Coolies’ Visit to India 2013

Coolies Visit to India 2013–2014

The Coolies experience is pretty full-on! Talk about the deep end. Assaults on your comprehension and your senses come in fast and furious. India delivers its first punch very early. Stepping from Chennai airport, in the middle of the night, there is little chance to appreciate the hot, humid environment, before we are assailed by dozens of touts, drivers and porters all eager to ‘help’. Our driver finds us and leads us to a distant car park, and our path through the many sleeping families along the various walkways delivers another punch. The 15 new arrivals, each with backpacks, have to squeeze into a minibus designed for far fewer. But such is India. We adopt pretzel-like configurations and manage to fit. The transit through the busy streets with headlight illuminated smog provided an eerie, hazy atmosphere through which to experience your first dose of the craziness of Indian road travel. Road work, diversions and hoardings add to the chaos of it all. Cars, scooters, auto rickshaws, bicycles, buses, trucks, pedestrians, just don’t seem to realise it’s really late at night! Can you believe it? We were only a couple of hours in! Surprises, contradictions and new experiences continue apace, but you do learn to roll with the punches. It’s not as if we weren’t prepared. We’d signed up for this months ago, been to heaps of meetings; convinced sponsors of the worth of this project; sold chocolates and sizzled sausages. We’d been briefed on the subject of Indian life and culture. Yet, when you are in the thick of it, it is just so different! What an experience. We were headed for the Lasalle Secondary School in the fishing town of Tuticorin, where we would spend the next month. The Brothers gave up their house to accommodate some of us and the rest bunked in together in shared rooms of three or four. The cooks ‘blanded’ down the food for us, cutting back on curry and chillies. Still, there were a few of us nursing stomachs that often threatened to misbehave. Time went quickly as we ‘manned up’, to compensate for the lack of tools or machinery, and carted bricks, stones, sand and concrete during our three shifts of one and a half hours each weekday. We thought we were pretty good too, until, on a couple of the really busy days, some local women coolies were brought in – they showed us what wimps we were in comparison. Nonetheless, we took great solace from the knowledge that we brought forward the completion date of that floor of classrooms we were working on by several months. We had the opportunity to mix with hundreds of students, many of whom were orphan boarders. We were like celebrities ‘on tour’ to the many interested students. The region is very poor and these lower caste people look to God and education to raise them from their lot. Nevertheless, the surprising acceptance, optimism and good-humour displayed amongst the students, and locals, is palpable. Our last fortnight in India gave us the chance for a little more train travel and to visit another couple of south Indian cities. The placid backwaters are the antithesis of what one usually experiences in this chaotic country. Many of us adopted the local garb, with one or two taking on a Gandhi-like appearance with shaved heads and dhotis. Goa’s beaches, a Cochin Christmas, and a Hampi New Year, all provided rich memories and a greater appreciation of what India is all about. The Coolies of 2013–14 returned home enriched, tired from the work, uplifted by the experience, appreciative of what we have here, and delighted to feel we’d done some folk some good.

Mr Larry Evans Coolies Group Coordinator