Illiterate women from abroad learn about solar energy in Rajasthan

In the kikar, neem and babool tree landscape of Tilonia, Rajasthan, the gang of six Sudanese women stick out like mishti doi at a Chinese buffet. It isn’t just their clothes, or their lyrical names (‘Asunta Achan’, ‘Dinka’, ‘Nyanag’, ‘Nekong’), or their gold costume jewellery, their Braille-like tattoos raised on the skin surface, or their eclectic head gear (nets, silk turbans, bright scarves), or even the diversity of their braided hair.

What makes these African ladies stand out — they don’t speak Hindi but some manage a smattering of pidgin English — even from the other resident foreign women from Malawi, Tanzania, Peru, Bhutan is their raucous laughter and the ease with which they’ve managed to fit in. The one dead giveaway, besides the frequency of their laughter and their shrill native chatter, is their enunciation of “namaste” (nam-ass-taye!) to passers-by in cheery, lilting tones.

These 38 women stepped out of their village for the first time in their lives to get on an aircraft and travel a few thousand miles into Tilonia, a dusty village off the Jaipur-Ajmer highway. Housed at Barefoot college, they are here to learn how to harness the power of the sun and take it home six months later.

How that happens is anybody’s guess, because the man who founded the college and dreamt up this course says very little.

Bunker ‘Sanjit’ Roy, in his late 60s, smiles and hopes that people who come to see the programme get it on their own. This minimalistic communication model that he has adapted for himself seems to be the running theme in the six-month solar training course as well.

“These ladies are selected on a criterion I created a few years ago. They should be illiterate, have children or grand-children, live in some remote and inaccessible corner of the world, and not have knowledge of English,” says Roy. The how and why is left to the inquisitiveness of the visitors to figure it all out.

Roy travels to less developed countries to choose women to come to India for six months and learn about the components in a CFL circuit board and take that knowledge back home to enable people to lead easier lives; not pay through their nose for kerosene, and allow children to study at night.

The ladies start off in Tilonia with the very basic smattering of passable Hindi and English. But even before they begin to grapple with the structure of an alien language, a couple of instructors start drilling in the basic physics of electricity and resistance.   

Wooden sticks with the colour codes of an integrated circuit are gifted to the ladies and the first few days are spent figuring out why the red wire comes before the green, and the black is sandwiched between the blue and the yellow.

“Rooms, very cool here,” conveys one of the women, Elisabeth, in gestures and broken words. Lounging outside their barracks that a 100 years ago used to be a sanatorium, the women look as comfortable as they would be back home. The workshop on solar energy happens essentially in sign language. The determined physically-challenged solar instructor, holding forth about wires and combination in the classroom, not unlike a science lab, drums into their heads, “‘’Phust’ colour? RED!”

The foreign women are looked after by Mumtaz, the matron of sorts whose husband is in the CRPF, and whose mother cooks meals for Bunker and Aruna Roy, who run the Barefoot college. They foreign women call Mumtaz ‘Boney Mama’ because it’s easier to say. Boney Mama is the trouble-shooter. She takes the women to the tailor to give their measurements for salwar kameezes. She also plays nurse maid and has a dispensary at her disposal for sundry head and tummy aches. Boney Mama grows attached to these “videshi mahilayen” because they’re so warm and treat her like one of their own. She understands their food preferences - not fussy but definite preference for potatoes and sweet tea.

The current batch of women undergoing the six-month training programme has 38 trainees — all from lesser developed nations. Besides the Sudanese, there are two from Peru, a contingent from Malawi (less cheery than the Sudanese gang), and four attractive Buddhist nuns from the Shechen monastery in Thimpu - Lhamo Tshering, Sangay Dema, Dema and Yeshi (all in their twenties except Yeshi who’s 52).

Sitting in the shade on an old pull-cart under a neem tree, the nuns, all except Yeshi, are shy. They are all dressed in maroon robes, and their heads are clean shaven. One has long shapely fingernails and giggles when asked questions. Another, the most stunning, doesn’t speak much, but like all of the others, can pull off a remarkably melodious “namaste”. Yeshi, speaking for all of them, says they like it here - “acha hai”. The nuns too, haven’t been to school.

Linguistic barriers, one would imagine, will only make it difficult to the students to understand what the teacher is going on about. Are they having problems following the lessons in the workshop?

“Thora thora,” they answer, tickled, but add that they are slowly beginning to understand the colour combination on the circuit boards. They have six months to pick up the nuances, manage basic communication, and clear their doubts. Till then, they’re sticking it out and not complaining about the climate of Rajasthan even though they’re naturally used to cooler climes.

Somehow, perhaps through a mixture of magic and persistence, many women go back home to light up their villages. They become “solar-engineers” going from illiteracy to fixing complicated integrated circuit boards, solar panels, and dishes in six months flat. Most of the funding for the programme comes from the Ministry of External Affairs, with the women getting Rs25,000 every month, along with a cell phone and a pre-paid card to call folks back home, and maybe teach them long-distance the nuance in a ‘namaste’