Timbaktu - In the lap of mother Nature

A view of Timbaktu

Timbaktu, an NGO located at a distance of 50Km from Anantpur and later this place itself became popular with the name as Timbaktu. This organisation mainly works on activities such as providing basic education to children from surrounding villages, mobilizing farmers to take up organic farming, creating women groups to name a few. All the activities reflect the deep holistic vision of the group and the fundamental belief that people have the strength and ability to address their problems and live in harmony collectively without entirely depending on an external agency like government for creating social order. More often than not the social order proclaimed to be created by such external agencies (like government)lack holistic vision and have meagre people participation. In Timbaktu Badi (Badi means school), the education is provided to children from standard 1 to standard 10 and the children after completing their tenth standard were sent to colleges in Anantapur district depending on the kind of studies they want to go for. Here all the students who are below tenth standard have both boarding and lodging facilities. The students are being taught in the classrooms where they have opportunity of learning the education while enjoying the nature as if it is in case of gurukulas in the olden days. The classrooms are constructed in such a way that they are at different places and the students are being taught at different locations everytime depending on the nature and the type of learning activity or topic. One such type of classroom is like an amphitheatre where they have a blackboard on one of the wall and a stage like environment. The children are being taught in creative methods and the teachers are also creating methods so that the children can learn practically even the minute detail. There are almost 70 children from 350 villages who are in Timbaktu Badi. There are 2 kitchens and the students, teachers and the staff members all of them have their food in any of the kitchen. Nearly 100 persons can have their food in the kitchen at a single time. The food is cooked mostly using firewood and the mud kiln is made in such a way that smoke goes out of the exhaust pipe. Few Timbaktu members also stay in the houses provided there. All the houses have roof made from locally available wood from inside and on the outside the roof is covered with a special type of grass found in Timbaktu lands, which makes the house very cool. You can just feel as if u are living in a house with an AC, so it is that much cool and fresh air circulating inside the house. Anantapur area even though very dry, has very good wind flow and these houses are built to take advantage of the local geographic conditions. The facilities do not have any electricity coming from the electricity board, instead they use electricity generated from the solar energy which is useful for the minimum lighting during nights, running communication equipment, laptops and also one small water pump. Most of the area is covered with a lot of trees so there is a fresh breeze surrounding everywhere in the place. They have a organically grown kitchen garden where few fruits and vegetables are grown. Since the land in Timbaktu premises doesn't have enough ground water it cannot support any farming. The drip irrigation system is used for watering the plants. Brinjal, beans, mirchi, bottle guard, bitter gourd, tomato , custard apple, papaya, gongura are the vegetables and fruits grown. There are few hens and a peacock which came there on its own and living there. He is called Sundarayya (man of beauty). One of the most amazing thing is Sundarayya, dancing every morning and evening exactly at 5:00 clock. Even we people also do not know the time so exactly by seeing the climate outside. It widens its feathers and dances so beautifully. Sundarayya seems to have developed friendship with the hens and he entertains and plays with the hens. He expresses his joy to the hens by way of opening his feathers and dancing everyday. He moves along with the hens in a desperate attempt to impress the hens. There are also large number of snakes around the area as the area has wilderness. Dinesh, another member of Timbaktu has a natural love and instinct for snakes. He can sense their presence, catch them, live with them - Amazing skill that he got very naturally. If one goes on trekking the nearby hills surrounding Timbaktu there are even bears and foxes. Subba, who is living in Timbaktu for past 14 years says, it is actually much easier and peaceful to live in the vicinity of wild animals than it is thought. The snakes for example bite people in villages as they cannot escape. The villages do not have wilderness preserved and hence the snakes cannot escape easily. Whereas in Timbaktu the snakes are occasionally seen but they never interfere with human life. Snakes need very less food and prefer sleeping most of the time. They are very peaceful beings, infact Subba refers to them as meditators. Some of us who visited Timbaktu that day wanted to invest in organic farming. We thought it is one easy way to take part in Timbaktu's activites. Another one expressed interest in forming an informal network in hyderabad to collectively buy Timbaktu products. We want to visit Timbaktu again for atleast a week and learn from the children in Timbaktu Badi and ofcourse rest in the lap of mother Nature. So wonderful and peaceful is Timbaktu !