Photos from Dec 2002 Asha meeting in Timbaktu, near Chennekothapalli (A.P.)
note: click on the thumbnails for larger (~70kb) images. to download even larger versions of these photos (~180kb), click on the 'hi res' link.
the winter 2002 Asha meeting was held at Timbaktu, the land on which some members of the Timbaktu Collective have made a home and which is also the site of a residential school for children of nearby villages. it is roughly 5km from the village of Chennekothapalli (just south of Dharmavaram on this map) in Anantapur district of Andhra Pradesh. asha nyc/nj and more recently london, have been supporting some of the activities of the timbaktu collective since 1995. The 'seeds of hope' project of the timbaktu collective was supported by WAH2002. during our stay at timbaktu, most of the children of the residential school had gone home for the winter break, so unfortunately there are very few photos of the children. more photos of the collective can be found in the site visit reports on the timbaktu collective page (see links below).
the following photos were taken by me and nidhi during the conference. this is a brief personal account of my experiences at the meeting, so will mention only some of the interesting things that went on. ramu has also put some of his photos online. they can be accessed here. hopefully, others will post their experiences/photos for everyone to look at. The photos are roughly in chronological order, but not always so. if you want higher quality versions of any of any of these images, dont hesitate to contact me.
This was my second asha meeting in india and i was happy to see friends from the previous meeting. This asha meeting also had a surprising number of asha volunteers from abroad and again, in many cases, it was nice to put a face to what was previously only an email id.
shankar
srinivas
London, feb 1, 2003
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useful links -
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Day 1 – Getting there
karthika (cornell), s.k.i. (sundar kumar iyer - MHV), nidhi (nycnj) and i (London) took a night bus from secunderabad that got us to anantapur early in the morning of the 27th. we took a southbound bus from there and got off roughly an hour later at chennekothapalli, a small village on the national highway. We decided to walk the 5km to the timbaktu collective.
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left: karthika, s.k.i. and nidhi in chennekothapalli. hi
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left: after roughly an hour of walking along the
train tracks (sometimes through thick acacia shrubs), we finally
turned off onto the rough road leading towards timbaktu. some
people were starting to show signs of fatigue from the warm sun
by then... hi res |
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The four of us stumbled into timbaktu a bit after noon, after walking for roughly an hour and a half in the surprisingly warm sun. a number of people who had arrived in the morning or the previous night were already there. siva and richa had turned up a couple of days before and had everything nicely organised. richa had even put together a very useful info sheet with a map, telling people the location of various facilities.
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Left: prasanna (hyderabad), sandeep (ballia), sundar (stanford)
and ananda (kolkotta) at the 'registration' point outside the hexagon.
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Where most of us slept
the collective put everyone up in the 'hexagon', a unique structure used to hold meetings, workshops etc. it is an airy, thatched building consisting of a shallow central hexagonal well, off of which six halls radiate. The collective had arranged mattresses in the halls, for everyone to sleep on. The initial plan was to have the meeting in the central well of the hexagon but we thought it might get claustrophobic to sleep and talk (read: argue, ramble, digress and occasionally agree...) under the same roof for four days, so we decided to sleep in the hexagon and have the meetings in one of the school rooms of the timbaktu school (which was available since the children were away on holidays). the weather was so nice a few of us decided to sleep under the stars, in our sleeping bags.
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| an old photo from the collective, of the hexagon. there is now a lot of vegetation on the barren land in the foreground of the photo. hi res |
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Left: richa (berkeley) and siva (delhi) inside the hexagon. in
the foreground, you can see the shallow central hexagonal meeting
space. hi res |
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where we had the meeting
the hexagon is roughly two or three minutes walk from the timbaktu school where we had the actual meetings. The school consists of four or five brightly coloured buildings. We met in one of the more recent buildings, constructed a couple of years ago with funds from asha.
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Left: a photo from the collective, showing timbaktu as seen from
one of the nearby hillsides. In the foreground is an open playing
field for the children. We had our meeting in the building at the
left of this field. The hexagon is located near the centre of the
photo, but is not visible because of the trees. |
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The meeting started more or less on time, in the afternoon, after lunch. for more on what was discussed, look at the minutes.
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| Left: harish (boston), kumar (princeton),
rekha (varanasi) and sadama (ballia). hi
res right: sunder (Stanford), kaushik (atma nirbhar), prasanna (hyderabad), garima (st.louis/corning). hi res |
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we spent a little time each day hearing about the work of our hosts, the timbaktu collective. on the first day of the conference, as dusk was falling, members of the collective gathered outside our meeting space and performed for us a traditional dance called kolattam. This is a fast paced dance where you hit sticks against others' sticks as you dance around in a circle (next time i'll have a link to a movie file...). after dancing for a while, the members of the collective sang some local songs for us, and asked us to sing some songs in return, to which the asha volunteers from u.p. responded with a ballad of their own. after this, mary and bablu of the collective described their work to us.
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| members of the collective performing kolattam. hi res1, hi res2 | |
at the end of the day, after a deliciously simple dinner, we gathered around a campfire outside the hexagon that bablu had arranged for us. The campfire was a recurring theme most nights of the meeting...
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| around the campfire - kunal deb (uthnau), kumar (Princeton), kumar (kanpur-ms3), nandlal (rajatalab) and biju (guwahati). hi res |
Day 2 photos on next page ...