INDIA Day 1 ? Dalit Service Visit

       Today we did a service visit through SAS at a Dalit or “Untouchable” village. The people who live in this village are literally outcasts. They are the very bottom of the caste system. They are so low in fact that they are often not even considered to be part of the caste system at all. They have literally been out-casted. This trip was exactly how I was hoping it would be. Not only were we there to help build rebuild their village but also to just spend time with the people who lived there.
        When we first arrived at their village we were met by a parade at the road. There were a few men dressed in costumes playing music and then a large crowd of women gathered singing along, waiting with hand-made flower necklaces to put on us when we stepped of the bus. All of the people had huge smiles on their faces and were so excited for us to be there which was so nice!
        The women made sure all of us were in the front or the middle and were gathering around us dancing and smiling. Once we got to the main part of the village, there was a space with a concrete floor and a tarp over it with a stage where they had set up chairs for us to sit in. After welcoming us to the village and thanking us for coming, they showed us a brick structure outside and took pictures of us pretending to lay bricks down. Most of us were pretty confused as to what we were doing but just decided to go along with it. After a few minutes of that, they brought us back to the stage area where the kids performed a few different dances for us. They were all different ages and so adorable. Most of the kids did traditional dances, which were really good! Two of the boys then came out and did break dancing to a Fifty Cent song which all of us were cracking up at. They both had on jeans and ghetto brand shirts, which looked so out of place next to the traditional clothing of everyone else around them. All of the dances were really cute and I loved the traditional Indian music!
        Finally, it was time to get to work! We discovered the beginnings of a brick building we had been pretending to build earlier would actually be what we were working on that day. More importantly, it was way more than the beginning of a building, it was a school for the kids! We spent most of the time there forming an assembly line to pass the bricks over to be used, making mortar (a mixture of sand, some gray substance, and water) and spreading the mortar between layers of the bricks we were laying. Within about two and a half hours we had built the building from just a concrete slab on the floor with four corners of bricks to almost an entire building! We had built the school all the way up to the top of a tall doorframe! It was so neat and unexpected to see how much work we had actually done that day and gave us all such a sense of accomplishment!
        After we had finished building, we were taken into a community building where a few of the village women and the man who put this program together came with us. Inside we were each given a clay pot candle that the women had made themselves. We then went around and each lit our neighbors candle and when we were finished we said together, “we light up ourselves, we light up the world”. After this the women took our candles back and arranged them into a circle and we then meditated and reflected on our day together. After this we were allowed to ask the women questions and we learned a few things. For example, the man in the room had once been part of the Dalit Caste but had converted to Buddhism so that he could escape the caste system. What was interesting was although he now considered himself to have no caste, the Dalit women considered him to still be a part of their caste. At the end of this whole experience, we found out that the $300 donation to this village from SAS would be used for three things: a years salary for a tailor to teach the women to sew / tailor, a years salary for a night school teacher for the women, and finally a years salary to teach the women how to read from a newspaper. It was so nice to end the day this way.