This summer, I wanted to engage in community service in Malegaon because I wanted to go back to my great grandparents’ hometown, and connect with the community I come from in a meaningful way. The place was just as I had remembered it — a few degrees hotter though. The classrooms with just one ceiling fan circulating air in a poorly ventilated room crammed with 30 students covered with a tin roof that heated the room even more mid-day.
This experience did open my eyes to the impact of climate change on the most marginalized and vulnerable communities — there’s simply so many people in the world that are defenseless against the devastating weather events it drives. As I had said when I was applying, attempting to paint roofs to reduce indoor ambient temperatures while it may reduce indoor temperatures for the time being, this is curing a symptom not a cause. It’s a band-aid to alleviate the pain from a deep wound we’ve inflicted on our environment.
I come back from this project with a somber realization — Malegaon isn’t equipped to deal with climate change. Despite painting all the tin, I realized that sometimes the poor ventilation indoors did more to trap heat than painting the tin could realistically alleviate. Perhaps my biggest lesson with this project has been that sometimes the measures we take don’t pan out to be as impactful as we anticipated, but we must try nonetheless. We spent countless hours in the day’s heat to paint, sometimes our progress was impeded by the rain. Sometimes we painted through nightfall to avoid the heat.
There were ambient cultural norms that required me to cover myself head to toe in clothing with the exception of my face and hands which made the heat more difficult to bear but simultaneously gave me just a hint of the plight of women in this region, especially those that spend all day indoors. We did conclude the project successfully, but I think this project was a baby’s footstep in the direction of climate change adaptation for Malegaon.
The region of Malegaon I was working in is a majority muslim area, as a result you will find that there are no women pictured (including me) since it is culturally unacceptable in the strain of Islam practiced here to photograph women (even when covered head to toe in clothing). I have tried my best to include those that do not reveal identities of people or show their faces directly since people in this community are extremely sensitive to being pictured.