The Jawadhu experience

just back from the community health programme in Jawadhu hills in Thiruvannamalai..i am not sure whether it is part of eastern ghats,western ghats,etc,etc..so i wont be boring u with the geographic details..atul was saying that he remembered having to draw 2 small lines as part of the ghats in tamilnadu..may be this is that only..any way,the trip was quite a lot of fun..(though i had a bit of mood swing attacks and was kind of depressed for arond half the time on the first day of the trip..)
we were contemplating the methods to be adopted in case of getting beaten up in the village considering the fact that our study was to find the fertility rate of the tribal population in the hills..but the people generally turned out to be qiute nice and co-operative(i guess we might have actually got beaten up if we used the national family health survey questions which had questions like at what age did u have ur 1st sexual intercourse and other such stuff:))well most of the females still giggled and some of them were blushing like crazy when we asked them how many children they wanted to have at the time of marriage...then there was the tricky part of keeping the drunk husbands occupied while chinthu interviewed the wife.on the last day i had to manage a drunk guy and his wife at the same time.i was a bit scared in the beginning that the guy will screw it up but it turned out to be the most hilarious event in the whole programme.he started blurting out random words in english and told me he was an MBA holder(i didnt ask him what MBA stands for according to him...that chap turned out to be someone who is married somewhere else and happened to be visiting his sweetheart in the hills).anyway it was lots of fun and it was the last interview during the programme.

this whole trip was actually quite informative.in these tribal villages the guy and girl stay together for 2-3 months before they get married...talk about live-in realtions!!
another interesting thing was that they breastfeed their kids for 4-5 years...we even found someone who was breastfeeding her child for7 years..but the shocking thing is that most of them still deliver at home..the mother/mother-i-l/sister-i-l,etc.help around during the delivery..many of them offerd us food and all and one of us had the honour of naming a kid also..i know... that was quite a cute thing.. :)anyway now back to the civilisation and analysis of all the data that we collected.