January 22, 2008
Student leads trip to work with India’s onetime “untouchables”
Working for Dalit rights is a personal matter for AU graduate student D.B. ‘Sagar’ Bishwakarma, who helped to brief the AU students who traveled to India this winter. The Dalit activist from Nepal was among the individuals recently awarded a Community Human Rights Award from the United Nations Association of the National Capital Area (UNA-NCA).
Bishwakarma was one of the founders of the Dalit National Federation (DNF) of Nepal, an umbrella organization for nonprofits working on Dalit issues, and served as president of the group from 2002 to 2007. In 2006, he founded the International Commission for Dalit Rights.
He is pursuing a master’s degree in sociology at AU. |
It wasn’t just Matt McCoy’s life that was changed by his high school trip to India to work with people once described as “untouchables.” It also changed the life of his family. And this year, Matt and his mother shared their passion for social justice with AU students on an alternative break to the community whose cause moves the McCoys so deeply.
It all began five years ago in Pennsylvania, when Matt’s mother showed him an article about an India-based nonprofit called Dalit Solidarity. That winter, the high schooler was on his way to India with a group of volunteers.
He was young, but his mother wasn’t nervous. “He has always been extremely mature for his age,” Betsy McCoy said by e-mail from India, where she stayed and continued working after the AU students had returned.
During that first high school trip, Matt was introduced to an ancient culture, and also to some ancient prejudices. Hindu society is marked by a caste system that once assigned everyone a role in life corresponding to a level of ritual purity, with priests and teachers at the top, kings and warriors in the second tier, and merchants and artisans further down.
Outside the caste system lies a fifth group, the Dalits, who traditionally worked as butchers, smiths, cobblers, tanners, street cleaners, and in other jobs viewed as unclean. Custom once barred these “untouchables” from using the same water sources as caste people, and even their shadows were considered polluting.
The Indian constitution banned untouchability in 1950, and activism and legislation has brought enormous changes. Yet discrimination continues to plague the lives of many Dalits, violence from extremists remains a threat, and millions are among the poorest of the poor.
Seeing this for himself filled him with a desire to do something. “It affected me very intensely,” said Matt McCoy ’08. “I felt I wanted to do fund raising and awareness raising activity, and started at my high school, telling about my experiences and showing pictures. Everyone in my family started to get involved in it.”
Soon they had all traveled to India, and his mother, an attorney, was dedicating herself to the cause as well. Recalled Betsy McCoy, “I consider myself to be a well-educated person, but knew very little about the Dalits and their problems prior to coming to India. The challenges they face are so overwhelming that I felt compelled to try and work for their cause when I returned to the U.S.”
She now volunteers as the program director of Dalit Solidarity. This winter, Matt and his mother cooperated to organize an AU alternative break to Dalit communities in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
“To see this mother-son team in action was really incredible,” said Shoshanna Sumka, AU’s coordinator of global and community-based learning.
Among their projects, the volunteers helped to conduct a health survey of more than 1,200 people to create a health database for a local clinic. They taught swimming to children in an area where it’s not uncommon to drown in a river or by falling into a well. They built houses for Dalit widows, who suffer discrimination as women and widows as well as Dalits.
The students prepared for their trip with a syllabus of readings about the topic and eight predeparture sessions that included guest speakers who briefed them on the issues and Tamil Nadu.
But most of all, they learned in India from the Dalit community.
“It’s important to notice that we gain much more from these experiences than any of the people we work with. Cross-cultural experiences are really invaluable to us,” said Matt. “Of course, there are some logistical benefits to the community—our fees paid for [equipment] for the community; the organization employed over 100 people for those two weeks doing various jobs—but more important than giving money is that we showed we wanted to be there and work ourselves.”
“It is one thing to read about it in a book, and another thing entirely to see it all in person,” said Betsy McCoy. “They now know what abject poverty means, since they visited homes where people live on less than 50 cents a day.”
Matt McCoy will graduate in a year. He plans to return to India, to learn more about Dalit issues and work for change.
