to fully take in where I am has been enjoyable.
I’m not usually one to anthropomorphise, but today’s birthday emu seemed much friendlier than the two lycra-clad Danes who passed me yesterday. When I saw them in the distance behind me, just out of Tailem Bend, I stopped and waited, assuming that when cyclists meet each other on the road they share camaraderie and cycling tales with each other. And maybe there was some camaraderie in the indifferent glance the duo gave me as they sped past. I dejectedly watched the Danish flags on the backs of their shirts fade into the distance. It seems I have a bit to learn about social conventions among long-distance cyclists. Or maybe I just need to learn Danish.
While my confidence is still a little low in the bike-riding department, the school-visiting side of my project has had a solid start. I met with about 150 students at a high school in Murray Bridge yesterday. After looking at a map to find India and, more specifically, the region of Kodaikanal in Tamil Nadu, I told the stories of some children from that area.
Valli
When I first went to Kodaikanal in 2001, I met an 11 year-old girl called Valli who was staying in the primary school hostel run by PEAK. Like the other 100 or so children there, she stayed in the hostel during term time so she could go to school. The village that she was from had a school, which she could not attend because Valli is from the Dalit community. Valli’s family, for generations, has done jobs that other people in the village consider unclean, such as cleaning sewage, slaughtering animals or making things from leather. In the urban centres of India, discrimination against Dalits has subsided and is less of an issue, but in many rural areas, it persists. In Valli’s village, Dalits either can’t go to the village school, or if they do, may be ignored or treated badly.
Staying at the hostel during term time meant that Valli went to school regularly, had help with her homework, ate three healthy meals a day and learnt about social issues as well. A small group of Jesuit Fathers and Brothers oversee the hostel organisation, while local women, referred to as “Akkaa” (older sister), look after the day-to-day needs of the children. When parents bring and pick up their children at the beginning and end of term, they stay for programs discussing hygiene, nutrition, education and agricultural techniques, and hear from local Dalit and Adhivasi activists.
Being one of the oldest in her hostel, Valli often looked after the younger children and helped prepare meals. She was a clever girl, was doing well at school, and had a cheeky sense of humour.
When I returned to Kodaikanal in 2004, Valli wasn’t in the hostel anymore. I hoped she had moved on to the hostel in town for girls in high school, but it turned out that she had returned to her village soon after my last visit. She was working with her parents as a coolie (agricultural labourer), picking beans for a nearby landowner. Given she would have been 14 by then, there was a good chance that her parents had already arranged her marriage.
Eswaran
Another student I met on my first visit was a nine-year-old Adhivasi boy called Eswaran. He was the first person in his village to be studying at Year 5 level. When I returned in 2004, I met Eswaran again, this time at the senior boys hostel, and he greeted me with a handshake and a “Hello, sister”. Eswaran smiled proudly as the hostel warden informed me he was ranked first in his class at the local high school.
Eswaran, aged 12 years, 2004.
This is Eswaran’s story.
To reach the village I am from you must catch one bus down to the plains, catch another bus for a half-hour trip, and then climb on foot for three hours. It is very isolated and has no facilities. The government refuses to help the people of my village build houses, so we live in huts.
The government also refused to supply water to the village, so the villagers saved and put their money together to get a pipe that brings in water from a nearby stream. Otherwise, we would have to carry water a very long way. There is no hospital. If someone becomes sick, they have to walk for three hours to get help. There is also no school, although there is a village television.
I go back to my village four times a year, where I play cricket, go swimming and work as a coolie to help earn money for my family. There are eight people in my family; I have two older sisters, one older brother, one younger brother and one younger sister. My older siblings did not go to school, but my younger brother and sister do. My family do not live in the village proper, but on the property of the landlord of a nearby plantation, which we look after for him.
My family and the other people who work for this landlord get paid 50 rupees a day for men and 40 rupees for women. [At this time one Australian dollar was equivalent to 30 Indian rupees.] They have to travel a long way to a different village where the landlord lives, though, to collect their wages.
I enjoy studying, particularly English and Tamil. When I’m older, I would like to be a government official to help the people so that they don’t have to work so hard. I think study is good as it helps people get better jobs than doing difficult labour.
Students in the Murray Bridge audience put forward ideas of how education could benefit young people like Valli, Eswaran and themselves: reading and writing, job opportunities, managing money, problem solving, communicating and negotiating, the chance to help people and the skills to change communities.
We finished the talk with questions about Bike, Trailer and the ride, during which the students showed a morbid fascination with the hows, the wheres and the whys of my falling-off-Bike statistics. At least they didn’t hold my bike-riding ineptitude against me, unlike some Danes I could think of.
Monday 7 February
Southend to Mount Gambier, South Australia
84 kilometres – 4 hours 14 minutes
Today I began my media campaign.
Christine, the Adelaide coordinator of Cycle of Learning, and I had exchanged a flurry of phone calls as I made my way through the pine forests leading into Mount Gambier. “They want to meet you at the top of Hay Drive. You should see the signs just as you come into town.”
“OK. I wonder why there. Do you think that’s where the TV station is?”
“Who knows? It doesn’t matter as long as you’re getting some publicity. Remember to mention the website and that you’re tax deductible.”
Christine and I have been friends since the first day of primary school. Even at that stage she was outlandishly clever. Not just smart in that she knew about negative numbers and how to read and write before she started school, but clever in that she had an overflowing imagination, was braver than a five year old should probably be and, in my case anyway, was able to get other children to do whatever she wanted. This worked quite well since I was extremely timid when I was young, and needed someone to drag me along on their adventures with them. For a shy child like me, having an anarchic friend like Christine – who bit people to make a point, hit boys with chess boards when she had to, and organised secret societies that involved you breaking school rules and stealing things – was probably just what I needed to balance out my meekness.
Since primary school Christine has settled down in some ways – I haven’t seen her bite or hit anyone with a chessboard for ages now. What remains the same, though, is how excited she gets by ideas. Eighteen years ago, it was excitement about how we were going to booby trap a bedroom, or about an atlas we were making for an imaginary world. Today it’s excitement about any new undertaking that she or her friends are thinking of embarking on – travel, study,
