Motivating Change

One of the lessons learned in life is that you cannot force people to change unless they see the need for change themselves. In other words: You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.This lesson was reinforced with our work in Ammireddigudum, a village approximately 30 minutes away from Madhira by car. An issue came up with the AMB school that IMPACT Community oversees. Many young men in the village are unemployed and would hang about with nothing to do. The school courtyard is one of the few areas in the village that is flat and cleared out. After school hours, the young men would go to the school courtyard to meet with friends, cause minor mischief, and play kabaddi – a game similar to “Tag” but requires much sturdier lung-capacity. Look it up on YouTube if you're interested. Now this generally would not be an issue except that many of the school children would stay after hours to work or take advantage of optional classes such as Spoken English language. The young men hanging out in the courtyard would often be quite loud, distracting, and messy. But since they had nowhere else to go, they could not be easily persuaded to leave the school grounds.

While brainstorming solutions to the problem, Regina, Sudheer, Mrs. Kusumakaram (the former headmistress of AMB High School) and the village pastor Ramesh came up with the solution of clearing out a piece of property that the school owns adjacent to the church. The field could be cleaned up and used as a community playground where these boys could then go instead of disrupting the students. The only thing we needed was community buy-in from villagers and their willingness to join volunteers cleaning up the field.

It was decided that the village youth would hire a backhoe to clear the land and IMPACT Community would fence it in to keep animals out. The solution seemed cut and dry. But the day the clean-up was to begin, resistance came to the forefront. People who lived adjacent to the school and had been using it for years to graze their animals, stack their firewood, and generally encroach upon it. This group began to complain and the clean-up came to a standstill.

This impasse didn't seem to have a solution and the young people returned to play in the school yard. Mrs Kusumakaram, who lives is the village and has had most of the young people as students, came up with a solution. She told the young people if they could not take advantage of the offer made by IMPACT, then they had no right to the school yard either. This nudge in the right direction is all that it took to motivate the youth to step forward and urge change. Then the parents picked up the call and the movement gained back it's lost momentum.When the villagers themselves started advocating for change, public opinion swung back in favor of clean-up. The complainers were still there, but their dissenting opinion had been overruled by the community as a whole.

On Saturday, July 30, clean-up began. Many in the village, including the young men at the heart of the issue, came out to see the event. Sudheer led a prayer and ground was broken. The field will be cleared, scraped, and fenced in to make a most excellent playground for kabbadi. We will continue to update with pictures as the project goes along.