It was the year 1989 and we had an impressive visitor from India. The handout for his talk, spoke about the need for action. The speaker was none other than Dr. Parameshwara Rao. Dr. Rao had a simple yet powerful message. He said – if we don’t do anything, by year 2000, every second illiterate in the world will be an Indian! This stirred up a bunch of us and we felt something needed to be done. This led to the formation of ILP in 1990, registered as a non-profit in Chicago, United States. As a first step, we decided to support Dr. Rao’s own organization BCT. Supporting BCT, gave ILP the right background and experience to support many literacy and education projects across India.

If you chronicle a successful family unit of any ethnicity or geography, you will often find that a woman has played a pivotal role. Sometimes the role is overt and obvious for all to see and appreciate. But often times, the contribution is behind the scenes, forming the bedrock upon which the family thrives.

Most of my earlier trips to India were to the biggest cities – Bangalore, Delhi etc. They were full of crowds, dust and traffic. It was my normal image of India: a poor, dirty, crowded, and very competitive place. A place where dogs and other animals roamed the streets starving, begging for food and where people sat in slums with rags on them. At least that’s what I first thought. This was my first journey into India’s villages and until now I had only seen photos and videos of what it was like. This time I was the one taking the pictures and videos as I experienced it myself, and I loved all of it!

On the first day, we came and we needed to set up many things such as the computer, projector etc. After setting these up, batch-by-batch the children started coming, so we needed to set them in straight lines and make them sit in a row. We anticipated that there will be more Tamil than Oriya students, and we will be able to communicate easily. But, out of a 100 students, only 7 were Tamil, the rest 93 were Oriya or Hindi! This was a problem as we couldn’t communicate easily, but Bitika Aunty, talked to each of the children in Oriya and asked their names. For the first session of the morning we had nursery rhymes for all of the children. For example; Roly Poly, Skeleton Dance.

When we entered the class of 60, which consisted of 6th, 7th and 8th graders, we were a bundle of nerves. All of us were volunteering from ILP to help SSA and IRCDS conduct a summer camp for the children of brick kiln workers. The main aim of the camp was to motivate children from various age groups to continue schooling as well give them a reason on why education is so vital for all of us.

The headlines read, “Construction booms as India heads towards a Global Industrial Giant Status.” But behind this construction is the pitiful plight of the back breaking labor of thousands of brick kiln workers and their children. By its very nature, work in brick kilns is seasonal, – December through August, and 90% of its labor pool are migrant workers from neighboring areas (source districts). Workers pledge their labor and get an advance of Rs. 45,000-70,000 from middlemen, at the time of employment. Brick kiln workers usually stay inside their work places for the entire season (7-8 months) and work around 12-14 hours per day, including 7 hours of nighttime work. Bonded labor is not uncommon in this line of work.

Are we trying to solve a problem with another problem? So it appeared to me when I recently visited schools in some of the remote Jharkhand villages with a group of India Literacy Project (ILP) volunteers. As we drove past extensive paddy fields, we enjoyed the lush green landscapes and monsoon rains. On the first day, we stopped by six villages in Lohardaga along with our partner NGO LGSS, led by Mr. C. P. Yadav and his staff. The entire NGO team is highly committed to improving the education scene in the Kairo block of Lohardaga district.