Vox Populi

This intro bit is really redundant to any regular readers of this blog, but c’est la vie.

I live in Delhi, India and work for a local company that is a grantee on an urban slum sanitation project in the cities of Bhubaneswar and Cuttack, located in the eastern Indian state of Odisha. Initially my position on this initiative was as the communications lead, though in recent times that role has expanded to include project management responsibilities. As the former, my duties broadly involve documenting and disseminating project information in various channels (i.e., managing the blog, spending time in the slums shooting photos and videos, stewarding the social media channels, creating a monthly newsletter, etc., etc.); as the latter, I’m pretty much a taskmaster and the person call to bitch to. (I have to admit, I love both though it’d be difficult to tell on any given day since I wear my emotions on my sleeve and like to freak out every now and again; it’s good for the soul).

Though I secretly do enjoy both roles, my heart is more into the communications side of things. I used to love writing when I was younger but got away from it, as things oft happen, and have really enjoyed rekindling the old flame. I write fairly frequently on the project blog, this personal blog, and keep a project manager diary. There are definitely weeks that I write 10,000 words or more and would write even more if time permitted.

Aside from that little addiction, I’ve also been taught a bit by my colleagues on photography, videography, and editing both. This I well and truly cannot get enough of, and primarily because it necessitates trips to “the field”, a.k.a the slums.

Posing with my buddies Ryan and Harsha along with our host family for our slum homestay

I’ve posted plenty of pictures and a few videos from these trips. Most of these were sporadic jaunts as living in Delhi made traveling to Bhubaneswar infrequent (they’re about 1,000 miles apart). Thankfully, though tempered slightly by the increased isolation and related loneliness, with my added project manager responsibilities comes the need to be based in Bhubaneswar at least half of each month. We’re also gearing up to start building the facilities in the coming months. Both of these means my time in the slums will increase dramatically as there will be endless amounts of activity to document.

A toilet block in a Bhubaneswar slum

When I first arrived here in February 2012, if I’m being honest, I was terrified at the thought of going into India’s urban slums. Granted, I largely accepted the job for this reason and exposure, but it still scared the crap out of me. It’s one thing to abstractly think about what the experience would be like from, comparatively speaking, absolute luxury some 7,000 miles away in the U.S, and it’s a whole ‘nother thought altogether when you’re in the pre-dawn cab to a slum with a camera in your hand and your colleagues machine-gunning last minute advice at me like a sergeant readying his troops to storm the beaches at Normandy. I thought I was going to puke right there in the cab.

Talking with some kids in the first slum I ever visited

The funny thing is, I loved it. The people, especially the kids, were super nice and totally welcoming. The surrounding community was in rough shape, with detritus everywhere, but the houses, though small, were extremely clean inside. This experience often repeated itself, though I have been in some slums with more basic housing in far worse conditions.

Water point at a slum in Bhubaneswar

The universal, unifying aspect has always been the warmth of the people. Irrespective of their surroundings, people I’ve met in India’s slums have all been awesome. I don’t know what I was expecting, but certainly not the level of welcome that I’ve so often felt. I guess I assumed people would be angry, or depressed, or some other negative manifestation of feelings. I suppose that’s me projecting what I imagine my own response to the situation to be onto them, which is really kind of pathetic of me, and unfair. I think at least part of me is jealous of people in these communities due to this resilience. I’d like to think I’d weather it with such, at least outward, aplomb and I suppose grace, for a lack of a better word, but I somehow doubt it.

Boys at school in a Bhubaneswar slum. The school has no toilets so the students use the adjoining field as a bathroom.

Anywho, enough prattling on about my own nonsense. The real reason for this post is to show off my sick video-making skills. Months and months ago, a colleague of mine visited a slum in Bhubaneswar to interview people about their lives. I drafted up a super basic interview guide, but the essence of the visit, and the corresponding video, was to provide people a platform simply to talk about their lives. Some did touch on sanitation, though not from our prompting. We asked general questions like, such as “What are you hopes for the future?” and “What do you think of your community?” and just let the camera roll.

I took bits of these interviews and made this short little movie, aptly titled “Vox Populi”, though I cannot take credit for such naming; my colleague nailed that one.

Here’s the magic, but you can also find it on the Video page of this site:

Originally published at kevinshane.me on November 19, 2013.