures that she wanted and then stuck the set on to large sheets of paper to display them.

Shobha had brought four of the children’s files from the office. The stories are mixed tales of poverty and tragedy. Parents who died young, from unknown causes, or from TB, young unmarried mothers, fathers who have fled, a child left property that was taken by relatives and he was turned out to survive without food or shelter. Grandparents and uncles and aunts who tried to cope but couldn’t because of their own poverty, ill health or because they feared for the child if they were soon to die. In each file there are photos of each child taken each year, letters from relatives, legal documents assigning the child to the village. Once here they belong here; no-one is fostered or given back.

3 pm
Shobha, Mrs Cord and I took the Village bus to Lalbagh Gardens near the centre of the city. It is a popular place to visit for families, courting couples and others. The only problem was that it is a place where almost everyone goes to take photos, which made it difficult for the children to think outside of the conventions of such photographs. So mostly what we got was a variety of posed pictures of ourselves, some very good, but somewhat staged.

Thinking about this I feel that if our project task is to get the children to express what happiness/peace means to them, then one important aspect of the study is to create situations in which they feel happy and then to see how they express this. So what we may have is a set of fairly conventional poses, but they are pictures of the children enjoying themselves. Perhaps the test will be in how they talk about the pictures.

We failed to find the Snow White clock, which several of the children knew about and which is mentioned in my Lonely Planet Guide, where it is described as ‘surreal’. I was disappointed not to see it too.

While I came away feeling a little disappointed that I had let picture taking overtake the project aim somewhat, Mrs Kaur said to me how confident the children were with the cameras. This was the first time we had let them lose with three cameras between them and when she mentioned it I realised how far they had progressed in the last few days. At one point as we were walking through the park a young man asked Sweatha if she would take a picture of him with his girlfriend sitting together under a tree. I think he thought perhaps Sweatha was in charge of the smaller children. She is tall and looked very elegant today in a full length dress (today several of the children had joined the ‘dress competition’), and she immediately responded by taking the camera from him and preparing to take the picture very confidently. He then I think realised what he had done and a look of panic came over his face as he saw me behind the children with Mrs Kaur and Shobha. He spoke to me in English and I said it’s ‘Ok, she is an expert’. The smaller children crowded behind her and for one minute I thought they were all going to join the photo but they stood quietly watching Sweatha taking the picture. As we walked away I said I had thought they might all join in the pose and Mrs Cord said she thought someone might have taken a picture of the couple too and later we would wonder who they were. Maybe too someone might have snapped Sweatha taking the picture. But we were all too slow.

Then I realised that Shobha was embarrassed and said this shouldn’t have happened and that it was a ‘development problem’. It was only several days later when I asked her about the incident again that she explained that the couple were cuddling each other for the photo and she felt that the children should not have witnessed this. Again my failure to understand the cultural meaning/significance of my actions in allowing Sweatha to take the picture.

Returning home on the bus through the evening traffic nearly everyone fell asleep, from a mixture of tiredness and air pollution I suspect. For the children it had been a long day as they had been at school all morning. The street scenes are amazing to my Western eyes. The mix of old and new, the small shops and workshops. I saw one that contained just a lathe, next door to someone who had welding gear. I am sure you could get anything fixed here if you had to. Bullock carts and street vendors outside the new Taj Mahal of the HSBC call centre.

Day 3

8.30am
I had not planned to visit the Kindergarten until later, not knowing how late I would sleep. As it happened I was awake fairly early and so decided to print the photos we had so far.

I unpacked the equipment, found adapters for the power and start to set everything up. Then I realised that I did not have a cable to connect the camera to the printer. I had a Firewire connector but found that I needed a USB. I could not understand how I had the mistake. I remember removing some of the unwanted cables when I packed but could not remember this one. Disaster! I was angry with myself and disappointed. I unpacked everything twice but it was not there.

All I could think of was that I would have to use the laptop and show the pictures on this. But it would be hard to leave the pictures behind as I had promised or to set up the ‘exhibition’ next week.

10.30 am
With Shobha I visited three houses. In the first house one of the older girls was visiting from her College in Mysore where she is studying and plans to continue to study for a degree in sociology. She talked about being homesick when she first left home, how she missed her mother, her brothers and sisters and her mother’s cooking. She is living in a hostel and now as friends but still likes to return home when she can. Her mother talked about how she found it hard when she first came to the Village and had to look after so many small children, but after two years or so it became easier.

In the second house there was also an older girl who was studying to be a librarian and in the third house lives the youngest child in the Village, just one year old. I asked the second mother who she would talk to if she had any problems with the children and she said the older children. I thought perhaps the mothers would discuss the children among themselves. The family is the most important social unit in the Village and the mothers seem to keep to themselves rather than being in and out of each other’s houses. The older children will visit friends in other houses but on the whole the place for socialising is outside the house rather than inside.

The second house was also home to two cats, one with a kitten. They were asleep on two of the children’s beds and I asked if they slept with the children. The children are not supposed to touch the cats and will sometimes sleep on the floor so as not to disturb them!

The houses all have the same design and are built in the same way. They are built of large, irregular shaped, stone blocks and have red cement floors and red tile roofs. Inside the rooms are mostly open to the full height of the roof and are cool and shaded. Outside a small garden leads to a verandah and the front door. The door opens directly on to a large living room, which has a table and chairs, three or four other chairs and a built in, glass-fronted display cabinet containing cups and medals won by the children at sports, a few children toys and in some houses, a few books. Several houses have sewing machines. On the walls of each house are various posters, depending a bit on whether the house is Catholic, Moslem or Hindu. Behind the living area is the kitchen, divided by open shelves as well as a door opening. The kitchen has a gas hob, a stone sink and draining board and shelving for kitchen utensils and outside there is a yard with a stone for washing and clothes lines.

Off the living area is a corridor with doors to the mother’s room, which small children also often share, a boys’ room, a girls’ room a bathroom and a further bedroom which seems in most houses to be used by older children. In some houses there is a small TV, though I am told that viewing is normally restricted to weekends, and in some houses there may be a ‘fridge or a washing machine. These though are not provided and the mothers have bought them from their own savings,

1.30 pm Lunch with Victor
I asked Victor how he saw the village in the future, when the current group of mothers are no longer able to care for the young children. He said that he saw an important role for them as ‘grandmothers’, who could continue to live in the village and remain in contact with the children, helping when they could. Some villages have already done this and have established a ‘grandmothers’ house’, a bit like the house next to the Community House where the ‘aunties’ live.

I asked Victor how the mothers were selected. He said that they looked for women who were optimistic and positive in outlook. He said that there was some discussion in Europe about whether the role of the mother should be professionalized, and require training in social and other skills. He said that they took a more old-fashioned view, seeing the job of mother as more of a vocation than a profession. He went on to tell me a little about two of the mothers, one who died of cancer a few years ago, and one who continues to work despite having a psychological condition. She wanted to remain in the Village and was managing alright on medication. Psychologists had advised that her condition was not detrimental for the children but the situation was being watched.

I told Victor that the dogs kept me awake at night and he told me a little about the wildlife. The dogs are a worry because they can carry rabies, though if you get bitten the treatment is much better than it used to be. Victor said people were reluctant to kill the stray dogs and also snakes, which are sometimes seen around the village and which are removed for release outside. Sometimes they will come into the house but then they panic because they cant move on the smooth cement floors. Mostly though he said the snakes will move out of your way if they can.

We went on to talk about health problems. AIDS is not a serious problem in this region but is difficult to deal with because it carries social stigma. The village has not had to deal with an infected child but does blood tests on admission to check. The problem Victor says they are likely to encounter is if they receive an orphan whose parents have died from AIDS and what the implications of this would be for the village as a whole. In some large cities it may be necessary to establish a village just for HIV+ children. Philosophically he says that once the disease is more prevalent, then the stigma will lessen and the problem will reduce.

2.30 pm
Returning to my printing problem I thought perhaps I could print through the Office printers if I transferred the images to CD. But before I tried that idea, I had just a vague hope that the printer might have a Bluetooth connection and thought that this might just possibly solve the printing problem.

Reading through the booklet and trying one or two other ideas I realised that I could print straight from the memory stick, if I removed it from the camera and put it in the printer. I just had to remember to set iPhoto so that it would not delete the images from the camera on transfer. I am pleased to have worked out a solution but why aren’t I feeling the enormous sense of relief that I should?

As I thought about it I remembered that this is just what I had done when I tested the equipment at home. I had printed from the memory stick, not from the laptop. I can’t believe I had not remembered this. Then I remembered that I am still operating on a five and a half hour time difference and that my brain is not functioning as fully as it should. Either that or I am aging faster than I like to think.

I remembered too, reading Malinowski’s diary and realising that frustration with yourself and your own inadequacies is endemic to fieldwork. I have only been here a few days but I wonder if being in a new culture necessarily creates these feelings of inadequacy and dependence.

3.30 pm
Shobha helped me identify the names of the children in the first set of pictures and we added their names to the keywords in iPhoto.

I had not realised that Shobha had worked here for only one week and she told me that it was so much better as a place to work than anywhere else. She was amazed that after only a week she had been asked to assist me and that this had caused no jealousy among the other staff.

We talked too about fostering and the problems this could cause. It is now illegal here but the village view is that this is the child’s home and that their family is here.

5 pm
It began to rain and so the usual outside prayer meeting was not held. We opened the Activity Room and the children quickly arrived. The plan today is to take the camera out for the first time and to visit some of their houses so they can take photos there. The mothers are very patient with this caravan of excited children arriving in their houses and comply with requests to pose, move pictures and generally disrupt their houses. We visit a number of houses before the batteries start to fail, so I have to fetch a second camera, having forgotten to bring spare batteries in my pocket. This is probably a good idea anyway as we are running short of memory.

Everything goes well and we return to the Activity Room. The children then decide that they want to photo a tutorial session (tutors come in for a few hours each evening and help the children with their work in the kindergarten classrooms). I fear their reorganisation of everyone gets a bit out of hand and we do disrupt the sessions but everyone is patient with us.

We meet back in the Activity Room to plan tomorrow. Shobha will meet me in the morning so that we can print this evening’s pictures and at 3 pm we will meet with the children for an outside visit, returning before dark. Shoubha decides we should reorganise the three groups to make sure that there is one older and more responsible girl with each group. This causes some resentment as some of the girls want to stay together but I think it will prove to be a sensible move. I had thought this evening we could have taken three cameras but we used only one at a time and this proved to be a good decision.

Day 2

10.30 am
A visit to the kindergarten. I spent two hours in the kindergarten talking with the teachers and observing a very active lesson in which the children chanted rhymes with movements and watched the children have lunch. The lesson was taken by one teacher with the other two assisting, which made it easy for them to talk with me. The atmosphere is very relaxed and the teachers are well in control. The kindergarten is not a central focus for the study but is an important part of the village and I wanted the teachers to know who I was and what I was doing.

The teachers explained that Indian education is very competitive and that exams were of great importance. In kindergarten the children learn to write letters, words and short sentences in English and also in the local language. The write numbers as well as having the chance to use computers.

1.30 pm
Over lunch I asked Victor about the village as a community and particularly about the family structure of mothers and children but no fathers. He understood the problem but said that it would create too many difficulties for married couples to run the houses. First there would be the problem for the parents of treating the children equally. He felt it was inevitable that they would favour their own children, even if only in small ways and that this would be a source of jealousy. He thought too that having men in the Village would lead to other problems, they would have to be found work, or would work outside which would lead to income differentials between houses and when they returned they would want to get together and perhaps to drink and that this could be a source of problems.
All in all, while it might be ideal to have house fathers and house mothers he felt that the structure that had evolved worked.

I asked about role models for the boys and he said it was the Village director and the other men, particularly the Educator, who filled this role and there were also the older brothers, who from fifteen lived away from the Village in the Youth House but who were still in regular contact with their families and who provided a role model for the young boys.

2 pm
Shobha came up to the Community House and I showed her the camera and the laptop and she practiced taking a few photos which we then viewed on the screen. I am still not fully familiar with the software but Shobha is quicker than I am to pick it up (but she does have a degree in computer science). When she left I told her to take the camera and keep practicing with it. Later she showed me the pictures she had taken of the office staff.

3.30 pm
I met with some of the Office staff in Mr Lokesh’s office. They included the project director from the Youth House, the accounts clerk, and the two women who manage sponsorship, local and international. I wanted to explain the project to them so that they would know what we were doing and why. They had been asking Mr Lokesh questions about the project and were curious to know more. I explained how the project had come about and how Barbara wanted to make this project an SOS response to the UN program on Violence Against Children.

I explained that there were three of us involved in the project and said a little about what Peter and Gerhild had been doing. I said we were chosen partly because we were each of us independent of SOS and so would not be seen to be acting only in the interests of the organisation. I said we came from different backgrounds, that I was a university teacher, Peter worked a lot with children and young people in Austria and that Gerhild was a psychologist, and that this mix was intentional so that we might see what we each could contribute.

As often happens, they found it hard to believe that they had been chosen for the project and that I was not going to other villages in India or elsewhere. But I explained that this was something of an experiment and that if it was successful then it may be possible next year to extend the project to other villages.

I said how it was important for the children to participate as fully as possible and how I hoped too that it would be fun, interesting and educative for them. They asked me why I was using cameras and I explained that this was a quick way to get them involved, that talking to them was also important but would be more abstract, especially as they would have to speak to me in English and would inevitably see me as an outsider, as older, white, male etc. Giving them the cameras to use was I hoped a way of involving them very directly and giving them something immediate and concrete to talk about.

They asked me about the emphasis of the project on ‘violence’ and asked how that would come into it. I said we were not going to ask them about this directly. We knew that they came from poor, deprived and sometimes abusive backgrounds but this was not what we wanted to investigate. Rather we wanted to be positive and to look at the things they valued about their life in the Village. The idea was to try and look at what the opposite of violence was, and we knew that this was very difficult and very abstract to talk about but we believed that the pictures would be a way to start doing this.

6 pm
Shobha and I met with the children in the Activity Hall. The children were waiting for us and so were many others who wanted to be part of the event so we had to close the door in an attempt to keep things a little calmer. We began by explaining that it was important to keep hold of the camera and not to drop it or to fight over it. We said too to keep their fingers away from the lens and to avoid taking the camera anywhere where it might get wet. Then we showed them the basic operations, How to switch it on, looking at the screen and pressing the shutter. We said to try and avoid pointing the camera at the mirror – the Activity hall is also used as a dance studio and has a mirror covering the back wall. Today we used only one camera to try to focus attention on it and to keep the event under some control.

Everyone then got to take one picture, which we looked at on the laptop. Most were OK but one problem was that in using the flash there was a delay between pressing the shutter and the picture being taken. This meant that if the camera was moved too quickly the picture was blurred or even cut of the heads of the subjects. The lesson to be learnt (for me) is that more practice with the camera is a good idea! And not just the obvious things! Nevertheless most pictures were OK, just a couple where the camera moved resulting in a fuzzy image or a head cut off.

Then we put the children in pairs and had them photograph one another. This time they were a little less excited and the pictures were better. We ended by taking some group photos and they quickly took control and organised each other (and us). Shobha and I both had to be in the group and to have our portraits taken holding a small chair shaped like a monkey. I hadn’t expected to be a photo-subject and it felt a little strange but I think it is a good sign that they are quick to organise photo-opportunities and to direct the scene.

Tomorrow we decided to try using three cameras, giving the groups more control and taking the cameras to other locations in the Village. Knowing now the degree of excitement this is likely to create we will stay with them in the hope that by the weekend everyone will be more familiar with the cameras being around and hopefully even a little bored by it!

Inside and outside
The emphasis of the project is on the lives of the children, children who here because they have experienced loss, trauma and deprivation. The question we are asking is how they see their lives now, and perhaps how they see their futures, it is not about their past and how it might have affected them. The Village provides the site in which to ask these questions. The purpose of the study is not to evaluate the Village idea, or to assess the work of those who live here, it is simply the place in which the study is to be conducted.

This is the rationale of the study but in practice it is difficult to sustain, at least in so far as first impressions go (I have been here less than twenty four hours). It is difficult because the Village provides more than a context for the study. The way the Village is clearly shapes the lives of the children, and perhaps the adults too. I think I have to try to see it more clearly in order to understand the lives of the children, even though, in the final analysis that is what should count.

First, there is a strong sense of the Village as a small world. Just outside my window is the boundary fence. On this side there are trees and flowers and the paths between the stone built houses are quiet and shaded. The plants attract a variety of birds and butterflies. You might here the occasional child cry (or more often laughing) but mostly it is quiet and peaceful. I understand why Shobha told me she just loves to come here to work. On the other side of the fence there is an area of wasteland, piles of rubbish inhabited by warring packs of feral dogs, and beyond that concrete houses, large gum trees (but few shrubs) and the mix of streets and dirt roads that mark an area in transition from rural to urban as the growing city overtakes its surroundings.

This sense of the Village as a haven, oasis or enclave does not take into account that the children (at least the older ones) move between the inside and the outside. This is where they live, but out there is where they go to school, go to the shops or visit the temple.

It is also a gendered environment. There are more girls than boys in the Village, since boys over 15 leave to live in the Youth House. The sixteen house mothers are the core of the community, along with the aunties – the women who assist them and cover for them if they are ill or away from the Village for any reason, the kindergarten teachers and the office staff. The only men I have encountered are Mr Lokesh, the Director, the Educator and three men who have offices here, Victor, ? the accounts clerk and ? the man who runs the youth house in the city, which provides transitional accommodation for 39 boys who are old enough to be at work or at college.

This gives the Village a domesticity and an ethos. Much of the time seems to be spent cooking, cleaning and shopping; these are the activities that set a tempo to life and they are mostly accomplished quietly and calmly. (Though it is hard to imagine remaining calm while caring for ten children and managing a large household alone). To the visitor this aspect of life in the Village is not immediately visible, and though it is not strictly the focus of the study, I think I need to understand the families better if I am to understand the children. The mothers have all been here since the Village was established thirteen or fourteen years ago. They are all single, some are widows, some unmarried and some are separated from their husbands. They are paid very little but are provided with accommodation and given a budget with which to feed and clothe the children. When I met them they were polite, reserved and respectful. Perhaps when the children take their photographs the lives of the mothers will become a more integral part of the story.

Day 1

11.45am
Mr Victor Nath met me at the airport and his driver drove us out to the Village, which took 40 minutes or so. This is not a large city by Indian standards, about 30k across Victor told me, but it has a population of more than 5m people. I am still in a state of some culture shock in relation to traffic rules. I try not to look forwards as the driver weaves in and out of the traffic, which is not just a traffic of cars but also includes auto rickshaws, cyclists, pedestrians, heavy lorries and cattle. The only traffic rule I can decipher is that where in Europe we have lines on the road, here drivers use their horns instead, and everyone looks to drive down the middle of the road.

We pass a large new building, which is the HSBC call centre, where workers answer calls from Japan, Europe and North America, working shifts adjusted to local time in each country. I am told that UK workers have to watch tapes of Coronation Street, check the daily weather and the football scores at the start of each shift but I don’t know if this true. Victor tells me that the work appeals to young, well-qualified people because they can earn around $200 a month – more than they would earn as a college teacher, but he worries that there is no career progression and that the global economy may well move the jobs somewhere else just as fast as they came here.

We talk about the project and I mention that there is some feeling in Europe that the idea of the Village is criticised by some, who see adoption as a better solution. Victor tells me a little of the backgrounds of the children and of local circumstances and culture. Most people who want to adopt, want to adopt young, male babies and on the whole are reluctant to adopt children from poor backgrounds. Victor explains that in part this is because in the majority Hindu culture, when fathers die, their last rites have to be carried out by a son. Hence, 70% of the children in the villages in India are girls.

Children come to the village because the police find them abandoned as babies or, more often, because their family has broken down, either because their father has died, or simply abandoned the family. Some come from families where there has been abuse.

Victor tells me that he has arranged for one of his staff to work with me as an interpreter. Her name is Shobha and he tells me that she is young and he thinks that she will relate well to the children. He explains too that she has only recently been working in the office, compiling a database of donors, and so she will be seen as someone who can be objective and not too closely tied to the village.

When we arrive at the village I am greeted by two young children and given flowers and then taken to meet Mr Ramesh, the Village Director. I am to stay in the Community House, which involves walking through the village along a stone path. On each side are the houses (sixteen in all), in each of which live a housemother and ten children. There is also a three-room kindergarten (which takes in both village children and children from the surrounding community) and an Activity Room (where children get special lessons in classical dance and music and where there are some computers, including two special computers for young children, donated by IBM).

Over lunch in the Community House we talk more about the project, including how to select children to participate and outlining a timetable and trying to foreshadow possible problems. The children are at school all day and return to the village about 4.30. At 5.30pm there is a short assembly and they need to return to their houses before 7.30. Realistically, we think from 6pm until 7pm, or just after is the best time to meet. In addition, the children are free on Saturday afternoon and all day Sunday, and next Wednesday, the day before I leave is a holiday as it is Ramazan.

We talked further about taking the children out of the village and I was told that the Village bus could be made available for trips and picnics and that we might visit a large park in the city, a playpark for children, a small local zoo, or perhaps a street where they might go with the mothers shopping. I repeated my concern about being responsible for the children but they told me not to worry, that at least one other adult would come too, that the children were responsible and would not wander off, and that anyway they were capable of finding their own way back to the village by bus if the had to. I wasn’t entirely reassured by this but it is striking how different the attitude would be in Europe.

Most of the children, I am told, will speak and understand at least some English. There is no serious security problem in the village, there are no gates and only a low chain link fence surrounding the property, but to be safe I should lock the equipment in my room when I am not there. The children, I am told, may be a bit nervous about using the cameras as they will not have used one before and they may be a bit shy about participating in the project.

Mr Ramesh tells me that I can have access to the records that the village keeps on the children and suggests that each day we consider two cases and he will discuss them with me. He explains that the mothers’ do not normally see the records because, as he put it, they want the mothers to respond to the children as they are, just as they would in an ordinary family. The aim seems an admirable one – to give the children a new start and to orient them to the present and the future, not to the past, but it leaves the question as to whether or not it is best for the children to repress the traumas that many of them have experienced.

4pm
The Mothers were called to meet me at the Community House. Thirteen (of sixteen) mothers came, the others were out shopping when the message went round. The Director and the Village Educator were also present at the meeting and the Director translated for me. I explained the project, saying that the idea was to give people outside the village a better idea of the lives of the children, of how they saw their lives, the things that made them happy as well as other aspects of their lives. I explained that I was only coming to one village (Victor had told me that there are more than thirty villages in India) and that my two colleagues were visiting villages in Thailand, in Colombia and Nicaragua.

I told the mothers that I would be giving the children cameras to photograph aspects of their lives and so they should not be concerned if they saw the children with cameras. I said they might want to photograph their rooms or other parts of their house and the mothers could ask them not to photograph rooms that were untidy, or to come back later if they wanted to. I also said I didn’t want to cause any embarrassment and that I would not take away any photographs that people did not want me to take. I said too that I would leave copies of the pictures in the village when I left and that these would remain with the Village to use as they wanted to.

I was asked where the idea of the project came from and I said that it was SOS who first had the idea and that it was a response to the UN’s program Violence Against Children. I said that the final outcome would be a book that SOS would produce, using material from the four countries.

They asked me what were my connections with SOS and asked if I was I a member of the SOS staff. I explained that I wasn’t and that the reason SOS had asked three outside people to do the project was to assure people about the objectivity and independence of the project.

I said a little about myself, about my work in the university and about my family. The mothers then introduced themselves. Some spoke in English but most in Kannada, the local language. They have all been here thirteen years, since the village opened, and have fourteen to sixteen children. They talk of the children as part of their family (just as I did in describing mine), including those who have left for college or university or those who at work or living in hostels. One of the mothers has a Moslem family but she admitted that they were not fasting this year (Ramazan is next week), another is Catholic, but the rest are Hindu.

The Director thanked me and said he hoped the project would be a success and said that he felt blessed that the Village had been chosen to participate in the project. I said I hoped that the children would enjoy it and learn from the experience and that it would not be too disruptive for the mothers. I told them they should tell someone to tell me if it was. I told them that they would see me around the village for the next week and that tomorrow I would be in kindergarten and that at some stage I would hope to meet them individually.

6pm
The first meeting with the children. We had decided to restrict the numbers to twelve but there were others waiting outside hoping they might be included. We decided we should start with the twelve but keep an open mind about adding others later if there was an opportunity to do so.

I explained the project to children and Shobha translated for me. Most of the children understood my English, or at least some of it but Shobha was able to make my explanation more colloquial. Later I asked her how much she was adding and she said that when I spoke one sentence she made it into four (but she laughed when she said it!). I said that is the problem with being a professor and she said, that is the difference between a professor and being a teacher! I noticed that when I spoke some children smiled enthusiastically but others looked serious and perhaps puzzled, but when Shobha interpreted they all smiled!

Once they understood what we were asking we put the children into three groups and asked them to discuss the kinds of things they wanted to photograph. Several of them wanted to photograph their mothers, but interestingly, talked not so much in terms of capturing a likeness but in terms of things that the mothers did. In the kitchen cooking was one suggestion, showing how they played with and looked after the young children was another. These seemed to me sophisticated ideas.

They also wanted to visit the local temple and photograph the god (perhaps an even more sophisticated idea!), and show the mother in the Moslem house preparing the food for Ramazan. Two of the children wanted to photograph something in their house which they said gave off a blue glow. I am not sure what this is or whether the camera will register such an image, but perhaps we shall see.

I told them that tomorrow I would show then how the cameras worked and we would get them to photograph each other. Some of the other things they want to photograph need to be shot in daylight conditions, and as it is dark by six, this might need some organising.

After the meeting with the children Mr Ramesh came in and asked how it had gone.

The children respond very well to Shobha, and she to them and I think I have to trust her to interpret the intent of the project rather than literally what I say. She told me after the meeting that she had taken a job in the office that was really below her capabilities and qualifications because she loved the village and the way they cared for the children. The project gives her direct contact with the children, which she loves, and the chance to be part of a project, which is something she has always dreamed of doing. I am very encouraged by her enthusiasm and understanding and I think I need to treat her as a collaborator and co-researcher. I think Victor has made an excellent choice in asking her to take this role and I suspect many people in his position would have chosen someone who was ‘safer’ and would keep the project in control.

About 7.30 I went back to the Community House where Rosi had cooked me dinner. Victor had told her not to use much spice but I think I should tell to use just a bit more!

Calm amidst chaos

1. This morning I went to London to get a visa for my trip to India. There has been a postal strike in London and I didnt want to risk waiting for the visa to be returned by mail with less than two weeks to go. A lot of other people had the same idea as there were about 500 of us queuing for visas. Perhaps I can count this as a first experience of Indian bureaucracy. First I queued for a card, which allowed me access to the room where I could queue to submit my application. This took about an hour and half, followed by another hour or so waiting for my passport to be returned by a woman who sat at a window calling out our numbers in apparently random order so as to return our completed passports to us.

It was not chaotic but it did begin to get fraught, I think because of the apparent unpredictability of the process. There was no sequence or order to the numbers that we could discern. One woman near me got increasingly upset and said how terrible the whole thing was and complained that there was no method to it. In front of her a tall man turned and said calmly and quietly: 'But there is a method, but it is a method that works for them, and not for us'. An analogy for the relationships between researchers and their subjects, perhaps.

2. With a couple of hours to spare before catching the train home I walked along the South Bank of the Thames to Tate Modern. This is the new art gallery created from a vast brick built power station, a key feature of which is the turbine hall, a 'room' some six floors high that runs the full length of the building. Currently this features an extraordinary installation by Afur Eliasson, who has put a mirrored ceiling on this vast space, making it seem even taller, reduced all the lighting and placed at one end of the space a large yellow disc backlit with sodium lamps. (Actually it is half a disc, but since it is placed at the top of the ceiling the mirror effect makes it looks like a full disc.) This disc is a convincing simalacrum for the sun, low in the sky in early morning or late evening. This atmospheric effect is emphasised by jets of gas, which I take to be frozen carbon dioxide that are injected into the space periodically . These fill the space with a chill mist, and at some times form clouds and (I have read) even gentle rain.

I had read about this installation and seen pictures of it but nothing can prepare you for encountering it (not even, somewhat paradoxically, actual sunrise and sunset). And more remarkable than the installation itself is the effect it seems to have on people who enter it. There is an extraordinary sense of calm, somewhat similar too, but clearly different from the feeling of awe you sometimes find in a cathedral. People lie on the floor, staring up at the ceiling, seeing themselves mirrored far above. A curious dissociation of the self, appearing both on the ground and in the sky (like those tales people tell of near death experience I think).
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/eliasson/about.htm-

3. Back across the river, St Pauls Cathedral is currently being cleaned and repaired and the facade of the main entrance is covered with scaffolding. Interestingly the scaffolding is largely hidden, being draped by a huge white plastic sheet, on which is printed an enlarged drawing of the facade, reproduced at a scale of 1:1. The facade has disappeared to be replaced by a lifesized drawing of itself: a kind of double Christo effect. (It was Christo, you may recall who, somewhat controversially, draped the Reichstag, and other landmarks, in polythene).

It is a curious effect because the drawing seems somehow more real than the actual facade. (Perhaps in the same way that many find the Parthenon a disappointment after having seen so many postcards of it). There is a quality to the drawn image that is more direct, more tangible and more individual than the anonymous carved stone that we normally see.
http://www.stpauls.co.uk/page.aspx?theLang=001lngdef&pointerid=42213fsySbUx6o8Hziz3D6vuQ6QMgewJ

*********
Our project is about using images to touch realities not easily reached with words alone. I think today I have learnt something about this, but I am not yet sure what.

What this site is about

I am taking part in a research project which is being sponsored by an Austrian charitable organisation called SOS-Kinderdorf. SOs-kd provides residential care for orphaned children and child refugees in more than 130 countries worldwide and has doing so since it began in Austria at the end of the Second World War.

Our project involves working with children and using digital cameras to try and gain some insight into their views of their world that might not be obvious to an outsider looking in. We are doing this as a contribution to the UN Year Against Violence to Children. In the first stage of the project three of us are going to four different countries for ten days each to see if the methods we have proposed work.

I am going to India in November to one of more than 30 Villages supported by SOS in India.