Blog Four from India Scholarship winners!

Festivals and Festivities in PaliThis past week has been one of festivals and festivities in the party town that is Pali. The local town carnival was an experience that saw our celebrity status in the region literally soar to new heights, as the only means to escape suffocation by the mobbing crowd was to brave the extremely rusty and rickety ferris wheel and an equally un-sturdy aerial flying swing set. Even more unsettling was that, to enable us to leave the showground, local police were forced to disband the crowd using physical means. This scenario is one that, though not always to such an extreme, we are becoming accustomed to when attempting to depart any venue, be it a school or a local residence.

We also had the privilege this week of attending two children’s birthday parties, which we were pleased to note are, while materially modest, still cause for momentous celebration among friends, neighbours and family. The value and importance placed on friendships and particularly on familial relations here is not just something that you can witness but something that you can truly feel. Matt and Ingrid certainly experienced this first hand when, en route to a local villager’s house for a cheeky chai they were whisked into every house on the street to meet, greet, have a photograph taken and break chapatti with a grandparent, parent, uncle, brother or best friend. This was among a myriad of weekly, if not daily encounters that are reinforcing to us that Indian hospitality is unsurpassed anything we have experienced elsewhere.

On the Educate Girls front, things are going swimmingly, despite the desert backdrop. Though we are still getting used to ‘India time’ (10 minutes is often more like one hour, ‘soon’ could very well mean tomorrow or next week), we are learning a lot about the inner workings of a grassroots NGO in general and about development in the area of girl’s education in particular. This last week we have been working with the communications team putting together success stories based on individual girls, teachers and schools through observational video footage, interviews, photo essays and feature articles. We have also been documenting some of Educate Girls’ (formally FEGG) teaching methods in training sessions. For instance, EG has developed CLT (creative learning techniques), which are slowly being integrated into all schools in the district. These techniques include use of materials such as flash cards, drawings, peer group activities, educational games and educational songs, which are hardly revolutionary in primary schools back home, but are virtually unheard of in schools over here where the basic teaching technique is teacher lectures, students listen and in the majority of students very little is absorbed and retained. Hence the high number of drop-outs after a few years of schooling, particularly among females where domestic duties are deemed a more viable use of their time than receiving a standard, if not poor, education. So this week we have spent several days at a training session for teachers learning CLT, and despite our very scant Hindi, it was evident that initially there was very strong opposition to these methods by the teachers, but, upon testing on guinea pig students there was almost overwhelming sense of enthusiasm and optimism from many of those same teachers.
On a side note, we were treated like guests of honour at this session, literally. We were honoured in a small ceremony (with nil understanding of why) with colourful leis bestowed upon us, hundred of photos taken and handshakes all around.
On another side note, both Anna and Ingrid have fallen hopelessly in love with one of the EG block officers, who is, and Matt can verify, the most beautiful man in all of India. The girls were both devastated and delighted when we went to his house for chai to learn that he had a gorgeous wife and newborn baby boy. Matt continues to shop for his Indian bride.

On the topic of physical beauty, Manju has made it her mission to make Anna and Ingrid more handsome (translation - fat) by tripling our meal portions. To add insult to injury, we have located the local ice-cream parlour, so naturally at least one a day has been integrated into our growing daily staple of sabjee, chapatti, rice and dahl and numerous street-side snacks. In order to counteract our consumption we have borrowed weights from the neighbours, started skipping on the roof and begun jogging around the village to many a bemused stare.

As per our previous blog, we did indeed take in a puppy for all of 24 hours before deciding that the responsibility of feeding and cleaning was simply not going to fit in with our work and particularly our recreational schedule. Kahlua is now blissfully gnawing on the innards of a dead cow.