Several months later I was sitting on a palm-fringed beach at my first meeting with a 'sangham' (women's group) in Sadras, a fishing village in Tamil Nadu. I was met by a cup of tooth-achingly sweet tea and twelve women who didn't speak a word of English. I worked on the Sadras project with three English girls under the guidance of a Tamil social worker. Previous SPW volunteers had initiated 'sanghams' in the area, encouraging the women to elect a president and treasurer and to open up a bank account into which they could deposit 'seed' money. The intention being that each woman would contribute Rs20 (about 30p) every month to this account. This money was to be set aside for hard times, for funding community projects such as building toilets and for giving loans to women who were interested in setting up small, sustainable businesses.
By joining forces with The Tamil Nadu Voluntary Health Association (a local NGO), we organised various sessions on topics such as HIV/AIDS awareness, sanitation, and legal rights, and employed a girl called Mungai to give basic literacy classes to the women's sangham. By making use of local talents and resources SPW could add value to the community by employing people with special skills such as those with a flair for teaching. This aspect of the project gave me my first real experience of managing people and balancing a budget. Other more 'hands-on' areas of work included running after-school English classes with a local primary school. This was great fun and nearly always culminated in a rowdy rendition of the 'hokey cokey'. We also came together with SPW volunteers working in other villages to organise a health-education week in a high school, in which I found myself leading a discussion on condom use with sixteen year old boys and looking thoroughly silly by singing 'stand by me' in front of most of the village at the closing ceremony!
The parting words of wisdom that Dr Jeevanadam, co-ordinator of our training phase at Madras Christian College for our placements in the countryside were "don't try to change everything". For a group of idealistic young volunteers, accepting our limitations was, in retrospect, one of the biggest challenges we faced. However, I feel that through SPW we acted as some sort of catalyst for change, sharing our energy and ideas, and above all, by working in partnership with the women of Sadras. At a time when preparations for a medical camp were going a bit pear-shaped I remember seeing a poster in Dr Jeeva's office, which bore the motto "if you can't build a lighthouse, light a candle." The image of Dr Jeeva running across a cliff madly brandishing a candle to avert an approaching ship flashed across my mind in a moment of cynicism. However, what I learnt through my experiences with SPW is that rural development work really is about starting with the small things. One of my best memories is of a seminar we organised near the end of our placement on legal rights and girls' education with another local NGO. We played a game with the girls that involved one of us standing on a chair holding up a pen (which symbolised literacy), which they had to try to grab. Cue Mungai to jump up and practically rugby-tackle me to the ground to triumphantly grab that all-important biro! The sight of this sort of enthusiasm made all of the frustrating moments seem worthwhile.
Coming face to face with the bureaucracy of hours spent talking about water pipelines and government permits in the stuffy offices of regional bureaucrats under weakly whirring ceiling fans made me redefine the meaning of frustration. Yet this was just one of the multitude of daily challenges of working at the sharp end of development. My SPW placement gave me a genuine experience of the complexities and pitfalls of development work at the same time as fuelling my interest in it. Even though I've been home for a year and a half now, I'm still learning new things and meeting new people through SPW, as the opportunities to get involved are really only just beginning when you leave your host country.
