Kurichiyad

Continuing with our activities at the tribal colony at Kurichiyad, Wayanad, four of us Abu, Saju, Akhilesh and myself planned to visit the place.

We started from Kochi on the 8th January by train in the late night and reached Koyilandi by 4'O clock in the morning. Jithin's dad came to pick us from the railway station and took us his home in Balussery. We got ourself freshened up, had our breakfast from there and started our journey to Wayanad by Jithin's i10 by 7AM in the morning.

The journey was real good with mist covering all over the mountains, the road from Thamarassery Churam was real hectic though. We reached Chethalayam by 11AM and Kunjahammadikka (who is a social worker and a great human being with no political background and most important he expects nothing out of it) who arranges all our activities in the village, was all set ready with the permission from the Forest deparment to go to Kurichiyad and with the Jeep – the only means of transportation to the village deep inside the forest, 9KM from Chethalayam -.

We did not want to bring in any one who had a political nor religious flavour, to our activities at the tribal colony, we were indeed lucky to get Kunjahammadikka as our co ordinator for our activities. Our mission was to acertain that the colony really required our help and to find out what we can do to better their lives. The visit also helped us a lot to get a real feel of the lives of the villagers and we also met a number of good hearts in the village, we cold feel the innosance radiating of the simple village folks who wanted to provide all support for our activities.

The kids at the school did not have proper cloths and we felt the need for school uniforms for the kids, subesequently we collected uniform cloth requirements for the kids. We felt that a local tailor will be the best for stiching the uniforms for the kids, we located the nearest tailor had a chat with the tailor at the nearby village (Chethalayam) which is 9 kms from the colony who agreed to stich clothes for the kids at a reasonable rate, he committed to visit the school on a working day for taking measurement of the kids for uniform. We had taken with us some toys and story books for the kids . The kids were really thrilled seeing the football and cricket kit and started playing as soon as we distributed it to them. It was a pleasure to watch them playing with a football, may be the first time in their life!

We started gathering quotes from a number of shops in Kochi and the best quote was received from a wholesale dealer in Broadway. We then collected the goods from the shop and sent it to Kunjahammadikka. It look around a couple of weeks to get all the clothes switched and Ikka invited us to distribute them to the kids. By this time we managed to arrange 4 benches for the Ekadyapaka vidyalam in the village. We wanted to extend our hand to the elders at the tribal village, noticed that the villagers did not have proper oral hygine and felt a dental camp was good to educate them on oral hygine and also to provide them with some basic dental care.

We thought of sending some of our volunteers from KMCT Dental College (A group of house surgency students) who can conduct a Dental camp in there along with distributing the clothes and benches. But the medical camp wasn't that successful due to the village celebrating their Devi Pooja in the forest on the same day they visited the place, some of them managed to make it though. And our volunteers handed over the uniforms and benches to the available kids and the rest were handed over to the school teacher.