Despair, anger, hope. Like coloured bulbs on a string of decorative lights my emotions kept blinking off and on, registering various emotions, as I travelled and met people in the course of writing the three feature articles for the Care-WFS Fellowships, 2008.

No one can escape the unpredictability that flags off a journey to any point in Mizoram, and that unpredictability accompanied me and my fellow passengers as we set off from Aizwal in the Sumo we boarded for our various destinations in the south of Mizoram. The weather was cloudy and occasionally rainy, and we were all wondering if we would end up stuck on the road somewhere because of a landslide, or whether we would have to spend the whole night on the National Highway because of some accident. This is the general experience of ordinary road commuters in this part of the world, especially during the rainy season.

Every single one of my fellow travellers had a horror story about how he or she had spent restless hours waiting for the landslide to be cleared by the Border Roads Organisation (BRO) workers who are on permanent duty out there but have many landslides to attend to during the monsoon. So who's talking about four-laning the highways to speed up trade? Here is an example where the hinterland's links with the state capital and the rest of the country hang on the tenuous whims of nature.

Roads are supposed to be the catalyst for 'trade and development' and that's why the government pours money into surface transport projects. But one could not help thinking about the situation in Lunglei district, where four villages - Ralvawng, Chengpui, Zotui and Hawlawng - were linked to the district headquarters with a newly-built road under a World Bank road project in Mizoram. The local people got their road but they can hardly make use of it because they are too poor and have nothing to trade in.

The struggle for survival is desperate in rural Mizoram, as it is elsewhere in the periphery of the government's development initiatives. Government policies have hardly anything to do with the ground realities of life. An 80-year-old man complained that he had enrolled under a government scheme for the elderly. "The government policy is to ensure that every registered elder gets 100 kg of free rice in a year. You know, last year I got only 60 kg. Where do I go and complain? But I keep wondering where the rest of my share went," he said.

Where is the rest of the rice, was a big question in my mind; 40 kg multiplied by how many more registered elders? This has the makings of another one of those ubiquitous government scams. But where's the time to dig that one out? They all know that the National Employment Guarantee Scheme 'guarantees' them 100 days work in a year, whenever they want it. But no one got more than 10 days of work. Another NREGS scam?

The hardworking hill farmers keep fighting their daily battle against hunger, with the young working shoulder-to-shoulder with their elders in the jhum fields. They appear desperate but still under control. Yet somewhere in the green but barren hills I can sense the lurking anger of the dispossessed waiting to be unleashed.

But there is one group who always lives in hope: the Chin women -- Burmese refugees. Hope is lit up with their unending energy and courage, as they face an unfriendly reality. They hang on as they try to make the world understand that it should not stand by and watch the violence being perpetrated inside their homeland, the violence that had rendered them homeless in the first place. Here, truly, are women who are harbingers of change.