Kakanji Nagar

..."The most striking features are the appalling drains. This hamlet is on the edge of a large village and all the waste water with all the rubbish flows from there and through Kakanji Nagar. Since toilets are nonexistent for most houses, the drains are used. The very sight of half a dozen such long drains is nauseating, but there is nothing these people can do about it – they are from the lowest of the low castes. The huts in which all the families try to survive are really beyond description. All of them are made entirely from coconut fronds stuck straight onto the earth. I said to myself that I could not stay for 24 hours in these conditions. The huts were mostly about 6’x6’ – no more, sometimes less. How a family of five or six crammed into them I have no idea. I went into one hut to visit a man who had badly broken his thigh. His wife and four little girls were there. She was cooking on an open wood fire and I could not stay inside for more than 5 minutes, the bitter smoke was too much. There was no water source for these 50 huts. There were no toilets – the children used the open drains – and the adults? There were no bathrooms – so where the adults bathed I cannot say. No kitchens. No electricity. No water nearby. Absolutely no facilities. But lots of lively and very friendly children, all in need of clothes and medical care and everything else that children should have." (Extract from RTU newsletter June 2009, words of Brother James)