COUNTRY: India
PROGRAM: GapBreak
PROJECT: Teaching
WRITTEN BY: Phoebe Laing
On the 19th of August 2014 I arrived at Udaipur, India, together with four other gap year girls I'd never met before. We would spend the next three months living in the same house (together with other volunteers from Austria, Switzerland, England, Wales and Germany), teaching English to first and second grade school children from a tribal village in the morning and to slightly older boys at a nearby boys home in the afternoon. Reflecting on the following months in the days before we left, most of us agreed it had been the best three months of our lives thus far. Not only had we gained incredible friends in each other, we had found friends all over the world and had acquired a new perspective about our own lives.
India is overwhelming at first - there are cows and dogs everywhere, wandering across the path of weaving motorbikes and tractors, many of which are calmly driving in the wrong lane. Horns, mooing, loud conversations and singing fill the streets; the smells alternate between delicious cooking and whiffs of rubbish and cow poo. It is a culture and environment so different from our own and yet we all grew to love and identify with it; the sense of community and family duty within Indian culture is something we've lost to a certain extent back home.
Our time away from our families and friends allowed us to step out of our normal selves and discover who we were outside of our normal environment. We were trusted with creating our own lessons and caring for our students, and the sense of responsibility and trust was relished by each one of us, allowing us to develop confidence and independence. We learnt how to connect with people from countries across the world, and this never meant more than the connections we made with the children we taught.
Our school children were from a very poor village- many had shirts held together by safety pins and were very obviously underweight. Yet it was their smiles and laughter that brightened our mornings; their parents also smiled whenever they saw us and each other, which left a deep impression on us about how happiness can be completely unrelated to material wealth. Despite their limited English, we made each other laugh and celebrated their progress together, and never felt as though language was truly a barrier. At the boys home I taught slightly older boys, 11-13, many of whom had quite good conversational English. I have never laughed so much as I have while with them; many of the boys are orphans or from incredibly poor families, and yet despite many traumatic stories they were accepting, friendly and always ready to laugh.
On my last day at the orphanage my boys took me by the hands and led me on a tour of the orphanage to show me how they lived. All they had in life was their bed and a small locker full of clothes and books. When I began crying at the end they told me, "No sad, Didi (big sister), happy happy", and made me smile even though I really didn't want to leave. My experience with those boys in particular will enrich my life forever - they have shown me what it is to be brave, and also how incredibly lucky I am to live in such a beautiful place and have so many opportunities. I plan to work hard to save up and visit them again next year, but in the meantime I know that I will be a more grateful person, and have so many stories to share with my new beautiful friends both here in Australia and throughout the world.
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