2 posts tagged “asha for education”

Last Saturday began a long two weeks of travel for me all over India.  First, we went further south to Chamarajanagar, a district in the southeastern corner of Karnataka for a conference on teaching methods and for NGOs and non-formal school educators to come together.  Chamarajanagar was really beautiful, and the school in which we stayed--Deenabandu School--is partially sponsored by Asha and educates orphans and very poor children in the district.  Chamarajanagar is also considered one of the most backward states in Karnataka.  Apparently, former Chief Ministers always had bad luck politically after visiting this district, so now its taboo to come there, and no CM's will come!  I made friends with a few schoolgirls that at first, wanted to call me Aunty.  We corrected that quickly and they taught me some Kannada.  It was really interesting to see various educators coming together and discussing the challenges that they face.  Some of them talked about a lack of "nourishment," so to speak, among people doing similar things--working with poor children, facing funding problems, feeling alone in their quests, etc.  Imagine starting up your own school in rural India for children far below the poverty line, some orphans, with little staff and few people that can give you the sort of intellectual or moral support with a certain level of understanding on education taken into account.  If you don't have that support, it gets lonely.  If you, as an individual, are the emblem of sustainability, by enduring with your project for decades, how do you find someone that can follow up with you after you've moved on, that has the compunction to invest the same amount of needed long-term energy into something like a school?  In some ways, it makes sense to me why one would instead choose to spend a lifetime trying to change the government system--the fundamental, permanent provider of education for the most underprivileged.  But that is also a very frustrating, endless road to go down.

On Sunday, we made a mad dash back to Bangalore to catch our train to Delhi at 10 PM.  Ram kept telling me I wouldn't have a chance to have a bath.  Thankfully, we did, and I had my only bath before we embarked on the 2 day, non A/C  train journey.  As a sidenote, this has been the dirtiest vacation I've ever been on.  Baths are very coveted affairs.  So anyways,  the train was actually not too far from my expectations, but I had been prepared.  Madhavi bought me a copy of the newest Harry Potter (!).  Sleeping on the train wasn't too bad, but at 6 AM sharp, the chai-wallas started coming down the aisles every few minutes.  The scenery was fantastic--we traveled through 6 states: Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh.  At one point, the train stopped for us to witness probably one of the most fantastic sunsets I've ever seen.  Guys on the train were sticking their heads out the windows and singing Hindi songs.  We got to Delhi around noon on Tuesday.

Once we got to Delhi, we went to the sketchiest hotel I've ever been to to park our stuff for the day and have much-needed showers.  Then we spent the day wandering around Delhi's National Museum and Connaught Place.  That night we took another train to Chakki Bank station in the very northern part of Punjab state, and from there we took a taxi to Himachal Pradesh.  We wound up the mountains and landed up in the Himalayan hill station of Dalhousie, about 7000 feet up.

Dalhousie was absolutely beautiful, though the cloud cover was pretty thick for the 2 days we spent there.    While no snow-clad peaks were to be seen, we did a lot of hiking and I am proud to say that I handled it all in my flip-flops with only on scape on my little toe to show for it! As we climbed higher into the mountains we trekked by cows and bulls grazing.  I'll admit that I was only slightly terrified of being butted off the mountains by a bull as we tried to slip by them on the narrow paths, with valleys dropping thousands of feet nearby.  2 days in the clouds of Dalhousie were fantastic though, and definitely a highlight of the trip.

After Dalhousie, we headed to the thriving metropolis of Sherpur, Punjab.  A village of 10,000 people, Sherpur is not easy to find.  The Asha India Conference was held there in a dharmashala in the village, and for 2 days I witnessed the goings-on (basically all in Hindi) of a mixed group of Asha-India volunteers from all over the country.  Asha is an extremely diverse federation of people--some running schools, some working in people's movements, some fundraising and running projects like in Bangalore, etc.  Most of the meeting was spent on discussing processes as Asha grows in size and in funding strength, so that wasn't too interesting for me.  But it was quite an experience nonetheless.  Being in Sherpur definitely provided another contrast to our third world/first world travels.  The place in which the conference was held was under construction, with piles of sand and dirt everywhere, un-usuable bathrooms with inches of stagnant water inside, and a generally rowdy bunch of Northerners mixed with a few "tree-top" NGO-types from the US and the South that were only slightly horrified by the conditions there.  I got to stay at a nice Punjabi woman's house at night, sleeping on cots in the open air.  I couldn't speak to my host, because she only spoke Punjabi and Hindi, but she was incredibly nice and hospitable.  The highlight of Sherpur was when we got to see the school and plant nursery that Asha was sponsoring.  The kids in Punjab are definitely more boisterous from what I'm used to, breaking out in bhangra and singing songs and playing with the volunteers.  The plant nursery was developed on the grounds of a crematory (!) and is situated in the rural part of the village.  I've never been to a place like Sherpur before, or a state like Punjab, but it was definitely an experience.  At times I felt entirely cut off from the rest of the world, but then at other times, I was taken by in-your-face kindness the people there.

From Sherpur we headed to Amritsar, and indulged in first-world delights of air-conditioning and mattresses and toilets in a hotel near the railway station.  In the evening, we saw Jallianwala Bagh, the site in which hundreds (or thousands? The numbers reported vary from source to source) of innocent people were massacred by a British Indian firing squad in 1919.  It was surreal seeing it for real, because my limited understanding of the place is from the film Gandhi and what I've read in history books.  Later, we visited the Golden Temple.

Now I'm back to Delhi again, after taking a fancy Shatabdi train from Amritsar around 5 this morning.  I'll be here for a few days before heading back by train to Bangalore, arriving on Friday.  This trip has been brilliant so far.  I've traveled 8 states in a little over a week.  I've learned to sleep on humming trains, bumpy rides down the Himalayan mountains, and in cabs tumbling through the dusty Punjab.  Oh and I've also learned to sleep through snarky comments on my reading Harry Potter (which was actually pretty disappointing! This article sums it up pretty well).  But I've gotten to experience quite a bit of the multifaceted landscape, food, charms, and contradictions of this country.  Pictures to come soon.

After about a year, I returned to Chandranagar Government Primary School today.  Chandranagar is about 3 km. from where I live, in an urban slum.  Last year, there were 280 students for 7 grades and 7 teachers.  This year, there are 330 students, 8 grades, and 5 teachers? Maybe 6 1/2 (two have been recently appointed by another charity in the last few days).  The children and the teachers remembered me from last year, and it was slightly surreal seeing all of these kids, one year older, slightly bigger, slightly rowdier, and still not learning much.

The situation at Chandranagar has been quite rough in the past year-- 3 Asha appointed teachers gone, one new headmistress come and gone in a month, another long-standing government appointed teacher switched out to another school, and then 2 recent appointments by the government for a school desperately in need of teachers.  The 5th grade class is now taken underneath a tree.  But apparently the tree causes a lot of noise blowing with the heavy wind at times, and the teachers are afraid that branches will fall on the children!

I was greeted with the usual "Good Morning Miss!!" and smiling faces.  I was really surprised to have remembered the special handshake that they do at the end of the day.  After spending less than an hour there, I was already left in a classroom of 8th graders, alone, and instructed to do some English with them.  We read a story together, with the students competing for their chance to read, some struggling, some reading each word very well but having absolutely no clue what it meant.  At times I would stop and ask the class, in either English or broken Kannada, what "ocean," or "frightened," or "peak" meant, sometimes having to draw diagrams on the board.

One definite improvement from last year to this year has been the nutrition and midday meals situation.  Last year, the mid-day meals provided by the government came infrequently, if at all on time, and were typically tasteless and void of nutritional value.  The teachers always brought their own lunch.  This year, an NGO called Akshaya Patra, in conjunction with the Government of Karnataka (GOK), is feeding children through the kitchens of the ISKCON temple.  The GOK only pays one rupee (~2.5 cents) per head out of the cost to feed the children through Akshaya Patra's Midday Meals, the rest of the cost is covered by other donors.  Needless to say, these kids are now getting fed better tasting food in bigger quantities, and apparently even the teachers eat it as well.

These kids are absolutely adorable, of course, but it is very troubling to see just how much of the day was characterized by classrooms stuffed to capacity without teachers.  

When I asked about advocating for more government teacher appointments, the HM told me that government teachers are appointed from a group of teachers that are interested in transferring locations.  The teachers get the option of choosing which school they would like to work in, and often choose schools close to home.  So, when the HM requested 5 new teachers from the Block Education Officer, they only brought in 2 because only two chose to work in Chandranagar School.

One of the most troubling situations, apart from the lack of basic needs in the school-- adequate teachers and space-- is the 3rd grade (III Std.).  There are over 60 third standard students in one classroom, and according to the headmistress, maybe only 10 students are at the level they should be, the rest are quite far behind.  This is apparently due to the chaos of this past year.  When these children were in II Std, their teacher (Asha hired), left in October, and there was no new teacher for II Std. until the following February.  The reasons for leaving were probably for the right reasons (see last year's blog for a full account of the drama that went down), but these children suffered a lot without a consistent teacher for so long.  So many of these small children that used to be so quiet have now grown bigger and more rambunctious, certainly difficult to control all at once.  The headmistress had to tell them, as I sat to visit their classroom, "Behave so 'Miss' can go back to America and say what nice children there are here."  

The GOK has also instructed Chandranagar School to hold upper primary classes up to the 8th standard now, as last year only went until the 7th.  To keep students from dropping out, an entire grade was added, and one additional teacher certified to teach upper level science and math was appointed by the GOK.  When I was in the 8th grade class, I noticed that one of my favorite kids from last year, Selvakumar, was not in the classroom.  He was a little troublemaker sometimes, but a sweet kid that had hopes to start his own business named after the headmistress, "Padmaja Electrics."  I later asked the HM where he was.  Apparently, his father had suffered from some illness, and is no longer able to work.  Selvakumar has now left school and become the "working man."  Apparently he is working in an aluminum factory.  He is probably 13 years old.

I asked the HM what I could do for them, because apart from writing a follow-up report on the school, I'd like to spend my free time there doing whatever I can.  Part of me feels helpless, yet empowered to do something for a school lodged in a broken system.  The GOK has now established that English should be taught from the 1st grade, yet no one is currently teaching English to these children, with not enough teachers to go around.  The HM gave me the new 1 std. English workbook and a teacher's guide to go with it, and got very excited at the thought of me teaching English to the tiniest of the lot.  I'm not a teacher.  I don't know a thing about teaching.  But there is a need, so I'm reading the instructors guide and studying up.  I also need to learn some more basic Kannada, fast.  That would make things a lot easier.  But still, I can't help but feel troubled by it all-- this school needs serious changes, not quick fixes.

Doing research on how NGOs should be investing in government schools, and then acting as an NGO player in a government school itself creates an interesting work dynamic in India.  Many things are familiar from last year, and some of the same things I debated with myself then are just as relevant one year later.  In a city and a country with an 8% growth rate, construction and development occurring rapidly from one year to the next, the middle and upper classes growing wealthier by the minute, it is also startling to see just how much things have not changed, even deteriorated, in the government schools.