Ben & Gayle - Yearoutindia - Mannan tribe volunteering project

Kozhimala is the village up in the Western Ghat mountains in Kerala, south india, we're we spent 4 weeks living with the Mannan tribe. We we're volunteering with an NGO called Yearout India (YOI), who are a small organisation who are involved in projects in this area. The initiative that we were helping with was a sanitation project which has been running for the past couple of years. It relies on volunteers to fund and help build toilets for the mannan familes in kozhimala. There's about 100 families and most of them don't have a proper toilet, but now two more families do.

We we're staying in a house which was built by YOI for Sasi, a Mannan who made the organisation aware of some of the problems this community is facing.

Sasi's family looked after us and cooked for us everyday, cooking up salty fish fry and tapioca, much to Ben's delight!!!

It was a real insight into how difficult some people's lives are. These people have no running water, so they have to make several trips to a well each day and carry the water back to their homes in metal buckets on their heads. We tried it and it's really difficult, we got really good at spilling the conents all over us, much to the amusement of the tiny women who we're carrying two buckets on the heads with only one hand as support. They also don't have any electricity or gas, so the food they keep is limited.

It's a saddening contradiction that they live in such a beautiful area which is abundant in so many different fruits and vegetables, yet they are desperately poor.

The Mannan people used to live in the forest and we're moved out in the 70's by Indira Ghandi, the prime minister at th time. The used to live in the area which is now a wildlife reserve and some of them make a living by being tour guides around the reserve.

We spent a weekend doing some treks around the reserve and we're lucky enough to see loads of animals, we saw 3 wild elephants, boar, gaur, which are indian bison, and this cool bird, the Great Indian Hornbill, which makes a fantatstic noise with it's wings when it flies. We didn't see any tigers though, maybe if Ben had gone through with his threats of covertly attaching raw meat to me to attract them, we may have had better luck, fortunately we'll never know ...