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For the past few years, Sam, Srilekha, and I have all been living in New York, a place where the word “village” refers to a kind of cultural hamlet, a neighborhood with a certain self-conscious style and character. The West Village has its French bistros and handbag boutiques and narrow ivy-wrapped brick apartments, the East Village has its laced-up leather and its vegan organic noodle joints.
In the West Village, you can go to your local greenmarket to buy milk that comes in a glass bottle printed with the name of an upstate farm in antique lettering. In the village of Vikravandi, Tamil Nadu, you can walk out of the kitchen to the organic farm in the backyard and milk a cow that you thought was male until you found yourself tugging at its udders. You can take tamarind from the tamarind tree and eggplant from the eggplant bush and dal from the lentil vine and make dosas and sambhar for dinner, under the discriminating eye of Velangani, the masterchef auntie who cooks in the kitchen. You’ve got a Discovery Channel on your front verandah, where you can watch the entire cycle of life and death in insect form (it appears to be bug-breeding season these days in Vikravandi). There’s a red-mouthed guinea hen who wanders in and out of the house and attacks if you reach for the eggs in its nest. People walk and work barefoot.
In the daytime, men in lunghis bike down the road balancing unlikely quantities of iron wire on the tops of their heads. At night, when the candles burn down, men and women carry cots from their palm-thatched concrete houses and relocate outside to sleep where it’s cooler. When you meet somebody new, they’ll ask you, “What’s your name?” and “What do you do?” and then, invariably, “Have you eaten?”
And by "milking," I mean watching a pro do most of it in 10 minutes and then awkwardly struggling with the cow on my own for another 10 minutes.
Dosa-making with Velangani.
I saw a lifestyle, a pace, a set of everyday rituals that I’ve never seen before. So I was excited to make videos with our students, because the topics of their videos were things I was curious to know: What’s your village like? Your school? Daily routine?
Here are two of the videos they came up with:
1) Our Home
Interview poker-faces.
Meet the students of St. Peter Paul Home for Disabled Children, a government-aided residential school in Mugaiyur, Tamil Nadu. In this video, they tour us around their school and speak about the difficulties they’ve faced as handicapped students in rural Tamil Nadu, their experiences finding a community at St. Peter Paul, and their ambitions for the future. Plus, they’ll show you their singing and dancing chops (which, frankly, put mine to shame. When they asked me to show them my dance moves, I changed the subject.)
Link to video here: http://vimeo.com/30616854
2) One Day in My Life
4th-grade hooligans.
They may appear pint-sized, but the 4th- and 5th-class kids of St. Antony’s Primary School are very busy people–and are capable of offering PBS-documentary-worthy reenactments of a day in the life of a primary school hooligan.
Link to video here: http://vimeo.com/30557432
One of our goals in continuing the partnership between The Modern Story and Communities Rising is to train staff to carry out the same type of workshops that we conduct to teach students to use the cameras in order to brainstorm, write, shoot and produce their own short video narratives. In the spirit of creating a sustainable, long-term digital story-telling program, we conducted staff training with all of the Communities Rising teachers and walked them through the process of producing a short film, so that they might replicate that process in the classroom with students.
We began with the brainstorming process where we had each staff member share out an idea for a video topic and then conducted a blind vote to select the top three ideas. Each TMS teacher directed a group in producing a short film on the three winning topics:
We planned the format and sequence of our videos in our first meeting and made arrangements to carry out those plans at the three hour staff training the following Saturday. When the time came, we quickly introduced those teachers to the camera who did not have experience. There was a wide disparity in the technological knowledge of the group. Some teachers came to the group with a clear-cut vision of what the video would look like and a plan to shoot and edit advanced scenes and sequences. Others had never taken photographs or video with either camera and had a vague, yet eager, sense of what we were trying to produce.
Each group gelled in its own unique way as leaders emerged to complete each task and less experienced teachers asked questions and contributed their ideas. The grounds at SAMSSS were transformed into an impromptu studio as members of all three groups ran around planning, shooting, directing large groups of school children, and speeding off to shoot scenes on location. It was a very exciting and inspiring atmosphere, and extremely productive when you consider the fact that we were able to shoot all the necessary video footage and introduce editing in only 3 hours.
My own group worked on a video about child labor. In our planning session, we decided it would be most powerful if we could tell the story of a child who had been directly affected and pulled out of school to work. A teacher knew one boy and promised to bring him along to the training the following week. Sure enough, she showed up with Vikram and he was a great sport and brave young man for showing us around a brick factory similar to the one he had worked in, and answering questions to help raise awareness about the issue of child labor. Although he was in fourth grade, Vikram looked more like a seven year old to me, and it broke my heart to see footage of him hauling clay for bricks at the factory, knowing that he had been forced by circumstances to grow up so fast. The good news is that Vikram is back in school and with the help of his teachers and their film, raising awareness about the problem of child labor in India.
As our two week stay at CR wraps up after today, it is sad to go, but I know that we are leaving a very competent and committed organization behind that will pick up where we left off in our digital media curriculum. I look forward to seeing the finished product of the Analadi Hostel boys’ “Discipline” video that Shiva will work on shooting and editing with them when they return from the break.
Communities Rising Staff: Child Labor from The Modern Story on Vimeo.
It’s been a real joy to join the efforts of Communities Rising in educating and empowering students in rural Tamil Nadu. While it is quite different from our busy home in the city of Hyderabad, the last week has been a welcome change for me. I’ve settled into a peaceful morning routine of cycling down the small country roads through verdant fields on either side amidst coconuts and grazing cows. Later in the day we travel to three different schools in villages in the area: The Peter Paul School for differently-abled children, Analadi RC Primary School and Boys and Girls Secondary Schools, and the Vikravandi after-school program for fifth class students and hostel boys at the SAMSSS computer lab.
Stella and her group members during the introductory camera workshop.
Meeting all our new students and teaching them has been a great experience over the last week. As Srilekha pointed out, the students at the Peter Paul School are particularly endearing and there is a very tangible sense of a loving, helpful community as soon as you walk through the gates.
My group at Peter Paul School.
My experience my first day there was truly impressive. We divided the class into three groups and each introduced them to both the digital and video cameras. I was working with Sathish, a college student who had made a film with Kara last year, who was well versed in the technology and a huge help in translating to the students. Thanks to Sathish’s translation skills, my group at the Peter Paul School for differently-abled children caught on to the concept of a photostory immediately. After he explained that the photos should fit together to tell a story, the students mobilized under the direction of a particularly creative student. They came up with the following narrative about a boy who is pulled out of school because of family troubles in less than one hour! While their creative skills are impressive, it is sad to see how prevalent and common-place the problem of child labor is in their communities. Check out their photostory at the link below!
We have made significant progress in all our classes in the last week, introducing students to the technology, planning individual film projects and filming the necessary footage to complete the videos. The students have been hard at work running around to shoot scenes of their daily routines, girls playing various sports, tours of their schools and villages, music videos, skits, Tamil – English lessons and more! For our video about the village of Analadi, the fifth class students were even able to get an interview with a member of the Panchayat.
The older hostel students have done a wonderful job planning unique and creative narratives and video topics. I was impressed that the hostel girls voted overwhelmingly to create a video about women in sports. The hostel boys at Analadi voted to write a short narrative about two boys to showcase the importance of discipline in education. They planned a video that shows the parallel stories of one disciplined student and a boy who is acting out and failing to study who are in the same class. The acting skills of this particular group were also fantastic. Little Muthuselva had all of us cracking up as he played the “bad boy” traipsing into the classroom late and trying to cheat off other boys’ papers!
There is a lot of editing to be done in the week to come, but I am confident that we will have some very interesting final products to show the students. Unfortunately, they have a holiday break next week so we will be unable to screen videos to the hostel students who have already returned home for the vacation. The upside is that the Analadi boys will be able to finish filming their story with the computer teacher when they return and they will also have the opportunity to learn film editing once they finish shooting the remaining scenes. Stay tuned for the final products!
My name is Srilekha and I am one of three Fellows from The Modern Story visiting and working with the Communities Rising schools in Tamil Nadu. We are in India teaching a six month course in digital storytelling in various schools in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh. As our students in Hyderabad enjoy a long three week break due to exams and Dasara holidays, the three of us fellows have migrated south to Vikravandi, where we have been working with the amazing Communities Rising team to introduce some of the basics of digital storytelling to their students. It has been a pleasure to meet and work with the teachers and administrators of Communities Rising; they know the place and the students well and they have really welcomed us into their community!
Life in Vikravandi has been a sharp contrast to the hustle and bustle we have become accustomed to in Hyderabad. We are surrounded by fields and greenery and a variety of living things, from cows to the strangest of insects. Amidst this peaceful and relatively quiet landscape, we have travelled to three separate villages and discovered three schools containing the most vivacious and energizing students. One school that was particularly interesting to teach at was the St. Peter Paul Home for Disabled Children. This school houses and educates about 60 differently abled children and orphans. Like many of our other students, none of them had ever used a camera before, so they were supremely excited by the prospect of taking pictures and being in them. What particularly struck me though was how they interacted with each other. Like other children we have met, they instinctively wanted to push and grab in order to get their hands on the prized cameras. But they also had a wonderful way of helping one another to understand. The older boys helped the younger ones, the ones that could understand more English translated for their peers, and everyone offered support and encouragement to those whose disabilities made it more difficult for them to operate the camera. It was truly inspiring to see such a close-knit community where boys and girls of all ages worked together and shared us and our cameras. Additionally, it was also fun to see how excited they were at the prospect of being able to teach us. We have been challenging ourselves to try to pick up some Tamil while here and the kids were very excited to help us. They were challenging themselves to understand us and to help us learn what they knew, offering words of encouragement like, “Akka, [your] Tamil super!” These are kids that are eager to share what they know with the world, and meeting them has certainly made my quest to teach digital storytelling feel particularly rewarding.
On our first day at Peter Paul, here are some of the photos that our enthusiastic actors and photographs came up with to tell The Extremely Brief Love Story of Mani Annan and Gopala Krishnan.
Mani gives Gopal a Flower
Gopal accepts and they get married
Mani and Gopal dance at their wedding
