A Song and Dance Routine

The children arrive for the concert in a school "crocodile" Indian-style

Yesterday was Children's Day for the children and friends of Building Blocks pre-schools in Bangalore. It was a day filled with joy, and celebrated with all seven pre-schools from around the city, coming together for a performance.

The concert began with the traditional lighting of the oil-lamp.

Here four young dancers are helped by three of their teachers.

The pre-schools have classes of around 20-30 pupils, and all have qualified teachers.
Sometimes, the teachers have training days when they visit some of the expensive schools in middle-class areas, so they can study teaching practices and observe different techniques.

The show took place in an outdoor auditorium in a beautifully planted park in Bangalore. 


The children were bussed in from their schools, which are all situated adjacent to seriously deprived residential areas.

James Suresh Ambat, the founder of Building Blocks was hauled up on stage to join in one of the performances - much to the delight of the children, who roared with delight as he showed them how it should be done.



It's all very different from the Sir Roger de Coverley English Country Dance that we had to perform at my Junior school on the occasion of the coronation in 1953.

I was called up on stage to talk about the "Plus Ten" scholarship project.
The little girl beside me is Chaitra. I have sponsored the next ten years of her schooling

At the end of the show, James commented to me:"They just don't look like a bunch of slum kids, do they?"

As I reflected on this later, I realised that this is the whole point of James' work - and what led to my involvement to set up the charity in the UK.


If you teach children hygiene and nutrition, give them a school uniform so they look like all the other children in school, then, with a good education, they have the opportunity to escape the poverty trap. 
A sponsored scholarship costs £3k or £25 per month for ten years. No, I know what you're thinking, and I can't afford it either. More to the point, I cannot not find that amount to really change the life of someone who was born into an underprivileged environment. It's up to her, now, to work hard and realise her potential.
Keep following the blog and there will be information on UK-based fund-raising early in the New Year.

My Next Challenge

Helping slum children to escape from poverty

Children from one of the "Building Blocks" group of free schools
for children living in the slums of Bangalore

Earlier this year I wrote about my visit to India, to Bangalore in the state of Karnataka, to the group of "Building Blocks" schools founded by James Ambat with his wife Hilda. You can read the story of my visit by clicking here.

Building Blocks has 7 schools, a staff of almost 80 teachers and helps around 700 children aged between three and six with a grounding in speaking and writing the English language and with core subjects like arithmetic and general knowledge. The purpose of starting English at such a young age is that English is the teaching medium in all the better schools right throughout India. 

The Kannada language has its own distinct script

The local vernacular language of Kannada is spoken by 51 million people in and around Karnataka, but this figure represents less than 5% of the population of India. 
The actual number of mother-tongue languages spoken in India is 1,652 and Kannada is one of India’s 22 distinct official languages, each with their own script.

The original proposal in the Indian constitution was that Hindi and English should jointly be the national languages of India for a period of 15 years from 1950 to 1965, after which the national language would be Hindi. However, when English was dropped, in January 1965, there was civil unrest in South India, and within a month English was reinstated as a national language alongside Hindi.

A country with so much diversity was simply not able to establish the Hindi language, which is spoken predominantly in North India, as its universal tongue. The benefit of this situation has been that Indians have a comparative edge over the citizens of many other countries because of the wide-spread use of English. As a result, educated Indians with basic skills and qualifications are able to seek employment almost anywhere in the world. Today, English is the chief language in the Indian education system, and while many infant schools teach in the local vernacular, English is the teaching medium for better schools through all age-groups.

The Challenge of Poverty

A Bangalore slum district

According to official statistics from the Karnataka Slum Development Board, the state has 2,796 slums housing over 4 million people. 
With the expansion of Bangalore, the slums have also increased, taking the official number of slum areas from 473 in 2003 to 597 in 2013. Officials say over 16% of the city’s population live in slums, but some experts put the figure much higher, at between 25% and 35%.

The urban poor are living on government, private and railway lands. Most slum dwellers work as drivers, domestic helpers, cooks, construction labourers, fruit and vegetable vendors and night watchmen. If there is to be any escape from this poverty, it must start in childhood

Much of a baby’s physical development is determined in its early weeks and months of growth, and much of an individual's intellectual development is similarly determined in their early weeks and months of schooling. 

Learning how to learn, and becoming familiar with language and communication skills, as well as basic literacy and numeracy, will equip children for continuing years of quality education that will set them up for a good life in adulthood.

Building Blocks gives 3-year-old children from impoverished backgrounds a high-quality start to their education.

In the seven schools currently run by Building Blocks, they learn Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, English and General Knowledge right through from admission till they enter mainstream education at the age of six.

The education is free of cost for these slum children who are provided with the best educational tools to learn.
‘At present, the school caters for children between the ages of 3 to 6. 
After a couple of years of schooling, we aim to get the children into good English-medium schools with the help of our sponsors.’

The children have a healthy, nutritious meal every day

Escaping from the poverty trap

The core principle behind Building Blocks is the belief that if underprivileged children have access to free education, meals and medical care, they can escape from slum existence and build a better life. Through Building Blocks, the children have excellent English-medium schooling for the first 2 years of their education. Then the scheme creates new challenges when they move on from pre-school after a celebration at their graduation ceremony.

Graduation Day at one of the Building Blocks schools

Placing children in primary schools with similarly high standards compared to the teaching they have received in their first two years learning with Building Blocks, requires scholarship funding. Hence Building Blocks' "Project+Ten," which sets out to raise sponsorships and scholarships to cover the next 10 years of a child's education.

When they move on, their new schools can be challenging, and some of these children need coaching and mentoring to ensure that they can keep up with children who come from less deprived family backgrounds. To address this, the team at Building Blocks supplies free afternoon coaching and tuition to children who have progressed from their pre-school and have now been sponsored into primary and secondary English-medium schooling. A scholarship to support a child for ten years, once they complete their time at pre-school costs approximately £3,000 including after-school coaching and mentoring. 

The visionary educationalist, behind Building Blocks

I was so impressed by what I saw in Bangalore that I returned to England determined to set up a fund-raising operation to support Building Blocks.

I located a UK-based charity that operates in the field of education in India, and we have come to an agreement whereby donations can be channelled through this charity to enable Gift Aid to be reclaimed.

My next step is to fly to Bangalore on November 1st and spend 2 weeks working on the practical organisation. 
I also want to ensure a good flow of information and promotional material.

But I cannot do this single-handedly 

I hate to admit that I am not as young as I used to be, but that is a simple fact. I need a team of volunteers, ideally located around the East Midlands, who will work with me and carry this on into the future. 
There are exciting challenges for people who are interested in coming together to develop and implement an effective strategy, both to support the pre-schools and to develop sponsorships for Project +10. For the moment I am funding the initial costs through my work in management training, and I have pledged my personal funding in Project +10 by sponsoring Chaitra, who graduated from Building Blocks' Azalea pre-school  earlier this year. 

Last Spring, I spent three months in Greece, working with volunteers confronted with the effects of the refugee crisis. That crisis continues. I am still involved with groups concerned with integrating refugees into British society and giving them the opportunity to build a better life.
The objective of my work in India is also about giving people a better life by creating new opportunities. You can follow the story here, and if you are interested in working with me to get the UK operation up and running, please contact me at mail@bobharvey.co.uk.

Postscript, after 6 weeks back home

There are refugees and there are migrants.

• There are refugees fleeing from war, violence and devastation.
• There are migrants fleeing from poverty, oppression and lack of opportunity

However you label them, they have one thing in common: they are people in search of a dream of a better life, who have found themselves stuck in a nightmare.

After university, I worked as an expatriate in Africa, to improve my work prospects and put cash in the bank. That’s on a different scale from what today’s economic migrants are doing, but it’s the same in principle. The difference today is in the direction of the flow, and the scale of the human traffic

Migration on a massive scale is a problem that is not going to go away. By Christmas, there will be roughly ten thousand, mostly African, migrants in Calais. They have crossed the Sahara to reach Libya before making the perilous crossing to Italy.

Burial of migrant in the desert

Thousands of their compatriots have perished on the way, dying from thirst, hunger and exhaustion in the desert or drowned at sea.

They reach France and sleep on pavements in Paris and along the embankments of the Seine. Others head to Calais and blend into the shanty town known as The Jungle. Some are rounded up by the French authorities and relocated to detention centres. The authorities show very little humanity towards these desperate nomads, mostly men, who seek only to escape the grinding poverty and persecution of life in Africa.  They have risked their lives and racked up massive debts to fund their migration. They are desperate, and desperate people will take extreme risks to achieve their objective.

Migrants who reach Greece are mainly refugees from civil wars and terrorist activities in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. While the migrants in France are mainly young men, the refugees in Greece are mostly family groups and unaccompanied children. In order to protect its tourist industry, the Greek government has taken great steps to hide the 57,000 refugees that are scattered across the islands and the mainland.

Refugee accommodation
at a detention centre in Northern Greece

There has been an extensive clean-up campaign in which refugees have been herded into detention centres, administered by the military: anything from tents in fields to crowded accommodation in disused warehouses or large marquees.

In some centres, there are volunteer groups, who strive valiantly to create some sort of infrastructure and activities with playgroups, schooling, language classes and women’s groups. The government’s contribution is to manage the establishments in the style of prison camps, with little more concern than a farmer might have for livestock.

These are real people, real lives, real histories and real futures.

From my own experience, I know that many of these refugees are highly qualified, professional individuals whose homes and livelihoods have been bombed to rubble. They cannot “Go Home,” – because home no longer exists, and will not be rebuilt in a generation.

Here in Northern Europe, it is pointless to imagine that the immigrant crisis is going to fade away like an English summer. These are real people, real lives, real histories and real futures. So, how will we cope with the inevitable invasion that will happen when the refugees and migrants finally cross borders and become part of our community?

I support various organisations under the banner: “Refugees Welcome Here!”

Asian exiles land at London Stansted after being expelled
from Uganda by President Idi Amin in 1972

Part of my motivation stems from having seen the regeneration of the English Midlands that resulted from the mass immigration of Indian-origin Asians from East Africa at the time of Uganda’s president Idi Amin. 

That influx changed the face of Britain with an explosion of entrepreneurial flair across many industries – to say nothing of the rejuvenation of convenience stores and the salvation of many rural post offices. 

Today, we see the children of that generation in senior positions in our health service, in the City financial sector and in the legal system.

Winners of the UK Asian Professional Awards in 2015

We now have to choose not only how we face the challenge that faces us from the pavements of Paris and the mud of the Calais camps; we have to decide how we will handle this as it continues through the rest of this century. We are all going to have to step outside our comfort zone and interact with an ongoing influx.

Love changes everything

This will only be achieved through a Hearts and Minds campaign. You can legislate against discrimination and incitement to violence, but you cannot change legislate to change attitudes. 

There are seeds of hope in some statistics. The UK census in 2011 established that 10% of all live-in relationships cross ethnic boundaries, and there is every reason to predict that this proportion has increased since then and will continue into the future.

Most of the next generation has far less racial prejudice than its parents and grandparents, partly encouraged by the multi-ethnic nature of popular culture.

Today, Britain is an island in name only.

We have the choice between living in the resentment and divisiveness of the past, or welcoming and integrating people who want to create a better life for themselves and their offspring, and will both contribute and enrich our society.

We have the choice between living in the European dream or living in permanent fear of an imaginary nightmare.

The invasion will happen . . .

The reality will not change: the invasion will happen over the next few years. The only realistic response is positivity, compassion and love, and what we project will determine what we receive in return.

The sign on a structure in The Jungle in Calais reads
“We are searching for a better life.”

My final post from Athens

Families from Syria in search of a better life

Young men from Eritrea in search of a better life

Some refugees/migrants die of thirst crossing the Sahara; others drown crossing the Mediterranean. Migration is not a new phenomenon, but it is now on a far greater scale than ever before. Most of us struggle to come to terms with all the implications and the fact that the world of our grandchildren will be very different from our own.  We fail to acknowledge that life has always been like this. 

Change is the only constant.

There are some cultural changes we grow to accept: our beer is colder, our tea is weaker and our coffee is stronger. Changes in language are more difficult, - innit? 
Changes in behaviour are challenging, changes in ethics even more so. But change happens: you have to get over it - and it never gets any easier.

Working as casual labour in rural Italy caption

A few years ago I went to live in rural Italy. African pedlars were an unexpected feature of everyday life.

Every six weeks or so, a young Nigerian strode up the track from the village with a backpack full of cheap goods that he hoped he might sell. 

In his bag, he had household items, brushes, brooms and packets of tissues. 

He would also ask for casual work, in and around the house. I remember he did some work on the garden hedges and was very happy with the cash we paid him.

Many boats fail to make the voyage from Africa to Italy 

In the four years, since I left Italy, tens of thousands more young, African men have crossed over the Mediterranean from Libya and made their way northwards.

I don’t know how Italian society absorbs them. There is the occasional surprising news story of the isolated Italian hill-top which has been haemorrhaging population for decades, and now finds African immigrants repopulating the ghost town. Will this really result in revitalisation? I don’t know.  

The Moria refugee detention camp on Lesvos

In the three months that I have been in Athens, I have seen little in the way of resolution of the root of the problem of immigration and asylum. 

Syrian and Afghan refugees have been scooped up from Athens, Thessaloniki and Piraeus and garrisoned in poorly equipped tented camps on isolated hillsides in the countryside. 

Holiday village converted for refugee accommodation

Some have been much more fortunate and have been accommodated by the anarchist student group that has taken over a failed hotel in central Athens.

Others are garrisoned in deserted holiday villages that had never been successful as holiday projects. 

Some communities thrive with volunteers running educational and recreational activities. Others are more like prison camps.

Pirate fashion labels on sale in Rome

But it’s all piecemeal. There is still no cohesive plan in place. Syrian and Afghan families, from grandparents to children and babes-in-arms flee the total destruction of their communities. 
Many are highly qualified professionals from every sector of society.

Across the Adriatic, it's a different story.
The young African men who fled military unrest and rural poverty at home, now wander through Italy as itinerant pedlars or sell tourist tat on street corners in Rome.  Some still sell a wide range of knocked-off fashion-label sunglasses and handbags, but the EU has endeavoured to enforce copyright protection, and the police frequently swoop on this pirate merchandise.

Afghan children studying at a makeshift school

In the port in Piraeus, Syrian and Afghan families are still arriving from the islands to await the inevitable transportation to a camp elsewhere. It’s life in limbo with no certainty of a secure and happy future anywhere.

As for the referendum, did I really want to remain as part of this cruel and unprincipled “European Union?” Yes: I did. 

I wanted Britain to get to the heart of the matter and work with our neighbours to build a better Europe. When the dust has settled, and the leaders start to talk to each other like adults, I hope that we can put selfish nationalism to one side. 

We must determine how we can best help each other to create something worthy of our tapestry of historical heritage.

Immigration and Assimilation

African migrants crossing the Mediterranean

I watched a news video made by MSF (Doctors without Borders) this afternoon. It showed a large inflatable boat being intercepted by the MSF rescue ship and the passengers being transferred and taken ashore. Every one of the passengers was a young African man, probably in his twenties. They didn’t look travel-weary, or stressed out by the destruction of their home towns, villages and city districts; these migrants looked like nervous young men courageously seeking their fortune and a better life. I can empathise with rural Europeans who might find these arrivals intimidating.

Perhaps they were coming from the trouble-spots of Southern Sudan, Eritrea or Nigeria. They had certainly experienced a frightening journey, - but they were a complete contrast to the Syrian families in Athens. 

Refugees in Victoria Square on a wintry March morning

All around Athens, you meet displaced people from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. 

There are well-dressed children, young teenagers, babes in arms, pregnant mothers and anxious fathers. Parents with pushchairs, children on tricycles.

Smartly-dressed young mums at Piraeus

 They are all confused and bewildered by the complexities of seeking asylum in Europe. Many are professionals; all just want to get started on building a new life, -  especially for the sake of their children’s education and future.  

Most would return to their beloved homeland if they could, but their homes, towns, villages and cities have been destroyed: flattened: reduced to rubble.

It is one thing to absorb whole family units into European society; it is a very different matter to integrate hundreds of single young men from rural Africa. 

Industrialised countries faced a similar scenario a hundred years ago, when young men (and women) came from the country into the cities to seek their fortunes, believing - in the words always attributed to Dick Whittington - that the streets of London were paved with gold. They had diplomas and certified qualifications, and the cities needed their skills

This was when the YMCA and YWCA flourished, offering safe accommodation and respectable social activities to young men and women who left home for the first time to migrate to the cities and advance their career all over Britain. This was how my own father was able to be an economic migrant from Hull to London, furthering his career in advertising and initially lodging at the YMCA on Tottenham Court Road.

But what skill-set do these young men from Africa bring to the British economy? More importantly, how many of them have long-term plans to become British citizens, as compared to how many are making money for family back home, to whom they plan to return after a few years? Not that there's anything wrong with doing that in order to accumulate a nest egg: - there are hundreds of British expats doing precisely that in the Gulf and in Asia-Pacific.

My culture teaches me to reach out and help the dispossessed, the poor, the homeless, the refugees and, if I should so choose, it teaches me that I can seek to better my life by migrating across the country, or across the world. My children have had those options and made those choices.

My culture also teaches that this option should be available to anyone in any part of the globe, a right that is enshrined in the United Nations Charter.

The people who made the decision, won't have to live with it!

The EU referendum has little to do with my last remaining years on this planet and everything to do with the world of our children and grandchildren, nephews, and nieces. 

Their options have been decimated by the selfishness, short-sightedness  and ignorance of their parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts who have now blocked the young generation’s European opportunities with their “LEAVE” votes in the referendum.

The verdict at Glastonbury.

We don’t own the world we live in; we are its custodians, and in time will hand it on to the next generation. 

Some of us have failed future generations by voting LEAVE; some of us are bitterly disappointed by a result that betrays our grandchildren.

We now have to make it all work, and maximise the value of their inheritance. 
But it's not about money, jobs, and opportunities, it's about the ethics that we teach and the ethics that we demonstrate in the way we treat the planet and all its inhabitants. 

Scavengers and Scroungers

Someone's "Home Sweet Home"

The apartment building in the next street has basement rooms. It’s not entirely below ground: I suppose the basement floor level is about 4 feet below the pavement, with steps leading down from the street. There are iron bars set into the wall at street level, which allow light in, but it is unglazed and has a makeshift curtain of an old piece of faded fabric which keeps out some of the dust and fumes churned up by the traffic. If I peep in as I pass, I can see a clutter of oddments of furniture, with mismatched cushions and a small table lamp with a feeble, low-wattage bulb that gives out yellow light. Sometimes an old woman is sitting on lightweight sun-bed, such as one might take camping or to the beach, and there is an old couch with sunken cushions, that probably serves as her husband’s bed at night. It is very dim and reminiscent of the room-set in a museum, displaying “how poor people used to live.”

Except that there would have been no flickering old television, no gaudy nylon and polyester, and no shaggy rug with the pile caked into odd lumps. But how could one keep clean a room that is level with the gutters of a dirty, dusty street? There are three similar adjacent facades, but those gratings are shuttered, the doors are boarded and there is no sign that these basement rooms have been occupied in at least the past decade or more.

 

Throughout this part of Athens, there are big galvanised wheely-bins for refuse, parked at 100-yard intervals along the roadside, with an occasional blue bin which is theoretically for recyclables. 

In practice, I suspect that anything that ends up in any bin goes to landfill while anything that could be recycled is scrounged, hoarded and sold to scrap merchants by an army of bin-divers. There is an extremely untidy protocol about garbage in Athens. 

It seems that people only put into the bin things that could have no value to those who make a living by recycling. The area of road and pavement around the bin is piled high on a daily basis with furniture, carpets, curtains, clothing and bags of plastic bottles: anything that might fetch a few euros or a few cents. 

Yesterday, a man was cross-legged on the pavement, assiduously unscrewing the hinges, handles, and locks from a discarded internal door, to sell as scrap metal, while a woman was sorting through a heap of clothes and putting children’s items to one side. Further down the street, a man with a Vespa 3-wheeled pick-up was roping down a stack of flattened cardboard cartons that towered high over me as I passed. These would go to the mill to be pulped and – inevitably – remanufactured into more cardboard cartons.

Everything is filthy. The pavements are cracked and the kerbs are uneven. By the pick-up point near the Metro station, the gutters overflow with cigarette butts emptied out from car ash-trays by drivers, while they wait to pick up partners coming home from work downtown. In a side street you can come across the empty shell of a once-magnificent, fin-de-siècle  town-house. That’s depressing, but even more so is the empty shell of a brand-new hotel nearby, that has never opened.

Some streets remind me of Indian cities like Bangalore, or Cochin, where investment has poured into gleaming new developments, but no one has thought to make provision for a maintenance budget. For the first months, the marble gleams and the chromium shines, then the dust and grime gradually take over, and the developer’s dream quickly loses its sparkle. 

Athens Metro below ground

That’s how it is in the Athens Metro. The stations and rolling stock of line 2 are spotless, but as you come up to street level you see the grime on the stairs, the escalators, and the lifts. How tragic to build a new Metro line where every single station is totally wheelchair accessible, and then to forget to budget for cleaning the lifts, so that the efficient glass cages are gradually becoming grubbily opaque.

Athens downtown - street level

When the Wednesday street market closes in late afternoon, the scavengers keep a few yards ahead of the bin-men. There are plenty of oranges, onions and potatoes to be scrounged from the gutters, and even the occasional tray of peaches or tomatoes; but who are these people? 

There is a family of Syrian refugees, the children scampering up and down the pavement, enjoying the game of collecting unsold free food. Meanwhile, the expressions on the parents’ faces show their dismay at the shame of being reduced to this. Father wears quality clothes and looks professional; when will he be employed? They seem to be wondering how long it will be before they can get back to living a normal life.

The lady from the basement apartment – if one can use such grandiloquent language for an urban hovel – goes home with a magnificent cauliflower and a bag of carrots. An irritated horn toots; it is a gleaming Mercedes Sports that impatiently nudges the woman and the refugees out of the way.

Cheek-by-jowl is the story of life in Athens. There are the middle-class ladies out shopping with their friends, who see their world covered in grime and un-cared-for, and there are the homeless refugees who squat under the trees in Victoria Square by day and go back to the tents on the tarmac somewhere to sleep at night. We used to bring them a hot meal every evening, but the police stopped that six weeks ago. They never gave any reason, but we suspect that the municipality was desperate to prevent the situation becoming normalised.

The fortunate ones stay at the Plaza, courtesy of an Anarchist group

The fortunate few are in the Plaza Hotel, which has been commandeered by the anarchists, and is fast developing as a self-governing community. There is plenty of food, education and playgroups, language classes and, yesterday,  even a concert of traditional Persian music.

But there is limbo. Nobody knows how long this will continue, and nobody knows how it will end. There are tens of thousands of people in search of a better life, while the EU fails miserably to offer any kind of solution. And still they arrive; - or fail to arrive; - and drown.

In Britain, UKIP displays a huge poster of an army of tough young men of Middle-Eastern and African origin, marching menacingly onwards. In Greece, I see whole families with women and children, who have lost their homes and their entire community has been flattened. . . and the world looks the other way. 

Does anyone have the courage to ask WWJD? I’m afraid the religion of the world today is selfish consumerism. That is what the governments encourage and - worse - that is what we teach our children.

I have written before that I am ashamed of my government. By contrast, I am proud of my people. There are so many twenty-somethings who have put their lives on hold while they come to Greece and try to help solve the problem. Many are from UK and Northern Europe, but they come from all around the world. Many who don’t come in person raise large sums of money.

One amazing woman with whom I have worked a little here in Athens posted this on Facebook. It explains the attitude and the frustration:

Thessaloniki airport. 

I'm sure I'm not the first, and won't be the last, to sit here and seriously consider my life decisions that got me here, and that are pulling me away.

I've helped start up and been coordinating a project getting food to 10,000 refugees a day. People looking for safety and ending up in disused, falling down warehouses, being given appalling food from the military, with no hope of the situation improving soon.

It's going to take years to relocate the 50,000 refugees in Greece. What can follow this? How can you do anything but more of the same once you've been here, seen it, and been a real part in making it a bit better?

Every new “problem” is seen as a challenge and an opportunity. When Samos hospital was running out of syringes last week, the message went out on Facebook, and someone, somewhere air-freighted boxes of syringes that arrived the next day. That is one tiny example of the attitude and achievements of an amazing army of young people who are passionate about putting things right.

So, please, next time you see someone collecting for Oxfam, or Doctors without Borders (MSF) or UNICEF, don’t reach for your small change; reach for your wallet.