Meeting Subhashini
Extract from the Diary
by Elisabeth Ullmann
The village director collects us up from the airport. We drive along a coast road for about forty-five minutes until we reach the SOS Children's Village. The vegetation is rich and green; palm trees line the streets, there are colourful flowers and rock formations on the beaches. It is a wild and beautiful area. There is a large welcoming committee awaiting us. They paint red dots on our foreheads and waft scented smoke under our noses. The children present us with so many flowers that we cannot carry them all. We stroll through the village and are astounded by its beauty. There is so much greenery and the exotic plants strike us. The houses too, are wonderfully laid out and the village is expansive.
During a conversation with the SOS mothers I discover that many people from the neighbourhood are requesting them to pass on their knowledge through training and further-training courses. The village director says that all he can do at the moment is to invite the women to spend a few days in the village. He hopes that soon other opportunities might arise.
We leave for the market with Subhashini. The village director cannot believe that we want to walk and take public transport. As it turns out, he actually follows us secretly to make sure that nothing happens to us!
We go to the beach in the late afternoon. It is about a ten-minute walk from the village. There are Subhashini and her neighbour with their swarm of children. The children are all dressed in their Sunday-best, and we hope that it is only for today and for our sake. Luckily they seem to have a great time, despite the clothes.
The interview starts: Subhashini proves to be a passionate story-teller. We sit together for over four hours just for the first section of the interview. I ask myself, how we are ever going to fit everything in to the few days we have! But I am happy that it is going so well. Shubha is an exact and patient translator.
Dinner with the village director and his wife: the big surprise of the evening is a bottle of Indian white wine. It has been bought especially for us. Normally alcohol is hardly drunk in the village, and never by women. Then we are served at least twenty-seven different dishes. The choice of delicacies seems to be never-ending.
Fred starts the day at five in the morning by taking photographs in the family house. It is the normal time for the first revision hour. Shubha and I join in at five thirty. All the children are sitting on the floor and simultaneously reading from their different books and notebooks, at the top of their voices! Afterwards, we go for a walk to the hill behind the village with Subhashini and her neighbour. There we enjoy the wonderful view across the Bay of Bengal.
Subhashini's Story will be published here soon
All these mother's stories come from SOS Children's Village Hermann Gmeiner Academy. Copyright is reserved and no unauthorized use permitted. Use for non-commercial purposes may be requested. The interviews telling about the lives of some SOS Mothers form part of an interesting study on being a replacement Mother to children in need in SOS Children's communities worldwide.