VISITING THE PATELS
In February Todd, Susie and I spent a week in Virampur, Gujurat, India at the Sarvodaya Ashram founded and directed by Hasmukh Patel. In 1984 I took a group of Warren Wilson students to visit the Sarvodaya Shramadana movement in Sri Lanka directed by A.T. Ariyaratne, a private school teacher who became a village organizer. He founded a nation wide program to help Sri Lankan villagers to develope their own communities by working together to build a road or a school instead of waiting for the government to do it. The process of working together helped resolve some of the communal tensions between rich and poor in the village. The aim of Sarvodaya was to make it possible for Sri Lankan villagers to live a Buddhist life of simplicity, decently, in simple housing, living in harmony with adequate education and health care. Sri Lanka was at that time a socialist country in the process of changing to being a capitalist country that came to depend on tourism and low cost clothing manufacturing, a process that resulted last year in Sri Lanka’s debts caused by large development projects and corruption to force the country to default on its debts, causing a financial crisis and a small scale revolution.
At the time in 1984 there was a growing civil war between the Hindu Tamils who lived in Jaffna and northern Sri Lanka and the Buddhist Sinhalese majority who lived in the rest of the country. So for the next trip in 1986 I wanted to find a place in India we could visit if the growing violence happened to make Sri Lanka unsafe. A person I met at a meeting, Marty Tillman of the Lisle Foundation who had brought groups to India said that I should contact Hasmukh Patel of the Gandhi Peace Foundation. I discovered that Hasmukh was going to visit the USA with a Gandhian group in the summer of 1986 and was even coming through Western North Carolina. So I arranged to meet him and spent a day with him here in the mountains. He agreed to help host our Warren Wilson student groups with Gandhian groups he was connected with in India.
In 1986 our student group visited both Sri Lanka and India and continued to visit both countries, sometimes for two months, sometimes for four months, every other year until 2004. Hasmukh was so patient with our student groups and provided us wonderful Gandhian experiences and home stays.
We became good friend and gradually I came to know his brother Jitubhai and his family along with his wife Manda and her extended family. I also got to know a little about the Gujurati business and medical community who are all good business people and professional people, mainly doctors who have emigrated to San Francisco, New York and now Johnson City, Tennessee where Hasmukh’s son, Mihir is a doctor and hospital administrator. So what started out to be learning about Sri Lankan and Indian villages now has become an education in how successful Indian professional succeed all over the world.
(To be continued)
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 