Filmmaker Hassan Ansah visits
Life Education Center in Auroville
An account of Hassan’s first visit to LEC, Life Education Center in Auroville, a project he has been supporting from the distance since 2020.
Photos of LEC women by Hassan Ansah, August 2024
Since first reading the book, Integral Yoga by Sri Aurobindo in 2004, the concept and vision of Auroville has since remained indelibly apart of my psyche as to what the highest potential of human development can become. The possibilities, sometimes in the fore front of my consciousness, sometimes buried in the shadows of every day challenges of work, bills, politics and many other mundane concerns.
Throughout the years of working abroad in war torn areas and refugee camps as a development specialist with the United Nations , I still held on to that sense of wonder and possibility connected with Auroville. Eventually I was able to connect with AVI/ USA, which allowed me to partner and contribute with different projects in the community. I chose the Life Education Center which focuses on the empowerment of young women in the Auroville Bioregion.
Experience working in many developing countries has led me to witness and admire how empowered women become the backbone and essential incubus of any holistic functioning community. I was eventually put in touch with a lady named Devi Namasivayam, who is the current manager of the Life Education Center, known to all LEC. Our first over the phone conversation was shortly after the covid epidemic hit in 2019/20. Then I could sense the stress and uncertainty regarding the future of the center in Devi’s voice. Yet her courageous leadership and generous vision provided a steady helm during this storm.
August 2024: My first visit to the Life Education Center was a subtly transformative one. Meeting Devi in person for the first time, she had a focused and determined manner, yet was warm and engaging. As we set down in the very spacious and open center building, she explained the early origins of the LEC, which began in 1991 under a huge tree on the northwestern edge of Auroville, where the city merges with the surrounding villages. Many of the young women come from communities where education isn’t valued for daughters of the household. There was the inferred expectation that the majority of young ladies will marry and become housewives shortly after puberty.
The role that the Life Education Center plays is one on the razor’s edge: It tries to provide students with a value-oriented education that encourages them to perceive life in ways that they aren’t use to and to ensure that they build practical skills which give them a sense of confidence and independence in the outside world. On this day I observe some of the students working on a collective art therapy project which focuses on integrative learning experiences. In my humble opinion, this helps to create a window to the larger world, and a foundation to them self-actualize.
Thanks to the solid contacts given by AVI/USA, I was finally able to penetrate beneath the aloof veneer of Auroville for tourist, and experience the wide and profound seed of human unity planted in its core many years ago.