South Africans visit India
Jockin went to Cambodia
A team from the City Net was here
Nepal Exchange
South Africans visit India
Derek Hanekon and his wife Trish, both who have held public office and as strong support of the SDI network and the South African Homeless people's federation. They have had a long standing invitation to come back to Bombay and reflect with all of us what has happened in the last few years since Derek Hanekon came as part of a delegation with the South African exchange. (for information about that visit ask us for a report which we can email you). Derek is now the MP for the ANC. And Joel Bolnick accompanied both of them into Bombay. Derek is on the Management Committee of People's Dialogue.
There was much to look for ?. It was good for him to see that so much had changed and progressed and many projects have moved on. He said on several occasions that for him the Federation was something to be reckoned with, especially in the South African context. It is like a parallel political process, which gathers those who are often marginalised by the mainstream party political process, and is able to go into such depths in organising the poor communities. And he sees it as an investment which would be of contribution to the communities of the poor and for the South African state as well. .
Joel was also involved in introducing Derek to a lot of things we were doing in SPARC. They visited a lot of our sites - The Kanjurmarg site and spoke to the women on the site, the Toilet project at Chikkalwadi with Mahila Milan. Each of these site visits was very special and at every visit there was something that came out of it. For example the Chikklwadi Toilets completely fascinated him. Blew his mind out. He immediately looked at a situation where in South Africa they built a lot of places like this - that were high profile, that were centres where the community met and at the same time it provided a facility like the toilets or whatever the community required. He kept saying, "Why can't we do this in South Africa? We can replicate the same thing." That it was a fantastic idea, both for income generation and employment generation and to create this business of community spaces inside poor communities which in the South African context is so rare because everything is individually placed.
My impression is that they were very impressed with their conversations with the women's groups in KanjurMarg. They spoke about savings and credit at length and they were able to see the connection between savings and resettlement and how the savings were in fact now coming to use to the families who had been resettled. They were also able to see the systems of resettlement that have been put into place and which we can now scale up in large numbers. So our own confidence and our strength of being able to say yes to the government demands comes out of the KanjurMarg experience, where we made our beginning few mistakes and where there were a few hiccups.
The third very significant meeting he had was with Mahila Milan. And I was present at that meeting and it was a meeting that actually moved all of us. And after 16 years of being in SPARC I would think that I wouldn't get affected by Mahila Milan stories for the nth time, but they did make a difference because I think all of us were talking to each other and telling our stories to each other. About how we got into this process and what our histories were and what brought us into the movement. All the women talked about their migration histories. And they were very real, they were very human and they touched something inside everybody in the group. So there was an energy around that discussion which was not like a normal interview where you tell your story. But it was something that all of us were sharing and it was like opening a private part of our lives to each other.
While Derek was here we fixed a visit with the Chief Secretary of the government of Maharashtra, and to that meeting we invited other senior government officials. And that was a very interesting meeting because Billy Corbett acting head for the division of UNCHS for secure tenure was also there with his team and he spoke of the Land Tenure issue that the UNCHS is now trying to promote. And he put forth the idea of launching a campaign on land tenure in Mumbai next month. The Chief Secretary got quite excited about the whole idea because he seemed to have a history of where he had done things in Nagpur and Hyderabad and said that he had supported slum dwellers to free housing and shelter. And I feel that if we are able to put a proposal where he sees scope for the rest of the State, there's a good chance we can set something off. Somsook Boonyabancha, the Director for UDCO, and the secretary of ACHR based in Bangkok Thailand, was there and she spoke about UCDO and this whole fund that is available in Thailand that is available for poor communities to construct and build and take loans for structure and other things and he got very excited about this loan fund. 
Jockin went to Cambodia
And he had a very lovely story to talk about. There were ten thousand people and this huge inauguration of the chom nom's community where the Prime Minister visited. And he gave a wonderful speech and at the end of the morning session he allocated some 2 million reals every month for the urban poor Fund. Something like that for the next year and also very strongly suggested that we should search for vacant land and work towards relocation. And he acted on it the same day. He signed the papers and everybody was very impressed with it. And he himself got very excited seeing all the people there. It seems He just took off, he was in his element. Took off his suit, shirt, he went back to being a comrade.
What Jockin and Somsook have done now - they have moved and reshuffled some of the people inside UPDF. And they are trying to look at how they can have a structure with the right people in it who actually run UPDF and separately make sure that SAB doesn't lose it's identity with UPDF.
We are planning for a visit to Cambodia next week. I was there last month and I spent quite a while, maybe a week or so, by myself. And that was very good, because I spent a lot of time with the different women's and the savings groups in different Khans and was able to look at all the missing links which needed to be put into place, which helped them to get little more grounded. And I see that as my role in Cambodia and I would be going to follow up what I did this month in the coming month. Plus there is an UPDF meeting that is planned in the coming month. 14th and 15th of May 2000.
A team from the City Net was here.
Bernadia with a Japanese gentleman and a translator. They had some interviews to do to look at the urban poverty situation in Mumbai. We had a lot of discussion with them on what we can do between Nepal and India and the possibility for them to fund the Bombay Nepal exchanges through TCDC.
Nepal Exchange
Jockin and Mahila Milan all went to Nepal last month. Shehnaz and Shakoor and two three others are going to Nepal to strengthen both the savings groups and talk to the Municipality of Kathmandu.