Merry Christmas! It's about 8:00am here and we're preparing
to head back to the school/community center.
I’ll share a few photos and notes from yesterday, Dec. 24, while Naveen
showers.
(Ladies, please contain yourselves—the photos will not be of Naveen showering.)
We spent most of yesterday in what I’ll call an alternative
school—a one-room building and rubble-strewn yard where one of our program
directors, Nutan, has taught for four years.
Her pupils generally aren’t in school elsewhere, and the education that
Nutan and her volunteers is able to provide is very, very rough. Yesterday morning, we worked with a group of
mostly 9 to 12-year-olds of both sexes, then spent the afternoon with 12 to 16-year-old
girls. Generally the children speak
Hindi but no English.
Nutan and me
inside the school
outside the school
the schoolyard
There is a family on this trip with Naveen and me that is
presently participating in its sixth Globe Aware vacation. John, Meg, fifteen-year-old David, and David’s
friend Nikhil brought a treasure chest of teaching tools with them, including
world maps, inflatable globes, magnetic letters, and cards with animal photos
and names. Those tools greatly aid our
pedagogical efforts.
We began each session sitting around in a large circle with the
children and introducing ourselves, giving our names and some detail with which
we thought the children could identify.
For instance, Naveen tells the group that his family is from around
Bangalore, and I tell them that I’m from Georgia, home of Coca-Cola. The children introduce themselves and ask
questions of us through Nutan and A.J., a local who works with Globe
Aware. We often talk about
sports—cricket is a local favorite.
We break into smaller groups and attempt to give something of a
formal education, pointing out various places on the world maps and globes and
teaching the children to pronounced their names. Yesterday, I taught my groups to identify
Russia, India, Australia, U.S.A., and Africa.
Some of them already knew where India was, but everything else appeared
new to them. We reviewed the animal
cards, and pointed out where giraffes, penguins, spider monkeys, etc.
lived. I’d encourage the kids to point
to the map as they spoke the name of a place, and give high-fives when they got
something right. I also encouraged them
to shout, as that is both entertaining and kept me awake, as I’d arrived at
5:30am and gotten up three hours later.
Our group had a great chant of “Russia!, India! Australia! U.S.A.!
Africa!” going until Nutan asked us to quiet down.
* * *
India is experiencing the paroxysms of modernity, and it is
fascinating to watch. Outside the gleaming,
glass-sided offices of international corporations, cattle, goats, and hogs eat
garbage in the streets. Beside the
speeding, beeping Tata automobiles, camels pull carts of produce to
market. Women in particular are driving
social change. In Delhi and Jaipur, the
recent gang rape of a 23-year old woman has sparked protests seeking to
overhaul India’s lenient, outdated rape laws.
The
protests have caught the Prime Minister’s attention. In our afternoon class, Nutan argued with a
20-year-old woman who came by about the direction that the young woman’s life
could take—Nutan said there was a future outside of domestic work. The young woman wasn’t so sure. In our morning class of 9 to 12-year-olds,
the girls were noticeably better students and quicker learners than the boys. The future may be theirs.
lunchtime
making some faces with the cameraman
splish, splash
mooooooo
renowned international educator James E. Butler III poses with two
bright pupils
Naveen Ramachandrappa poses with some goats
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