Basant Soni and Dhansay Sori
On the 12th of October 2020 an awareness program on the wild and uncultivated food of the Kamar people was carried out with 12 children of the Kamar village of Kularighat, Mainpur block, Gariaband District, Chhattisgarh. The meeting was facilitated by UD fellows Basant Soni and Dhansay Sori with the help of resource person Janakram a Kamar village elder form Kularighat.
The children had been taken to their forest areas around their village in the previous year where they were shown different wild and uncultivated foods used by the Kamar people. Janakram asked the children which different wild foods did they know about and also checked if they still remembered the different wild foods they had come across during the wild food program in the previous year. The children shared that they know about many different wild foods which included wild tubers like Karu kanda, Peeth kanda, Dang kanda, Bhensdeti kanda, Marda kanda; fruits and flowers like Detu phal, bhelwa, amla, char, bel and mahua. They children also remembered what they had been taught about in the previous awareness program about how to use and methods of preparing and boiling tubers. The children then played a local game which involved dividing them into two teams and arranging a small pile of stones which had to be hit with a cloth ball.
The aim of these awareness programs is to ensure the continuation of the rich and diverse food systems of the Kamar people which have included the collection and consumption of a variety of wild and uncultivated foods. However, the younger generations are losing touch with traditional wild foods and the goal is to spread awareness and knowledge of wild foods, their benefits and collection, identification and processing methods among Kamar children so that they can take this tradition forward and insure continued health and nutritional security of the Kamar people.
The children expressed a keen desire to visit their forests again to find, identify and collect wild food. Janakram promised to take them to their forests during the next program and get them to identify and collect different kinds of wild food. Accordingly it was decided that the children would be taken to forest areas to learn more about wild food in the field.
Janakram emphasized the need to pass on and safeguard traditional knowledge of the wild foods of the Kamar people from generation to generation and urged the children to safeguard this knowledge and bring these wild foods into daily use. The village elder Janakram and the children were all very pleased with this awareness program and it was felt the if school teachers also take up such programs on a regular basis then all Kamar children would be aware of their wild foods and use them in their daily lives.
