The recent cyclonic rains brought a lot of sand into local
creeks from the surrounding hills. As soon as the rains stop, local people line
up to “steal” this sand to use for their own construction purposes or sell it,
illegally of course. Our landlord jumped into the fray and had a load of sand hauled
last week, and got it piled up in front of the house. He had brought a sieve
too. A day later his daughter L got interested in the sieve and started
scooping the sand and sifting it, all on her own. She worked, with tremendous
focus, for several hours. Mind you this
is heavy work.
She is 13, a rich village girl, who goes to an English
medium private school. Usually most of
her time is spent at school or tuition
classes. Thus I have never seen her “doing” anything in the last two years that
we have been here.
Thanks to the rains, the schools have been closed for a
month now. While L was at work, the other
kids at first just hung around and then slowly started joining her one by one
until all six were busy. They have been working together for a day now. As I
was observing this from my upstairs balcony, these were the words that came to
my mind – harmonious, productive, efficient, self-organizing, co-operative and
seamless.
Their assembly-line operation had the following steps:
- Spread the wet sand on the road because dry sand can be sifted more efficiently. Make sure there is a constant supply of dry sand for pick up.
- Scoop the dried sand with a hoe and dump it into a receptacle
- Dump the contents of the receptacle onto the sieve. Maximize the sieving efficiency by constantly bringing the non-sieved portion to the top of the inclined sieve with a curved broken tile
- Collect the sieved sand and dump into separate pile
I got to hear some snippets of their conversations:
- “It will be difficult for them to work without us. We need to get back soon” (during their lunch break)
- “We can’t afford to take long breaks. We have a lot of work to do.”
- “It is 2 p.m. now. Can we stop at 6? What do you think?”
- “Hey, you take up my job now. I will do yours for some time”
They were working independently and also as a team, rotating
their jobs, maximizing efficiency, minimizing wastage, planning the next stage,
getting good exercise and most important of all having fun.
Now to contrast this with what I have typically seen here,
when the schools are in session:
School lasts for approximately 7 hours, mostly six days a
week. Most of the kids have a one hour before-school tuition and one hour
after-school tuition class. Evenings are devoted to homework and a bit of TV. Sometimes,
on Sundays, the six kids in our street get together to play. Mostly their games
would end abruptly, in an unpleasant manner. The reasons being -- lying, bickering, cheating and hitting. It was as if they needed more time and
continuity to be able to even play amicably.
Had I not seen what
happened today, I would have never believed that this set of kids could work
together. If our society can offer children the luxury of time, won’t there be
more opportunities for them to do meaningful work, participate in and
contribute to what is happening around them?
-- Hema
