After preparing for a couple days before all the students arrived, the South Asian students presented on their cultures for the international students. You can read more here, and see a few student interviews here, beginning with Olga!
Monica
Mohammad
Rohini
Kultwisiso
Shilpi
Today, my group and I attended Ms. Yesha’s session about how mental health is perceived in India. By participating in various activities which included myth ranking, acting, and analyzing a specific scenario of someone seeking help in India, it came to my surprise that many citizens of this country do not take mental health seriously. From calling it “fake” to labeling the mentally ill as “dangerous”, it is not shocking to say that many who suffer from a mental illness choose to not seek professional help. As alternatives, they may reach out to family that will only consider it as a minor thing or call them weak, which is absolutely ignorant and upsetting. Because of the lack of awareness, there are not many professionals in this field to help those who are struggling, fueling the fact that more people who have a mental illness do not get the treatment they need. I hope the stigma around mental health awareness becomes more prominent in Indian society, and that the topic itself disregards itself as a taboo. As someone who wishes to study psychology, this session enlightened me greatly and I am grateful for the experience and exposure.
Today we traveled to chharana (forgive my spelling) — A place located in East Ahmedabad that housed a group of people who were a denotarized tribe or in other words a criminal tribe. As soon as we arrived I felt this overwhelming sadness in my heart. The place was very different then the other places we had been to. There was a lot of trash everywhere and the houses looked miserable. As we walked through the community, there was a lot of barriers with Barbwire to split the communities and trash everywhere. Our guide told us that the people here live by the hundreds and single rooms and have to sleep on top of each other.
The reason that they’re forced to live in these horrible conditions dates back all the way to colonial rule by the British. Because of their knowledge of the land and jungle the British decided to make these a criminal tribe so that they could take the power away from them and force them into submission. The sad thing is even though the British had left the Indian government continue to force people into this horrible life style. Today they still live in horrible conditions and the police brutality is. Unbearably high backed by a corrupt government systems.
A group of local actors who formed a town library continue to try and fight for their rights they are performing straight place and telling about their story I felt this was extremely inspiring and brave. It made me want to do more for my community even though I can’t do anything for this one. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be a traveling doctor and have been contemplating the idea for a while now. But after seeing the conditions which humans are forced to live in today through the slight glance of their life that I was granted, I now know that it is indeed what I want to do.
I will however not leave you on a sad note one thing I did notice while I was here is that even though people are forced to live in these conditions there was many many smiles on peoples faces and they seem to be quite joyful. This made me think that we could take a lesson out of their book and be more grateful for what we have and try to look at life through a better perspective. Materialistic possessions are not what truly make us happy. I wasn’t entirely sure when would be an appropriate time to take a picture so unfortunately I don’t have one of the community itself though I do have one of us learning together.
This picture is us in our circle reviewing the day and thinking about how we can apply what we’ve learned to help us in our personal communities in our respective countries.
Today is a Eye opener for me because I get to knew the hidden truth in Society about Chhara community. Chhara community is tagged as criminals by birth because they do liquor sneaking. And they are denotified tribes in India. Liquor sneaking is not their actual profession. They are forced to sneak liquor at the time of British rule. Britishers tagged them as Criminals by birth. Even after getting independence Chhara community is still remained as labours in hands many other higher authority people of India. They got released by Jawaharla Nehru (first Prime Minister of India) in the year 1952. Even though they are released/freed but they are still tagged and called as “criminals by birth”. They don’t get most of the fundamental rights those are prevalent in India. Whatever robbery or any criminal activities arises Police directly go to Chhara community and arrests any one of them.
After facing all these social illnesses a voice started raising on the behalf of Chhara community and its name is Bhuda theater. It has members Dikshin,Atish and many other youth students. Their main aim is to create awareness in Society by their theatrical works on real life stories of many Chhara community people. They get support from Mahashwata Devi and Ganesh Devy. There is only one library in whole Chhara nagar which is nearly 10 million population. I’m so wondered that they went for jail for no cause. But now youth are becoming stronger and Slowly their hope is also becoming stronger. I’m sure that they’ll get their rights back. And they will be no more called as “Criminals by birth “.
