From an article by Rashmi Menon published on 23 March 2008:

On his first trip to India, Tim Shadix may seem like an average American tourist. But this student of politics major in Whitman College, Walla Walla, US, has come down with a purpose, a social one at that. And he is not alone.

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The past few days (really all of the trip) have been filled with a minute-to-minute schedule. As the rest of the team and I combat a 13 hour jet-lag the days seem a tad bit too short for the amount of work set in front of us.

Travel: The trans-continental flight was dreadful as usual. One would think that a person would get used to these 24+ hour flights, but they prove to still be extremely agonizing. This time around the flights were a little more fun because of the company I had… almost missing our Seattle-Paris sector - not so much fun.

Day 1 - Monday: After our Air France luggage catastrophe, Tim and I set to work on the Water Book for about 12 hours straight. We formatted and edited and formatted some more to get the manuscript in time to the Mr. Anand Narsule, our publisher. I do not want to elaborate much more on this day partially because of the horrible memories but also because I figure Tim will be writing about the long, bleary-eyed hours that comprised our first day here. We were scheduled to leave for MUWCI the next day at noon with all the luggage. Ahh… sleep.

Day 2 - Tuesday: Early during the day Tim and I went out to hit the ATM machine up after attending to WDA emails. We needed to pay my father for the Worli Guest House accommodation for the rest of the team. We stopped by the mall next to my house to buy a prototype for the conference folders that will carry our Orientation packet. Tim also bought some formal clothes for a steal. We came back home to find out that the misplaced luggage would not arrive today, but would come the following day. Okay, one more day in Mumbai. This actually came as a boon to me because I realized the previous day that I had a tonne of conference logistics to still take care of. This included booking hotels for the travel scholars, arranging for a banner to advertise our conference, ironing out the food details, buying pens, notepads and folders, arranging for a photographer and videorecorder, etc., etc. Tim was a little disappointed at having to stay another day away from the project down in Kolwan. But, he was great help to me as I needed some help with the conference (Yukta was in MUWCI at this point).

The afternoon consisted of calling up a bunch of hotels to make reservations for our travel scholars. After speaking to a string of extremely rude reception desk workers, I realized that we could not make reservations on the phone or via the internet. I guess it was presumptuous for me to think that it would be possible to do so here. I also was quickly learning that finding hotel rooms was more difficult than I thought. Rooms get booked here long in advance. Okay, so Tim and I put on our WDA faces to hunt for rooms in Mumbai. Having my father send us people from his office was a REAL help. We first went to the Andhra Mahasabha which was a hall with attached boarding. This place had very attractive prices, but the only deal was that it was a dormitory set-up which would not roll with the travel scholars comprised of men and women. I cannot imagine co-ed sleeping arrangements rolling very well with our NGO attendees from obscure little towns in Orissa and Andhra Pradesh! The double rooms available were not sufficient in number. So, we took the recommendation the manager had for us to look for another boarding lodge a couple of blocks down. Tim, I and company arrived at the South Indian Concerns Ltd. at around 4pm. After much confusion regarding the exact number of people we needed to book for March 18th and March 19th respectively (oh how we wished Yuks was with us) we got all the bookings done.

We came home and found ourselves with a moment to breathe. Tim and I thought it might be fun to watch a movie, I was ready to take him on a 4 hour long Bollywood soujourn, but alas there were no appropriate show timings…I think Tim was secretly glad about this.

Day 3 - Wednesday: I woke up real early to see if our bags had found their way to my house, but in vain. Only Yukta and my bags were here. Tim and Jessie would have to wait another day (?) or so for their bags to get here. After consulting with Tim, we decided that it was time for us to leave for MUWCI, bag or no bag. My mum offered Tim a few of my dads huge t-shirts and off we went.

We got to MUWCI around noon to reunite with the rest of the team. I do not think WDA members have ever been this happy to see each other! I decided to accompany Daniel to the villages for water testing. It was a real trip down nostalgia lane for me to be visiting my old high school and all the villages in the surrounding community again. After organizing the needed water testing equipment, Lifewater testing kits included, we set off into the dusty valley at around 2pm. We hit one water source in around 5 villages. With the help of Hasmukh, a Sadhana Village worker who was helping WDA as a translator, we managed to cover one water source in 5 of the villages in Kolwan. Quite an educational experience on and all. I learnt quite a bit about the water scene from talking with Hasmukh.

We got back to campus with enough time for me to have a shower and a ten minute unwind session with Tim and Yukta at the library lawn (my favorite place in the whole wide universe) before we grabbed dinner at the cafeteria. Never before has MUWCI food tasted so good to me! The WDA team assembled back at the lawn for our “marathon meeting” at 8pm. We needed to give each other updates and have a general talk since this was the first time we all were together in India.

I think our meeting served us in an excellent way for everyone present to get a clearer idea of the agenda for the project that we were already knee-deep in. Arguably, the most important WDA meeting this team has had… Sleepy time.

Day 4 - Thursday: The whole team and I assembled for breakfast at 8am. Afer a bit of fooling around, Daniel brought us down to business. Tim, Jessie and Daniel needed to sketch out their day. Yukta and I were going to stay back on campus, to take advantage of the fast internet connection, in order to attend to conference logistics.

Our 9am meeting with Dr.Wilkinson, my high school headmaster, went smoothly. He basically wanted the low-down on WDA and what we were up to in the Kolwan Valley. This was basically a great opportunity for us to thank him for the hospitality and comfort the school has shown us. Being an alum now, I was allowed to peek into the fabulous lives that can be lead in MUWCI guesthouses (for a thorough run down on the resort-esque feel that MUWCI has, please reconfirm details with Yukta and company who fell in love with the pool).

Yukta and I spent about 3 hours just attending to WDA emails. I am now hit with the fact that I need to buy a business class ticket for Suresh Prabhu to speak at the conference. Ouch! Hopefully, I can try and get this money reimbursed. Thankfully, we have not tapped into our speaker budget as yet. We left immediately after lunch. I arrive home 5 missed calls from our not-so-happy publisher. The fact that I did not have mobile phone reception in MUWCI did not allow me to follow up with him and put a delay on the proceedings of the book. It’s all good, we are still scheduled to have our book in time. Mr. Anand just wanted me to look at the revised manuscript before he starts to publish all 220 of them.

I was a little shocked to see that he had taken the liberty to completely re-do the cover of the book. Sorry Joe! I know you put in a lot of work into the cover, but he said that it was of lower resolution and would not look as great as the new cover. The fact that he printed them left me with no choice but to okay it.

Day 5 - Friday: I met with the printer at 9:30 am to look at the physical copy of the book. It actually looks very professional. I cannot wait to have the rest of the team look at it. Yukta and I hitched a ride with my parents into town as we had to meet the conference hall manager. We arrived at the Nehru Centre at 11:30 to re-check the hall settings, arrange for registration tables, look at projector-laptop compatibility etc. We also spoke to the caterers to fix the lunch menu. We have now reduced the number of lunch plates from 200 to 150. This has been done after consulting Yukta, who has managed the invites for the conference. We have also added a much needed “tea break” in between lectures. We are still committed to $1,500 and the rest will be taken care by a sponsor found by my dad.

In honor of Yukta’s birthday today, my parents treat us to lunch in my favorite Chinese restaurant- Ling’s Pavilion. Oooh, the mud cake…!

We get back home in Thane in time for me to add rooms for more travel scholars that Yukta informed me of recently…

On and all the conference is talking shape, but I am constantly run down with taking care of small details that I did not foresee. It’s going to be a tough couple of days ahead. Over and out.

This week has already been one of the most informational and eye-opening in my life, and it’s only halfway over. The water situation in India, and around the world for that matter, has apparently been the elephant in the 16 x 9 dorm room; it is simply astounding how much this discussion should be a part of everyone’s lives. Water encompasses everything. It is a poverty issue, it is a women’s rights issue, it is an education issue, and it is a development issue. Even in the valley we are working in, there are complexities upon complexities upon complexities. It could take an entire career to scratch the surface.

Enough stating the obvious. We’ll see what we can cover in the short weeks we have.

I arrived on Saturday to the warm hospitality of Anat and everyone else at MUWCI. My travel plans apparently weren’t communicated clearly, yet they quickly sent a jeep down to Paud village to come pick me up. A couple of hours later, another mixup of times and appointments, I rode back down the hill with Maya and Samir of the Comm-d team to meet with Medathai of Sadhana Village.

Our meeting went much better than I expected, maybe again because I didn’t know what to expect to begin with, and conversation flowed, well, like water. The first topic was on how well the survey groups went, and then we drifted towards designing the focus groups like a ship to rocks. The challenge was not a conflict of opinions, rather it was a lack of understanding of the valley. On my part. I could not voice what groups we wanted to include in discussion nor what answers we hoped to come of the meetings.

The following couple of days were then partially dedicated to developing a plan of attack. We needed questions which would preferably follow up on issues raised during the survey but would also provoke discussion, not responses of two or three sentences. Our goal was and is to inspire passionate debate about water access.

For the most part, the focus groups have been a mixture of both, a nice broth of success I could’ve guessed would happen. In order to ask the bigger questions about a community dynamic, we need to first understand how the community works. How it functions. Where they go for their milk. The format to achieve this, or at least what we’ve learned over the previous two days, is as follows: the participants, a Marathi speaker to lead discussion and ask questions, a few note takers, and a couple more observers to create inane questions to ask. In all honesty, the afternoon sessions we’ve conducted have been thoroughly enjoyed by everyone. The villagers appreciate us asking about their water situation, and we wonder at the marvelous insights the responses offer.

A question has been raised as to whether we are actually conducting focus groups or just holding interviews. For instance, the very first conversation we had was with the pipe manager from Chikalgaon. He is paid to turn the pump on and off every morning. To begin to understand the issues faced by the village, we had to first know how the distribution system works. The bulk of our discussion with him revolved around these specifics, as opposed to questions like, “How do you rate water issues compared to kid’s education, healthcare, women’s rights, etc?” Yet, at the same time, we gained far more practical, useful information from the dialogue than if we had forced an abstract subject. It illustrates the most pertinent issue, too; because water access in the valley is an everyday challenge, the things the villagers are most worried about are the simple details.

When I met with Ashwin of Gomukh on Monday, we spent a bulk of our two hours talking about the project’s established focus, the “cultural, social, and religious constraints to Appropriate Water Technology.” His argument, if I can try to paraphrase and summarise it correctly, is that the sentence itself seems to imply there are faults within Indian culture, society, and religion themselves which are the sources of issues related to water access. In this hypothetical scenario, for instance, religion would say only specific castes should have access to a certain water source. In reality, this is not the case and it is the complex social institution I am at no liberty to try and describe which causes these injustices. Seeing his point, I now realise it is difficult to delineate between his reading and our intended presentation. I think this type of misunderstanding will be the topic of a few pages for the report.

The dirtiest task I’ve had to take the lead on while at MUWCI is digitizing the data we’ve collected. Results from 141 surveys need to be painstakingly hand-typed into the ad-hoc spreadsheet we’re using for storage at the moment. As I write this, there have been two Comm-d students working beside me for the past hour on one a piece. Needless to say, it is somewhat of black hole. They aren’t the only information which should be put online either, there are now pages of notes from the focus groups in good ol’ fashioned handwriting. After finishing Natural Capitalism, I’ve prided myself in being able to look at systems and find easier and more efficient ways to achieve the same aims. Unfortunately, I have yet to find a method of dodging grunt work.

And to think the rest of the team was worried they wouldn’t enough work to do. The next week and a half will be filled with even more discussions, testing, and data compilation than the past few days. I guess we’ll write the report when we have time, eh?

For the last few months we have been conducting these water surveys in the surrounding villages. Our procedure is simple; we go down to the villages, we try to find our contact persona and otherwise someone else and we ask them if we could ask some questions, but from this point it becomes slightly more difficult. Most of us don’t speak any Marathi (maybe a bit of Hindi, thodi thodi) and most of the villagers don’t speak any English. Therefore we always ask a Marathi speaker to come with us, to do the translations. However of course sometimes questions and answers are lost in translation, or there is just general misunderstanding. I suppose the most common one is that we ask if we could ask something about the water and the woman nods and we are seated on a mat (so far so good), then you can here a tap running and a long pause and then she returns; holding three cups of water in her hand; Panni?

Although I can’t speak Marathi, I still feel I’m learning something from this experience. Firstly I learn a lot about doing surveys, with that I mean, assessing who to approach, being aware of how you pose a question (the surveyor for instance has to understand the purpose of the question to be able to pose it) and also discovering the thin line of what you can and can’t ask sometimes, addressing the taboos without offending anyone. Also when doing the survey I found out the importance of knowing the communities well, that otherwise there is a big chance that your questions might be misinterpreted. Even more this experience has taught me a lot about the daily life of the communities in Kolwan Valley because although one might say the glasses of water they drink per day is not really going to give you an isight in to their lifes, partly it did. Collecting water is an important part of their daily routine, similiarly with other questions I did feel I got a better view of what their day actually looks like.

During the water surveys I usually had the task of writing down the answers to the questions, a task that seems simple enough but actually wasn’t. Except for the obvious difficulties of having to try to distinguish in the fast conversation between English and Marathi it was also trying to get the answers of the people down as accurately as possible. Again lost in translation-related issues, but also sometimes selecting what is relevant to the survey (is it important enough to mention that the Sacred Grove nearby is annually used for an animal fair?!) and what is irrelevant.

Lastly, I learned where their water is usually from and how they get it and was therefore able to compare it our situation here, and my lack of knowledge on that. Just to compare:

(village) From the river Muslhi in to a well, add tablets to well, have pipes from well to water pump, go from house (10 min) to well with three buckets between specific two hour period that it is open, walk back with 60 litre of water on head

(us) Walk outside the door and open the tap

Written by Ernestine, Comm-d Group