The Pigs of Kadod
I came to India prepared for the cows and the monkeys. Somehow the donkeys and occasional goats just kind of made sense. What I was completely caught off guard and a little enchanted by were the pigs. In the States, pigs almost never see the outside of a pen. Here, they wander the streets in complete freedom. They “earn their keep,” so to speak, by eating street garbage. When I mentioned my surprise at the presence of the pigs to a colleague, she related to me the urban legend that the pigs were actually placed in Kadod as part of a local government scheme. After an hour of googling on my part, I was disappointed to learn that it is in fact just an urban legend. But it got me to thinking.
These pigs are ingenious. Even though they’re feral, they help to maintain the cleanliness of the village, which they do for free. It’s not a perfect system by any means (as they’re feral, they do leave their own waste wherever they feel like it), but they make sense contextually in rural, primarily aggro-based India. It would be easy for a Western mind to come to Kadod and want to impose a sense of “sanitation” on the village. To implement a plan to use big, industrial street cleaners and garbage trucks to collect the waste and dump it in the landfill. This would all be well and good except that the roads here are mostly dirt, someone would have to sacrifice their farmland (and family income) to have room for a landfill, and you would have to travel hundreds of kilometers just to acquire the necessary garbage trucks. Basically, it would take a lot of money and a lot of work to implement something that no one would actually use.
Too often, people looking to effect change in an environment that is not their own opt for dump-trucks instead of pigs. What sets Nanubhai apart is that we actually live and work in the the type of community that we seek to improve. Because we’re here in rural Gujarat day in and day out, we know the daily struggles and triumphs, the very particular challenges of teaching in a classroom that doesn’t have the art supplies necessary for the students to complete the projects shown in their state-mandated textbooks, a classroom that was in fact only very recently wired for overhead lighting. Being here, visiting the classrooms, allows me to see when students find a way to make a classroom trash bin out of recycled materials and the joy and pride it instills in them. Working weekly with our teachers allows me to give them contextually appropriate guidance but it also allows me a sense of pride when they excitedly tell me about their newest classroom experiment and the results they’re achieving. Being here makes it easy to see the value in Kadod’s feral pigs and so much more.
Post on January 15th, 2013 by Teaching & Programming Assistant Kate Jenkins.
