Volunteers from FSL India mostly from German are engaged with PRATHIBHE in its development work in the most underprivileged area in Mysore district.

The volunteers Mr. Thomas and Mrs. Miriam have joined PRATHBHE as volunteers under the arrangement of FSL India from 2016 August and they were here till mid of December 2016.

The volunteers were very anxious and had lots of dream and experimenting attitude with rural community in our working villages.

PRATHIBHE is primarily working for socio-economic, educational and environment consciousness and importance of them for the very existence of small, marginal and land community in the fringe of National forest Bandipur. The project location lies to south of Mysore at 70 kms distance.  Organization feels that the development of the community shall go in a micro-level approach to mitigate the long standing economic, education and social discrimination.  Our primary stake holders are being tribal communities who have been evacuated from the forest in the name of forest protection. These communities have lost their every day food coming from forest. Apart from the tribal community the other communities with whom we are associated for development are dalith and backward communities.  The project location is in the fringe of forest bound so the conflict between man and animal is always a common scenario in the project area.

The volunteers have interacted with me on how the development work is carried out, the objectives and approach method. They have been exposed to our project locations before they decide on what to work. I was impressed by their sharing about their country education, health, roads, environment, economy and social lives. Agriculture is done in a very systematic way in their country and their production is mainly for commercial purpose.

We have selected two small villages from our 20 project villages for their experience and learning and sharing about their culture and social lives with people. The villages selected are Mahadevanagara 100% of them are migrated from different places as small agricultural and land less families. Naganapura colony is an another village with tribal community belonging to soliga and bettakurubas. The distance between these tow villages is within 1 km distance. In these two villages we have formed women and men groups who will be directly accessible for any development work. We have supported 70 families by giving goats, chicks, fruit saplings, kitchen garden seeds and vermin compost production units. We have the volunteers to identify whether any impacts are created in these villages because of our program intervention and how they are able to change their economy in case of proper utilization of the program.

They have contacted all the families, try to discuss individually and collect data on the impacts created. They were very happy to meet the people, learn socio-cultural backgrounds of the families. Planned to develop two school kitchen garden in these two villages, planned to develop 100% sustaining mechanism to sustain vermin compost production, kitchen gardening, poultry and goat rearing. In Mahadevanagara they have put up their efforts to support on continuation of the vermin compost production.

They have been also exposed to other projects on finger millet value chain program focusing on the staple food crop production in 4 villages in the same location. They have also shown interest to participate in the community level meetings and interact with them to learn on how their economy, education and other family supporting issues. In KR.pet Mandya district we are working on social forestry program and natural resource management programs to improve soil moisture, water conservation and develop agro-forestry model to provide percolating economic source through social forestry.

The volunteers have shown greater interest and tried to do physical work and listen to soci-cultural background of our project locations through participating in the programs. PRATHIBHE has listened lots of issues from them about education systems and economy and the discipline they follow in their work culture and time management. Mrs. Puttathayamma community organizer, Miss  and Mr. Mallesh crop assistants and two volunteers from prathibhe have accompanied them during the field visits.