From the diaries of a social worker

FROM THE DIARIES OF A SOCIAL WORKER

As published on knowyourstar.com
http://www.knowyourstar.com/sreepriya-menon/

07/10/2016

“Social Work? Acha samaaj seva!”

“No. It is a professional course!”

“But why does anyone need a degree to help people?”

“Because you need to know which people to help and how.”

I saw the power of labeling first in a slum in Malad, Mumbai. I labeled a person as a slum dweller and she labeled me as a social worker. I went there to help, she saw me in obvious discomfort in her house and gave me space to sit, by moving outside the door way and asking me to sit on the floor. She fed me juice by the time which my guilt was poking stones in my stomach for having the audacity to think of who is helping whom. My supervisor later told me, you took a step forward by accepting the invitation for the juice. Otherwise, she would have thought that you have purity-pollution issues based out of caste. Later due to our visits in the future, we were able to support a women’s SHG to take a bank loan together and buy some materials through which they could earn a livelihood. They were all women, young and old, but mothers of children with disability who had taken a stand to support and not abandon their children just because the world says he or she cannot achieve anything because of an illness or impairment to the body or mind. To this day I maintain they helped more than I could hope to help them.

LIVING AWAY FOR SOME REAL EDUCATION

My first experience in TISS or Tata Institute of Social Sciences was that of awe. The new found independence of being a woman in a city like Mumbai to study a subject that is usually not recommended to young folk because neither is it lucrative nor is it practical. I use these words very mindfully since my colleagues will either laugh in pride or in irritation. I came to this institute with the single conviction that I need to work in the area of mental health and psychology was too clinically detached from the social reality of my people of this country.

I started learning how to articulate what I believe and spell out clearly what I don’t believe in. Slowly without realizing it I became too comfortable in that space where disagreement and diversity is found, appreciated, and then taken for granted. This is what social work taught me about education. It never stops. I had a seventy year old professor who taught us about the importance of being in love in a law class she took for us. She told me the sheer weight of duty that is rested upon the top 1 per cent of the country’s educated employed youth who has the power to change the social fabric of India’s villages and cities. She taught me whose voice I ought to represent when I speak. She taught me to question every authority and to work with every person with humility and pragmatic cleverness.

The people I met in TISS had come from forests, slums, cities and mountain lands. They were India for me. How each of them spoke and about what they wanted to live and die for was different. Each of them has a dream and a temptation from the world regarding a well paying job, a supportive partner and comfortable life. But what TISS did to us was to question who is paying you at that job, whether your partner’s gender and orientation is something you’ve thought about and what exactly is comfortable about living if you don’t shake things up which need some shaking.

COLLECTIVE CULTURE

Education wasn’t meant to be a level playing field at TISS, but what made it so was the city we were educated in. A budding social worker needs to explore their interventions, explore their communication skills and do a thorough need assessment. Mumbai as a city is a complex field for a social worker. For someone who likes studying and observing people and their stories, Mumbai is like a library. So what works well in Mumbai?

Certain cities have a culture of collectivity where they resonate with each others’ troubles and miseries and celebrate their joys together too. I saw the miracle of community living nowhere else but inside the Mumbai locals. Children, vegetables, vessels, fish and heavy equipment like ladders and baskets and whatnot enter the ladies compartment in a neat line, occupy space, give out a few choicest of swear words, and exit similarly all in the span of say 2 and a half minutes or less. Come rain or terror attacks, fear of outsiders or disdain for one’s own species, help is extended like for one’s own. Pride takes a beating when you accept help, and then you are open to helping others as well because now you’ve seen how easily it can be done.

The first and foremost thing of a gifting culture I noticed was acceptability and normalization of help giving or in simple terms “how easily we accept the practicing of kind behavior by strangers”. Once it is accepted, it is noticed more often, acknowledged and acted upon with lesser hesitation.

What is it that makes this city’s collective culture friendlier to curious learners and newcomers? I believe that along with a person’s genuine concern and joy of being alive and freedom of being somewhere unquestioned, of being allowed to exist in connection with their fellow beings is what makes wonders happen. This is an environment built over generations through practice, and marketing of this city as a city of dreams. Similarly, more spaces can be built in such manner, if the concept of collective or community living is understood and celebrated for the joy that it is.

By the end of my first semester in TISS, I had an answer to why I am a professional social worker and not a charity worker or doing social service. The answer lies in the fact that one has to appreciate the nuances that social work as a multi - disciplinary subject has to offer to people’s lives. The systematic study of social issues such as caste, class, gender and race have a direct impact on how we conceptualise development in the social sector. That is the power of working at the grassroots with this perspective and that is how we see empowerment.