Finally at the primary schools

Last Tuesday I finally arrived at the first of the primary schools I plan to stay at. The schools were set up by my NGO as a response to the discimination that many Dalit children experience in rural government-run primary schools. I've been here for a week now, and it's been really nice. It’s a boarding school, and the students and most of the staff sleep in the school's classrooms. Thin, roll-up mattresses are piled up on one side of the rooms during the day, and then taken out at night. People sleep right on the floor just like that, with just the thin mattress as padding. There are a few cots, one of which I've been putting my mattress thing on top of and sleeping on. The first night I slept in one of the classrooms on the floor, along with a teacher and about 10 students. The bell is first rung at 6 AM, and then students start to study and do homework for an hour or so. The light got turned on, and I had a hard time staying asleep, and also being on the stone floor wasn't the most comfortable. So since then I've slept in the school's office on the cot. Unfortunately the bell is directly outside the office...but the privacy and cot are worth it. I always wear ear plugs when sleeping in India (it muffles the barking dogs, trucks with absurdly elaborate horns, firecrackers, singing, etc.), but they can only do so much.

Anyway, life here is nice. The school is for grades 5 through 7, and is coed. There are about 44 girls and 80 boys, which is a real success; it's very difficult to convince parents to invest in their daughters’ education, let alone send them to a boarding school. Everyone here is extremely enthusiastic about learning, and it shows. When they first enrolled, about half of the students had trouble reading and writing Gujarati, while more had trouble with Hindi and only a few could write the ABCs in English. Now all the students are reading and writing all three languages, a testament to the school's heavy schedule of classes and unstructured reading and study periods, along with the dedication of the teachers to provide extra tutoring in the evenings to students who need it.

Last year when I was in Gujarat I went with the Director of the NGO to a bookstore in Ahmedabad to choose some English children's books for the schools. I’ve been happy to see that many of those books are now well-worn. A few days ago some of the 6th grade girls asked me to read them the books in the "Benjamin Bunny" series, which are apparently a crowd favorite, so we spent about half an hour doing that. It was in the evening after dinner, and we were sitting on the lawn just outside one of the buildings. One of the girls, Mina, has really taken to English, so she read and tried to translate it into Gujarati while I held the book. We went through four or five of the books like that, with the kids sitting in a semi-circle around me as I helped Mina along. I don’t like everything about being here—I get a bit tired of people asking about the cost of my computer or plane ticket, or staring at me while I wash my clothes, or laughing about my use of toilet paper—but moments like that, outside reading on the grass with the students, a cool breeze coming in after an extremely hot day, far outweigh anything negative about being here.

I’ve been teaching some simple English songs to the students during the day as well. “Head, shoulders, knees and toes” is so popular that some of the boys whisper the words under their breath just walking around the campus. “Hello, my name is Joe” is also a good one, along with a few others. I think I’m going to introduce “Simon Says” today. We’ll see how that goes.

I interviewed two of the teachers yesterday, and will interview the rest today and tomorrow in order to write a report about them. They’re very interesting people, and their dedication is impressive. Most of them are happy to spend 6 or 7 days a week at the school. One of the teachers joined the school after she felt humiliated because of her status as a Dalit by the wife of the principal of the school she had worked at before. Another had been seated separately in the classroom and at lunchtime when he was a primary school student, which motivated him to become a teacher himself and teach children about equality. His father dropped out of school after grade 3 to start working, at age 10 earning 100 Rupees a month (about two dollars today, probably about ten dollars back then). His mother is illiterate. But he has a BA, and MA in Gujarati, and a B.Ed., and he also completed two out of three years of law school. Each one of them has their own story, and that’s what I’m trying to document in the report.

I’ll post some photos later on….I haven’t taken many yet.