Work and more work

As the first Court of Women public hearing looms ever closer, the work load weighs heavier. The public hearing will take place Avanigadda at the end of October. Women from this part of the district who have survived extreme violence at the hands of family members will offer their testimonies to the court, trying to lift the shroud of silence on the issue and, maybe, gain some redress, who knows. Expert witnesses will give speeches, trying to make sense of the violence from a variety of perspectives: political, social, legal, medical, and so on.

I spent last week working almost day and night far away from home in Avanigadda, with poor Wilf stranded back in Gannavaram. The work ethic in the PSVS compound was terrific: up at 6am, on to work until a thick mist of sleep clouds your eyes with lots of snacks and coffees punctuating the day. For me it meant 10/11pm, for others it meant the early hours of the morning. I was fund raising anxiously, a desperate bid to cover a budget that is inflating by the hour.

Our week ended (on Saturday of course, never Friday) at All India Radio with Theresa giving an impassioned speech on women's rights (or she could have been talking about her penchant for kittens for all I know, the Telugu gap widens by the day). Then on to a Global Forum for Women event in a very grand hall with chandeliers hanging spledidly and inappropriately, whilst the committee - all male of course - championed the cause of women's human rights (or talked about kittens?). Apparently these guys are supposed to 'sensitise' the government to 'women's issues'; the reality, it seems, is that they take funding from other NGOs and enjoy a lot of expensive, elaborate events. Bah.

This week my work-base was closer to home, just a bus hop (an Indian hop, not an English one), to Vijayawada, in a complex of NGOs dedicated to enforcing child rights. Everyone is madly gathering the testimonies, throwing them recklessly around in a ping pong of Telugu and English, with edits and re-edits forming tangled knots all over the shop.

Wilf's off from school for a week - I'm setting down the laptop and heading to Amaravathi to be a tourist again.