By Nate Jones
Staff Writer


Caitie Whelan, a 25-year-old South Portland native led a fairly normal life up until 2002. She did exactly what was expected of her: she graduated from Portland’s Waynflete School and was accepted at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., where she enrolled in classes for a full academic year.
Still, something was missing.
“Both of my parents had been adamant about me having the best education possible,” Whelan said. “I didn’t really know what I was doing [at Sarah Lawrence]. I realized I had a lot of learning to do, but it wasn’t happening at a college campus.”
While most people would appreciate having the same opportunities growing up as Whelan, she said she felt she had yet to earn the rewards of her own life which had largely “been given to [her] on a silver platter.”
In 2003 Whelan took a break from college and began what she called “re-learning the world.” In addition to studying at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland, Whelan spent three months volunteering at a non profit sustainable farm in Italy. It was there, in the middle of a sunflower field in the Italian countryside, that a 20-year-old Whelan was struck with an epiphany. She said she suddenly realized she needed to do something big with her life, only she didn’t know what, or how.
“I felt like I had this wasted potential sitting inside of me,” she said.
She returned to the U.S. determined to answer her calling.
“I was 100 percent positive I was going to do theater,” she said. “I was going to go to Broadway; I was going to be a movie star, I was going to have it all.”
In the summer of 2004, Whelan found herself waitressing at The Good Table in Cape Elizabeth and Barbara’s Kitchen and Café in South Portland, with “fewer and fewer doors opening.” Then she met Karen Lukas, the executive director of the Folk Arts Rajasthan (FAR), a non-profit group with branches in New York and the state of Rajasthan, India, focused on preserving traditional Rajasthani music, art and culture.
Desperate to realize her place in the world, Whelan agreed to volunteer as Lukas’ assistant to help manage FAR’s educational, fair trade employment and international outreach programs.
As part of her new position, Whelan visited Rajasthan, India, alongside Lukas and other FAR members.
“I had absolutely no interest in going to India,” Whelan recalled. “The food is too spicy and it’s too far away. I wanted to go to Europe, not India!”
Whelan said being suddenly engrossed in the Indian culture “was like being hit by a bus” as she devoted herself to the FAR programs that would lay the foundation for her own projects to preserve and archive Rajasthani traditional music.
“Women get up every morning, put two pots on their heads and go fill them with water, and that’s all they are allowed to do.” she said. “All of the things I had taken for [granted] didn’t exist there.”
Rajasthani inhabitants called the Merasi, or “Untouchables,” are considered the lowest in India’s social caste system. Rajasthan, being one of the most conservative Indian states, denies the Merasi the right to obtain an education, enroll in health care programs or elect a political representative.
“Women will go to a market and people gravitate away from them since nobody wants to touch them,” Whelan said. “They can’t read the signs because they were never taught how to read and write. It was shocking.”
Finally Whelan had found a cause she could devote herself to.
“I thought ‘Well, I can sit around and feel bad or I can pull myself together and figure out how to make it better,’” she said.
Determined to learn more about the Merasi people so she could help them overcome the social and educational policies aligned against them, Whelan returned to the U.S. and enrolled in anthropology courses at Brown University in Providence, R.I.
“I needed to raise awareness. I needed to learn everything I could about what was going on in the world. I needed to learn Hindu!” she said.
Returning to the U.S. with a mission was refreshing for Whelan, who said she was amazed at the difference in “life before India and life after.”
“How do you live a normal life after you’ve seen what’s out there? How do you function?” she asked. “How do you create a lifestyle that brings the best of the two together?”
Whelan and Lukas worked with Rajasthan native Sarwar Khan, the director of a local folk art society based in Rajasthan, to determine the best method to share and preserve the Merasi culture.
“I needed to work with them. It can’t be my idea – what change needs to be,” she said. “Sarwar Khan is an incredible story in himself; having no education he taught himself five different languages.”
It took Whelan and Lukas nearly a year and a half to coordinate the first ever Heart With Hope tour in 2005. After struggling with the “absolutely horrific” U.S. VISA application process, they were eventually able to visit and perform their music at a number of U.S. schools, museums, theaters and libraries with the Merasi, many of whom had never left their villages.
“It means the world to these kids. It’s easy to let the space you’re in funnel you down to focusing on just yourself,” Whelan said. “They realize we are all connected in ways that are artistic, economic and political. It’s absolutely explosive.”
After the tour, Whelan was awarded $4,000 from Brown University’s Royce fellowship that enabled her to tour different Merasi villages in the summer of 2006. At each village she recorded native songs to be added into a musical archive used as a teaching tool to preserve the Merasi culture.
“I recorded their oldest songs, some over 1,200 years old,” she said. “We need to preserve and share nearly 37 generations of an unbroken musical legacy.”
In interacting with the Merasi people, Whelan said she discovered  their real needs, which were not necessarily to preserve the past, but to brighten the future.
“What started as a murmur built into a rumble,” she said. “We were listening to [the Merasi] and they said what we were doing was nice, but what they really needed was education.”
Whelan returned to Brown, where she raised $5,000 “banging on doors” and worked with educators to create a curriculum for Merasi people.
“I had no interest in starting a school whatsoever,” she said. “I knew nothing about education except that I had one, but I knew the best thing you can do is pay it forward.”
Whelan brought her best attempts to “completely reorganize the Indian educational system” to Khan, who offered valuable insight as to the differences between western educational programs and addressing the needs of Merasi children.
“They live in abject poverty,” Whelan said. “They do not have the time to sit around and discuss theories, they need to develop skills they can take away from a single lesson. Time is lost labor, which is literally lost money.”
It took Whelan and Khan two months to rewrite the curriculum focused on developing students who “keep one hand on the drum and the other on the pen.”
“We’re teaching them to read and write while preserving their musical heritage at the same time,” Whelan said.
Thirty children traveled to the Merasi school when it opened in June, 2007 with Khan as the only instructor. While the number of children was encouraging, Whelan said they eventually decided to enroll about half of them, as attending classes was dangerous for some who had to travel through unsafe areas without supervision.
“We can guarantee safe harbor while they’re at the school, but not coming and going,” she said. “If you can’t guarantee that, you’re just as liable.”
Today, three teachers and a soccer coach work with up to 15 children daily at the Merasi school. Whelan continues to raise money for the school in the U.S., including about $25,000 that enabled them to purchase the small building.
“For kids to be able to walk by a building, point at it and say, ‘That’s my school,’ is just huge,” she said.
Last winter, Whelan finished writing the “Merasi Schoolbook,” an instructional book used at the school to help students meet the same educational standards of students with access to formal classrooms.
“By sitting down for two hours a day, we can give these kids the same equivalent of education as any other,” she said.
Whelan is currently wrapping up the final few performances of the second Heart with Hope tour and said she hopes to visit Rajasthan again, although plans to enroll in a summer internship at the Office of International Development could delay her return for some time.
“It doesn’t do the Merasi any good to see Catie Whelan at the head of a classroom,” she said.
Whelan received a degree in anthropology from Brown in December, and continues to encourage her peers to “go out, see the world, contribute extensively and beautifully to it,” in a time when she said individuals are becoming more and more centralized.
“It’s important to understand you exist in a greater world,” she said. “Put yourself in positions where you’re totally uncomfortable; where you don’t know what is going on and you become the learner.”