Activities
Evening study centres
Children fare poorly compared to their counterparts in the plains in academics and other health and development indices. This problem is multifactorial due to inadequate teachers, poor access to schools due to the geographic terrain leading to under stimulated children and high dropout rates in schools. Adults in Jawadhi hills need help to fill out government forms, apply for jobs and so on due to poor literacy skills. Academic levels have further suffered due to the closure of schools for two years during covid as these children had no access to online classes. The parents of this children are all uneducated and this makes it more difficult for children in getting help with their studies. Hence, we run evening study programmes in the villages to assist children with their studies and to prevent the likelihood of children dropping out from school. Once children dropout of school they start experimenting things and most of the time they tend to spend time with the older boys who are already dropouts and are into many un wanted habits. Some even get married at an early age as there is a social sanction. Thus, it starts a vicious circle of problems in the community such as school dropout, child labour, child marriage, maternal death, infant mortality, unsafe abortions, unemployment, poverty, suicides etc.
Boarding for Tribal Children
We stared the boarding to accommodate children from far away villages and especially the poor orphan and semi orphan children who would find it hard to go to school and end up being a school dropout. We currently house about 150 children in our boarding. This initiative was started looking at the need of the children by the Salesians who came later. The community-based work was very strong among the Salesians who worked in Jawadhi hills. Thus, new programmes such as this was begun to cater to the children of Jawadhi hills.
Youth groups
Don Bosco Tribal development society and CHAD,CMC under take many researches to know more and to plan our interventions in a scientific manner. The scientific researches brought to light the problems related to youth. The youth in Jawadhi hills are more vulnerable and they lack entertainment. This results in youth becoming addicts and anti-social. Hence, we started youth groups to engage the youth positively to play and to become an agent of change. At present we run six youth groups and a gym in Jamunamarathur. They are followed up on a regular basis by the social outreach staff. They have monthly review meetings and tri monthly programmes to motivate and to foster unity and bond.
Watershed Programme
Jawadhi hills is a hilly region with seasonal rains. The farmers here are subsistence farmers. The major cultivation is millets. The rain fall in Jawadhi hills is very scarce this makes the farmers to migrate to other states in search of work. Hence to provide livelihood option for the people we do watershed projects this helps the farmers to be engaged throughout the year. This initiative was started by Fr.Codello in the 70s. we still continue this work with the help of foreign doners. In the recent past we completed 145 open wells, 5 ponds and 1 lake.
Deaddiction Programme
The people of Jawadhi hills are hardworking people and they earn a lot of money when they go to other states for migrant labour. This income that they earn during the migration they spend it on drinks. The volume that they drink is also quite high thus it results in them becoming addicts. We have done several researches to study the prevalence and the study results are quit alarming. Hence to help the youth to mitigate this problem we started community-based deaddiction programme. Till date we have rehabilitated nearly 526 patients with the help of CMC, CHAD team. This is a community-based intervention. Soon we will also construct a Alcohol Rehabilitation centre in our campus with a 20 bed facility.
Model village programme
The collaboration with CMC, CHAD resulted in a model village programme. This programme targets the entire village. We try and fulfil the sustainable goals in that model village. We have been working on this programme for the past 10 years and we have seen tangible results in all the model villages we are working in.