A recorded INBOUND 2013 talk (uploaded Aug 21, 2013) connecting the speaker’s family history in Orissa, India to the importance of clean water and sanitation. The speaker describes how lack of water constrained girls’ schooling, recounts a 2008 cholera outbreak in a nearby village, cites Gandhi’s line that ‘sanitation is more important than independence,’ and introduces charity: water’s September campaign to bring water to 100 villages in Orissa. The talk also summarizes a local Gramvika water and sanitation program (household toilets, 24-hour piped water) and notes local costs and village demographics.
Questions this video answers
Bring water to 100 villages in Orissa, India.
About 300 people.
About 70 people.
In late 2008.
About $600 a year (for a family of four, this approximates the local cost without subsidy).
Chapters
Good morning. It's great to see all of you. As mentioned, yeah, my background is in social media. It's nice to be amongst my people. People that use these tools of communication to do important things. And, you know, about a dozen years ago I was building these tools. Some of you might remember old blogging software called Movable Type. And folks like Seth Godin and Arianna Huffington took it and used it to tell stories that changed their businesses, changed society, changed the world. And those kinds of examples are really profound and meaningful to me. And it inspired me to try and tell a story to you all today that I've actually never told publicly anywhere before. It's one I think is pretty important. And like all stories do for all of us, probably it begins with my mom and dad. I'll start with my mom. So they're from. They're born in India, as you might expect. They're from Orissa, which some of you now are familiar with, is a small state on the eastern coast of India. And we're from. My family is from the hilliest part on the western part of that state, which is a little poor region there. So one of the poorest parts, one of the poorest states in India. And my folks are sort of an odd couple. My mom is from a well established family, lived in the big city, grew up with good schools and wearing really nice clothes. My dad, not quite wrong side of the tracks, but definitely a farm boy. I found out actually we speak our family's language with a little bit of a country accent. I didn't know that growing up and being able to learn from their example of how they lived. In the case of my dad's family, the village that we're from, very small village, about 300 people. As a kid I would go and visit just like you do on summer vacation or anything else. I went and lived there for a couple months when I was about nine years old and did the things with my cousins that you all did. Play, played soccer, played tag with them, went fishing, got in trouble, usual things. One of the things I was able to notice in my time there as a kid though was that my cousins, who were girls, spent a lot less time playing than those of us boys did because they were busy gathering water for people to use for cooking, cleaning, going to the bathroom, washing their hands, basic stuff. And we were actually pretty lucky because we had some help. See, my folks are part of the Brahmin caste, which is the highest caste in the caste system that still decides so much of life in India. And so we had a lot of privilege as a result, and we were able to get some help with that. But the other families in the village, their daughters spent a lot more time gathering water. In fact, it kept them from being able to go to school at all. And that's at least within the caste system and the surrounding areas. Around the village where my family still lives, there are aboriginal tribes and villages full of people who are Muslim or Christian, which are very small minorities in that area. And those people aren't in the caste system at all. Their daughters don't ever go to school. This started to change a little bit for my family and for its village because they got clean water about six, six years ago. And it's had a transformative impact to the point where the daughters and my cousin's daughters are able to go to school. People were able to participate, but those kinds of changes didn't happen fast enough. For a neighboring village, 10 kilometers away from where my family lives, they're a small village of about 70 people, in late 2008, was completely wiped out by cholera. The treatment, the cure for cholera is just clean water. That's all it takes. And these are people who I thought, growing up are the kind of people you see in a National Geographic special. They're different than us. They're someone else. But then I had the chance to go and live there as a kid and to go back and visit it as an adult. And they're just me. They're the same as me. They're the same as you. They're the same as the people that invent and use the tools that we're all talking about using at events like this. They're the same people that create the things that we go and visit on the Internet. They just don't have access to really basic fundamentals. And our obligation to help them was something I learned from my mother's side of the family. My mom has always been proud to tell the stories of her dad, a lawyer, and her granddad, who was a lawyer. He worked on civil rights and inclusion for folks in the outcast community and those who weren't helped by the system. But most importantly, my great grandfather was an independence fighter in India's independence movement and marched with Gandhi on some of the most important marches they did for independence in India. And so this was always raised as the stakes, how are you going to live up to this? How are you going to be worthy of people that can do that kind of work to actually free a nation of a billion people? And then a few years Ago, I connected with the folks at Charity Water to discover a little bit about what they're about. And in the process of researching what they work on, I stumbled across a quote I had first seen in the context of my great grandfather's work. And this was a quote from Gandhi, who said, sanitation is more important than independence. A man who gave his life for his country so it could be free thought that an even higher calling was providing the simple dignity of being able to wash one's hands, being able to go to the bathroom, being able to have a clean drink of water and not worry about getting sick. And the thing that was most striking to me was my great grandfather shared that message and others about the independence movement by using a small, simple, movable type printing press that's still in the attic of my family's house back in Orissa. And then I thought about the obligation we have with these things. $600 a year is the average income for a tribal family. And in western Orissa, for a family of four, $600 is about what this costs without a subsidy plan. And the tools that I've been able to use in blogging for the past 15 years or being able to help people start business blogs, these are the most powerful communication tools that have ever been created in the history of humanity. And we should use them to build our careers. We should use them to do our work. But at least once in a while, during a coffee break, during. During every coffee break, all through September, in the September campaign, for what we can do with the tools we have at our fingertips is so transformative, it's almost impossible to understand how much of an impact it can have. With that in mind, I'm really, really proud and excited to introduce this introductory video for Water's September campaign that is bringing water to India, bringing water to Orissa, bringing water to 100 villages that all of us collectively can help give a chance to. I hope you enjoy the video. Thank you.
My grandfather employed many laborers. Once, while visiting him, I found that he was feeding his laborer from a hole in the ground. And I asked him, why was this being done? This is how you feed dogs. And he replied, are they any better than dogs? The discrimination is so naked, and it is practiced in a very violent form. People began to discriminate them, saying that, you can't use the same water. You are dirty. You can't walk on our streets. Yeah. I have seen in my life when people were humiliated, when indignities were heaped on people, they became less than human. Initially, when we Go to a village and tell that we can all work together and you can have a toilet, a bathing facility with privacy, 24 hours piped water supply. Unless they have seen it being implemented in a nearby village, most do not believe it. There is the dominant thinking that poor people should have poor solutions. Am I panic?
Hale?
Health is the biggest economic asset of the poor. Being sick with a waterborne disease like diarrhea or dysentery or typhoid, people would be sick for 15 days. They would not be able to work. They don't earn. If they don't earn, they don't eat. The Gramvika program of water and sanitation is a game changer. It restores the dignity of women. It brings unity in the village. Water and sanitation program creates an enabling environment so that all aspects of development can take off for us. Water and sanitation is a vehicle for eliminating exclusion. All families have to sign that they will participate in this without even a single exception. Then they work on to bring all the local materials. They make the bricks, bring the rubble, sand. They begin to construct, under our supervision, a toilet and a bathing room. Then Grambly CAS comes in with materials which have to be externally procured, like cement, steel, commode, the roof, door. Then we find a very safe water source. Water is piped to every family through three taps. We believe that unless people contribute substantially to a program, the ownership of that program will not rest on them. The Dalit woman who is a widow, the poorest in the village, she has the same type of toilet and shower room as the richest Brahmin woman in that village. They are ready. They have made huge contributions. They are waiting for the funds to come from charity Water.
