Barefoot College (BC) is an
organization that teaches village women to install and repair solar equipment
in order to bring electricity to their rural villages. At first, the program
was only in India, but since the early 2000s the organization has gone global,
bringing villagers from around the world to India in order for training. BC
does a lot more than just solar electricity, though. It runs a night school for
children who cannot go to school during the day due to family obligations, it
performs puppet shows that bring up issues like women’s rights, caste issues,
and health, and there are even medical and dental clinics run by villagers. The
college was founded upon the idea that even if you are illiterate, you are
still capable of learning complex things (like solar engineering and
dentistry). The college wants to empower rural villagers by teaching them
skills necessary for a more “modern” society, rather than have outsiders come
in and try to change things without the consent of the village people. At the
end of our stay, each of us was given a ton of information on the college which
has been really interesting. Since my readership doesn’t have access to these documents,
however, I would like to simply recommend the Ted Talk that the founder, Bunker
Roy, did in Edinburgh (it is viewable on YouTube). We got to have a meeting
with Mr. Roy and he is just as fiery in real life as he is in the video. The
college in practice, however, is a little less extreme than how the Ted Talk
depicts it. It’s hard to word exactly, but the actual college is simultaneously
how it is shown to be in the video yet also very different. In other words, I
was skeptical of its practices after seeing the video and before visiting
Tilonia, but now having seen the real thing, I think it’s a wonderful program
that is tackling development of rural areas in a sustainable and logical way.
(Hopefully I didn’t lose you too much in that last part)
While we were there, the
international villagers were on the fourth month of their six-month-long stay
in India to learn solar engineering. I got to brush up on my Spanish speaking
to the villagers from Cuba, Ecuador, and Bolivia, and they were so excited to get
to talk to someone in one of their native tongues (as you could maybe guess,
there aren’t that many Spanish-speakers here). We got to visit one of the night
school sessions and see where they recycle old newspapers, flip-flops, and
other junk into folders, toys, and various teaching materials. We met the lead architect of many of the
buildings, an illiterate man who has been working with BC for the past 40 or so
years (basically since its inception). I really enjoyed my time in Tilonia and
it was awesome seeing women who must be so brave to leave their tiny village,
fly to India in a giant mechanical beast, and live in a culture that they could
not have even fathomed beforehand.
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