My name is Balama, I live with my husband Balraju and my three daughters – we did have four but one died. We are a poor family, we don’t own any land, we live off the forest. We harvest wild plants and grow food crops on the hills. However, recently outsiders have come and bought up our land – they make money and we are left at the bottom of the heap – God doesn’t help us, he seems to be on their side. They put pressure on us to abandon our ways and grow cash crops – they promise progress. The first year we planted cotton we made a good profit, on one acre we made 3000 rupees. But the next year the whole crop failed.
A couple of years ago GD asked us if we wanted to start meeting in the Gotti We began to meet and talk about community issues. We used Reflect to help us talk about these things. It’s fun, we do plays, draw pictures on the ground and talk and share our concerns. Instead of being isolated with our problems, now we all sit together and analyse what is happening in our village - and how we can work together to make changes. We share our joys and sorrows, we talk about thing that matter in our lives and together we discover new solutions to our problems. When GD came to Kantalabanda they said that they would also teach us to read and write. I asked, why should I learn to read and write, what good would it do me? Now I realise that learning new skills does help me communicate more confidently. So far my reading and writing aren’t perfect, but at least I’m learning to speak out, and to ask questions. We used to run away when strangers came to the village. Now we have the confidence to face them.
In the Gotti we discussed the situation of our crops. We realised that many of us had switched from our traditional crops to cotton and tobacco, and that this had caused us all problems. These new crops take much more work than the old ones - and if they fail we are left with no money to buy food. After discussing this in the Gotti we realised that we had a choice about what crops to grow - we didn’t need to do what the outsiders told us. So we have now decided to only plant half our land with cotton or tobacco - the rest we are saving for our food crops. Because we had the Gotti we could take this decision together which has made us stronger against the outsiders. I do not think I could have taken this decision alone.
The Gotti has made us realise that we are not alone in our struggle for land and on international women’s day we held a rally to protest against outsiders privatising our forest. We met with people from other villages and shared our stories. I stood up and told everyone about our village - and they all listened. I felt brave and respected. We shouldn’t let ourselves be pushed around like this - if we lost this forest we’d have nothing - we would lose our rights and where would we go. We have rights over our forest, we won’t allow anyone to exploit us or push us out of the forest. You can’t lift a heavy weight on your own. With one finger you can’t lift anything, it takes all five fingers to lift something up - we must fight for our rights together.
GD, the people’s movement who have been implementing Reflect in East Godavari. They not only promote Reflect at a community level but circulate among the villages preforming a play which makes links between the villages local reality and wider pressures of privatisation and liberalisation at a national level.
The Gotti was a traditional village meeting place which fell into decline over the last 30 years. GD revived the Gotti using Reflect to make the discussion more structured and democratic/participatory.
