I very quickly want to tell you about a meeting that I’ve just had, with a couple of people who partner with Tearfund in India. Some of the meting was confidential, but some things I can share. Talking to people who live in vastly different places, with different problems, is always good. It’s so easy to stay in our own bubble, and to worry about our own problems, and hearing about people who mainly eat rats for supper helps to keep things in proportion.

I was learning about a project Tearfund are partnering with, which has the catchy title: Transforming Masculinities. (Honestly! I kid you not, this is the title they have come up with.) Unlike the title, the work has absolutely nothing to do with people who feel they are the wrong gender, or who want a sex-change, or any of the other modern inferences that you might imagine. The work is about educating men about the rights of women—teaching husbands that their wives are equal partners, and their daughters should have the same rights as their sons—that sort of thing. Crimes against women is still a big problem in India, and educating the men might be a good way of sorting it out. Especially because men in the churches are sometimes no better, when it comes to abusing women, than men outside of the church.

Tearfund is better than me at knowing how to meet need—and how to assess it. One of the workers made the excellent point that when assessing the success of a project like this, initially, you might expect the police stats on crime against women to increase. Because more people will be reporting it rather than hiding it, telling the women that it doesn’t matter. (The long-term aim, of course, is for the crimes to stop, but reporting them officially is a first step.)

The workers also talked, as an aside, about some of their other work—like ensuring people who cannot read or write are able to access the government help that is available, or mending toilets and checking that people in the slums are using them, or ensuring there is clean water available. When you see lists of things like one toilet to every 33 people, or a clean water tap available to x number of families, it really makes you think. This is today, 2024, and there are still families sharing a single clean water tap? Really? How is this okay?

They also spoke about the issues today, which I was ignorant about. Did you know that currently (end of November 2024) the pollution in Delhi is so bad that people have been told to stay inside? So just like during Covid times, children are not able to attend school, people are struggling with child-care and online work—and those are the ones lucky enough to have a job that can happen indoors. The people who have to be out are getting ill, simply because they don’t have clean air to breathe. We talk a lot about our rights in the UK, and the sense of entitlement worries me. But surely, everyone has the right to clean air to breathe.

We need to be aware of these issues, because we are all part of the problem, aren’t we? As I said, we live in our bubble, and if climate change doesn’t directly affect us, it is easy to ignore. If our taps work (our own tap, in our own kitchen—not shared with several other families) then do we even think about clean water? And as you read this, are you hoping to catch some rats for your supper this evening? We live in a small world, we are able to be part of communities that have less than us. Please don’t just turn away. Please think about how you can be part of the change to improve their lives, because they are real people, coping with real issues, they are not just a photo on a charity poster. I know, because I chatted to them this morning.

Thank you for reading, and please don’t just forget about it.
Have a good week.
Take care.
Love, Anne x
Some photos from my last trip, which was several years ago, but I fear things may not have changed much.