Year 2 - CraftHER Week 5
BANG BANG BANG. Erin and I awoke to Lorelai’s frantic rapping on our door at Akkara Homestay. My half-asleep self soon learnt that we were meant to evacuate all of our belongings in 45 minutes. Glancing out onto the patio, I immediately understood why. The river, a good 100m away from where we peacefully resided the night before, had crept up stealthily in the night, such that it was uneasily right outside our bedrooms.
As someone who grew up in Asia, Monsoon season wasn’t new to me. However gathering through the urgency of our usually calm supervisor, Asha, I understood the cliché that time wasn’t on our side.
Yet, as we rushed out on our sturdy, rusty-looking red truck, battling the rough waters of Kerala, I wasn’t prepared for what met my eyes. Or rather, the atmosphere I was engulfed in. Stillness. Quiet. Not in the eerie sense, but an incredible placidity. Suddenly, the urgency that had pushed our truck out of the gates of Akkara a few minutes ago mysteriously dissolved into a sense of calm.
Coming to the end of the programme, this strange and unsettling experience somehow conveniently allows me to tie up the fleeting thoughts, deeper reflections and comprehensive journal entries, altogether.
Two main themes stood out to me, which maybe contradict each other, or maybe don’t. Either way, I don’t think settling inconclusivity is the point, or even useful.
- Building for loss as a form of resilience
- Livelihoods built on homes
Again, back to my week’s reflection from Forest Post, I’ve learnt to accept that things don’t need to be packaged into neat boxes (while Minecraft is awesome, real life holds more beauty).
Building for Loss
Two instances where this theme of building for loss came from my interaction with Forest Post and Save the Loom. Firstly at Forest Post, Manju (founder) explained that houses were built from bamboo and mud, and must be replaced about every two years. This creates a form of resilience: people prepare for and accept loss, including events outside their control. Secondly at Save the Loom, all of us girls were shocked by the description of the aftermath of the 2018 Kerala floods. One can’t even begin to imagine the loss of everything being taken away, in an instant. Yet when Ramesh (founder) describes his first interactions with the households, again, the same theme arises as when I sailed down the road-made-river: unruffled resilience.
I am hesitant to call it as such, and I fear I lack the vocabulary to adequately describe this ‘undisturbedness’. This is because I sense that calling a community resilient can sometimes make suffering sound more acceptable than it is. Yet whilst it ruined all their looms, the source of their income and livelihood, they weren’t weighed down with despair.
So perhaps, in some cases, it isn’t just building for loss, but acknowledging the limitations of their control and the non-permanence of nature, that can shape a mentality that accepts hardships - a different form of sustainability.
Livelihoods built on homes
Yet with the other three organisations that we worked with, this non-discriminatory event seemed to tell a different narrative. All of their core missions were to provide work that was flexible, not just in terms of time, but to work from home. Take one good look at our itinerary and you’d find ‘home’ as the most frequent word. Home-based tailoring, home-based weaving, home-based food production. So gazing again at the water-blocked homes gave me discomfort in thinking all their tools and materials, foundational to their livelihood, were washed away.
So what now? Should the people of Kerala build an expectation that things follow the course of nature, or should they build to resist nature?
Clearly these questions are so broad, and have to be contextual, but it is worth one dwelling on. In my reflection on ‘Our innate human desire to relentlessly control for happiness’, I discussed the need for us to flow with life and nature. But what if our livelihoods depends on it? Alas again, I am always challenged by new outlooks. I guess the only thing I can say for certain is the Socratic saying “the only thing I know is that I know nothing”. An unsatisfactory ending, but wholly captures my internal thoughts.
Please sign in
If you are a registered user on Laidlaw Scholars Network, please sign in
Maria, this is a beautifully written, and intellectually honest reflection. I am relieved that you, the group, and your supervisors were able to evacuate safely. Your opening captures both the urgency of the situation and the perhaps surprising reaction in the street.
I particularly appreciate your hesitation around the language of resilience. Communities are often praised for enduring repeated loss, but that praise can unintentionally make preventable suffering appear natural, acceptable, or even admirable. What looks like calm acceptance may represent cultural knowledge, preparation, solidarity, necessity, shock, or recognition that few alternatives are available. We should therefore be cautious about inferring people’s internal experience from their outward composure.
The idea of 'building for loss' is powerful. Designing with impermanence in mind may represent adaptation rather than defeat: using renewable materials, anticipating replacement, preserving knowledge, and avoiding the assumption that every structure must resist nature indefinitely. However, the need to rebuild repeatedly may also reflect constrained resources or inadequate public protection. The important question is not only whether people accept loss, but who bears the cost of that loss, who has meaningful alternatives, and what support is available afterwards.
Your second theme introduces a particularly important complication. Home-based work can offer flexibility, autonomy, and compatibility with caring responsibilities, but it can also concentrate risk. When the home is simultaneously a place of shelter, production, storage, and income, a single event can remove several forms of security at once. It may also transfer the costs and risks of providing a workplace from an organisation onto individual households, often onto women.
I would gently challenge the description of flooding as 'non-discriminatory'. The water itself may not choose whom it reaches, but disasters are rarely socially indiscriminate. Housing quality, location, income, insurance, mobility, caring responsibilities, political influence, and access to recovery funds all affect who is most exposed, who loses most, and who can rebuild. A shared hazard can therefore intensify existing inequalities.
Perhaps the choice is not simply between submitting to nature and resisting it. A third possibility is adaptive resilience: accepting that some disruption cannot be prevented while reducing vulnerability through safer siting, elevated or distributed storage, portable equipment, early-warning systems, collective resources, social protection, and recovery plans. Even then, responsibility should not be placed entirely upon individuals or communities; governments, organisations, and economic systems also shape which forms of adaptation are possible.
Your refusal to force these tensions into a neat conclusion is one of the reflection’s strengths. 'I know nothing' need not mean that nothing has been learned. You now know that resilience can be both an achievement and an imposed necessity, that flexibility can create new vulnerabilities, and that sustainability involves difficult questions about what should be preserved, adapted, surrendered, or protected.
An fabulous reflection. The leadership question I would carry forward is: How can leaders respect communities’ existing forms of resilience without using that resilience as an excuse to leave unjust risks unchanged?