Experience of Building communities

[Guest guest]

Dear FORUM,

Sub: Building management capacities of CBOs,

This is an account of how difficult it is to build community-based organizations

(CBOs). I can only recount, as an example, our struggle as homosexuals to

become part of mainstream society with dignity. From 1985 onwards many of us

self-identified homosexuals or same-sex loving men, realized that with large

families breaking up, rapid industrialization and urbanization and women's

emancipation, many of us would have no place in our society if we did not

organize in some way. That's how some of my friends and I started a newsletter

called 'Bombay Dost', which was a momentous event in giving a voice to an

hitherto invisible community. We were not even sure there was a community of

such homosexuals at all in India. But we were over-whelmed by the response of

over 800 letters a week at its peak in 1992/93.

It was unfortunate that the HIV epidemic came in at the same time. So not only

were we fighting stigma and discrimination but realized that soon we would die

in droves as was happening to whole communities of homosexuals in America. It

was my first visit to an International AIDS Conference at Montreal in 1989 that

frightened me out of my wits. I saw a desperate community fighting for its very

life; with over 80 per cent of the HIV infections happening among gay men in the

USA, hardly 8 per cent of the funding for HIV preventions was going to gay

groups. If that was the condition in the world's most visible and powerful gay

community, what chance did we men-having-sex-with-men (MSM) have in India where

we were not just invisible but totally scattered and unorganized.

Towards that end, I remember we started meetings in parks, hotels rooms, private

homes, small community halls from 1989 onwards. The birth of 'Bombay Dost', a

quarterly news magazine, elicited heart-breaking stories: lonely and scared men

and women not knowing where to turn for counseling, trapped in unhappy marriages

to innocent spouses who had no clue what was happening to them. Many men were

already infected by anal and oral STIs, most joined dysfunctional religious

groups or tried suicide or ridiculous cures to rid themselves of this unwanted

sexuality. It was tough: we started a message service where people would ask for

street counseling. We met our clients on railway platforms, near well-lit

landmarks so we were not set upon by goondas and police, we tried to talk of

condoms near public toilets only to be beaten up by cops and finally realized

that a newsletter would never solve a community's problems.

That's how in April 1994, Humsafar Trust was registered. Only three men were

willing to sign on the MOU filed with the Charity Commissioner at Bombay. Our

first job was to take the subscription list of Bombay Dost and contact 74 men

who we thought were peer leaders. In this I have to specially thank the

contribution made by Shivananda Khan, a British citizen of Indian descent, in

London, for partnering us in the first gay men's conference in India in December

1994. After that conference, five groups of homosexuals quickly formed all over

India. Just before that event, an activist lawyer Siddharth Gautam, brought out

the first 'situational report' on homosexuality in India. " Less Than Gay', is a

classic in its own right, still one of the best compiled and written reports on

the subject. He died soon after and is sorely missed.

Humsafar Trust was allotted a space in a municipal bazaar from where it still

functions. This decision was by two incredible progressive health officials of

the Bombay Municipal Corporation namely Dr.Alka Karande, the then Executive

Health Officer and her dynamic deputy Dr.Jairaj Thanekar, the pioneer who set up

Asha Prakalpa, the first civic effort to offer exclusive health services to

women in prostitution in Mumbai's red-light area of Kamathipura. We again bow

down our heads to these two who had also gone into Mumbai's very heartland of

teeming slums and immunized 99 per cent of the children against polio which was

a miracle in those days. We must mention the strong support and encouragement in

those early days from Dr. Prasada Rao and Dr. Alka Gogate who gave us our first

pilot project from the Mumbai District AIDS Control Society (MDACS).

Humsafar Trust today offers a wide array of community services. It got Mumbai's

first VCCTC within a community based organization, the first STI clinic

exclusively for homosexuals, transgendered and bisexual men, a modest library

used by a minimum of three research scholars every week, a drop-in-centre open

from noon to 8.30 P.M. on weekdays, help-lines for tele-counseling and rooms for

one-on-one counseling for sexually distressed people, a huge city-wide street

outreach program spread over 45 beats covering 155 sex sites in the Mumbai

Metropolitan Region (MMR) courtesy of MDACS who gave us the first pilot MSM

intervention in 1999, health camps at truck spots for transgendered sex workers,

the first special drop-in centers and clinics for male sex workers, especially

film Xtras and young males trying to make a living in Bollywood and the fashion

world, special outreach into virtual networks working through cyber space and

internet sex, condom distribution at sex parties and backroom sex, thanks to the

Avahan-Aaastha Project.

In many ways, we are proud that we have gone and 'discovered our own', we have

formed families and networks with hijra gharanas, we have proudly fought the

moral and culture policing groups in the streets over lesbian issues, we have

stopped TV shows when we were not heard by conservative stubborn homophobic

people, we have talked on college campus, had stalls to draw tattoos and make

friends with people who have learnt to appreciate that we too had a right to

live in dignity.

In fact last year alone, Humsafar's Outreach Workers (ORWs) have distributed

over nine lakh condoms in one-to-one outreach because we like to have daily

meetings with our clients to collect feedback and gossip of what's happening

where. We have done presentations in temples, and masjids, talking quietly to

both pundits on political platforms and with mullahs and imams in their masjids,

in that we too want to be blessed by God.

And the people have opened their hearts to us for, however bad they may think we

are, we are their sons, brothers, uncles, neighbours. We are everywhere and we

intend to be very proud and productive members of this great and ancient land

which has never persecuted homosexuals -- ever!! In other words, we will make

sure that through our community based organizations we will never let our people

be ashamed of us. During the floods last year in Mumbai, our Humsafar boys were

given a big pat on the back by the Municipal Health Service because we

distributed over 30,000 water purification tablets, got in the young and old for

health check-ups in Vakola, took sick people to hospitals and taught the

illiterate how to fill in their admission papers in civic hospitals. In fact,

Humsafar Trust's linkages with over five public hospitals, especially our

linkage with Sion Hospital in North-Central Mumbai is noted as a model

public-private initiative by UNICEF and has been documented as such. As hard

working citizens of this land we insist that we have a right to health like

every other citizen of this country and we shall strive to upgrade what the

Government has built up from scratch. And we urge you all; the young and old of

every caste, community and creed to do the same. For community based

organizations (CBOs) are the only way we can really work with the Government to

deliver. Nay CBOs are the very interface between the Community and the

Government. We are like the two hands that must come together and do the

namaskar for the world outside to know about the achievements of our people.

This effort of forming CBOs is now new at all. Chanakya refers to 'Shrenis " or

guilds of various kinds in Mauryan India of 300 BCE to 200 AD approximately. The

Arthashastra talks of various community-based groups who built dams, tanks,

roads, common pasture lands, community halls through joint efforts called

'visthi'. The Temple at Madurai talks of meetings of villages to mobilize taxes

to build tanks and roads. The Sanskrit word 'Sangrama " or battle actually means

a meeting of villages for 'San' is meeting and 'Grama' is Village. So, that

really meant an argument but then became battle for obvious reasons of

conflicting interests of water sharing mostly.

Ashok Row Kavi,

Humsafar Trust,

Mumbai Metro

E-mail: arowkavi@...