But seriously

I had gone to Timbaktu with a somewhat vague mandate -- Mary (co-founder) was feeling that she was getting swamped with desk work and not doing any field work and was hoping I could take on some of the documentation/reporting work so that she could be freed up a bit. One of the specific things she wanted to do was see if the quality of the monthly reports that each worker turns in could be improved. She felt it was lacking in a.) articulation of all the things that had actually been done and that could go into reports to funding agencies etc. b.) lacking in some of the background context and missing some of the more subtle things. The monthly meeting was to be held the weekend I was there -- she had specifically asked me to be there for that. I spent the first couple of days generally hanging out and reading various things and trying to get some understanding of what I might do there. Mary was usually very busy and was running around doing stuff, and she hadn't quite crystallized what she wanted herself. Pretty soon I started getting stressed about the lack of structure and lack of clarity. We then went for the monthly meeting. By then I had got a sense that it would not be that easy to break into the community of people and start vibing with them and so my introduction at the meeting would be important to break the ice. There was some kind of a 'moment' at the meeting -- I was introduced and I explained what I was there for, reasonably clearly and confidently in Telugu and it seemed to jell with them. Several of them asked questions and people who knew me said nice things about me, and some of the workers came to me after the session to ask if I could help them with some of their documentation and other stuff. I felt a lot of relief, like an important barrier had been overcome.
After the monthly meeting Mary asked me to do a specific task -- read through all the monthly reports and summarize them. She was concerned that like in previous years the reports would get filed away and neglected until it came time to do the annual report or some donor reports, at which point everything would get dug out and much chaos would ensue as people would try to understand the reports and recreate the numbers and try to remember other stuff that wasn't captured in the report, but was needed -- stuff like that. So I spent 3 days slogging through the reports and talking to people to get a better sense of the projects. The reports are all in Telugu and it became apparent pretty quickly that my Telugu wasn't yet up to the level of going through these reports with any speed. So instead I would just sit with the person who wrote the report and ask him to describe or recite the report verbally to me in Telugu which I was able to grasp. That way progress was much faster and I also learnt a lot more. I didn't finish the task while I was there but made enough progress that I felt comfortable that I could complete it the next time I was there. I also helped one of the groups a little in putting together a small presentation for some people from a partner group that would be visiting (see photo).

I got some depth into the work of some of the groups and here are some comments:
--One group is the womens' mutually aided cooperative societies. Some version of this is becoming popular all over India, though I don't know the extent of the penetration yet. Here, the women pool together their savings and run a small bank-like institution, with deposits and loans. The activity seems to have been a spectacular success with year on year growth in deposits in the 25% range, and current deposits around 2 crores. This is with with poor to very poor women contributing small amounts of as less as 10 Rs. a month.
-- Another small group that has not yet taken off in a big way is their work with disabled people. Exposure to the information in this area was quite painful. When people are poor and then become disabled for some reason or have disabled children, these bear the brunt in an already bad situation. The government has some good programs like free bus passes and pensions for those disabled beyond a point. But the programs are badly administered so that all the benefits do not reach. Timbaktu workers often do the job of getting together and submitting the documentation so that these disabled people get the benefits that they are entitled to. Such a basic task provides so much value and nobody was doing it in this area until Timbaktu took it up and that too in a very small ad-hoc way (so far, funding constraints and all that).
-- Timbaktu runs a few schools in the area. The schools are small and the focus is on quality education and the schools are essentially run free. I'm not sure what's the focus of the school initiative, partly its to just do something useful I suppose and partly its a demonstration in good quality education. The schools are very alternative and do many amazing things with the children like spending a lot of time (upto 50%) on non-academic things like arts/crafts/games. I briefly saw some of the children and they looked very happy and bright and seemed to have a real childhood. My first impression was however that they were not turning out really smart kids or really creative kids. This is a disappointment as their teaching methods are really outstanding. The roll call of activities they do is amazing for any school leave alone a cash strapped rural school (singing, acting, painting, local traditional dances (kolattam), brick making, soap making, lemon-n-spoon race, pottery, multimedia cds ...). The schools were started by a really cool guy (IITM Btech, IITB Ph.D. in Energy Systems), and I believe he would have structured the academics for inquiry and discussion based learning not rote learning. They also don't have grading until 7th std. In such a great atmosphere, I would have thought we'd be churning out absolutely smart creative geniuses so I'm a little disappointed.
-- Watersheds are another important area. More on this perhaps in later posts as this is a fairly complex area, but its very important and interesting work.
-- Timbaktu Organic is one of their recent and cool projects. More on this too later. Briefly this is to encourage farmers to grow organic, and to also start growing millets. Millets folks ! They're the new panacea for rural India. Remember, you heard it here first

Photos below are of the Timbaktu office. Its a pretty cool building.