Our new initiative for better understanding of village dynamics

Do you know how Indian villages work? What their challenges are? and how their residents and governing members solve them? To give you insights on such village dynamics, every week or fortnight henceforth thanks to our Staff Reporter Ms. Amutha David, we, i.e. Jairaj Gopalakrishnan and Prof. Shyama Ramani,  will summarize the essence of major happenings in Kameswaram village. Read our first edition – to make your make your own discoveries!

Amutha Madam’s daughter Angel wins prize for FIN’s vision of a clean village!

To celebrate India’s Independence day, on August 15th, an essay competition was held in  Saint Sebastian School in Kameswarm. Here, students were asked to write about their Vision for Kameswaram!

The competition was won by Angel David, the daughter of our staff member, Ms. Amudha David. “Madam” Amutha explained to us, “I was practising all the time at home to speak in public about the FIN vision for Kameswaram – whereby all had access to safe sanitation, clean water, with waste segregation at source, recycling of waste, with compost being made from bio-degradable waste etc. I never imagined that all this was also going into my daughter’s head! Of course, she added more but it’s our vision which got the prize madam”. Who would have expected Amudha’s homework to have had such an impact on Angel’s outlook on the future!  

Thank you Amudha and Angel! Congratulations ! That tiffin box you got for a prize looks awesome!

This serves as the real proof of the potential of knowledge-sharing ! If we can practice what we preach, we can significantly influence our children’s contributions towards a valuable, sustainable and equitable future!

Meena Madam brings our Waste-to-Value Project to life!

At FIN, we enjoy challenging the people of Kameswaram to try and think of innovative ways to use different types of waste material to create value. When people usually think of waste, they have in mind something that needs to be thrown away – not the opposite!

But our staff in Kameswaram know better! They know that many things that are supposed to be “waste” can actually be reused, recycled or even upcycled! Thus, for them, waste is only an item that does not abide by these characteristics (From: The Green Academy Project Book by FIN) 

To this end, Meena Madam has come up with an innovative way to use waste cloth from tailoring shops. Now with the 10,000 masks we have got made from the tailors – they have become our friends. Going to these new friends, they took the waste pieces that would otherwise have gone to the Velankanni landfill and transformed them. How?  Led by Meena Madam, our staff ladies have stitched the waste cloth together in a woven pattern to create floor mats to be used at doorways or in bathrooms. Don’t they look nice?

 

Coronavirus Updates

  • Several families had been quarantined for 2 weeks, a label had been put on their house. They had been checked daily by the Health Department and none of them had required medical assistance.
  • Nobody has been hospitalized at Kameswaram and there have been no mortalities.
  • Now the objective is to keep the situation from worsening.