Educating India one child at a time

So I haven’t said a whole lot yet on the purpose of my trip here. So here goes.

The reason I’m here is that some years ago, my now-89-year-old grandfather decided to purchase some land just outside of Pune on which he dreamed of building a school for disadvantaged children, orphans, abandoned or unloved children. Three years ago a small primary school was started under very basic and temporary accommodations, meeting in a small rented house with only four teachers and led by a group that did not provide very good leadership and that ended up just leaving unannounced last year. Around this time I realized that this project is incredibly related to my studies and passion – providing the downtrodden masses in India with quality education that promotes their empowerment and development. At that point however I still had a year of studying to go so I couldn’t get directly involved in the project. After much prayer and God’s incredible provision, the project was taken over early this year by Melinda Parker, a dear Australian family friend working under YWAM whose passions and vision for the school are amazingly aligned with mine.

So this summer I finally had 2 months off and decided to come help out. I’m using this time to help with planning and drafting the mission statement and vision for the school, helping train the teachers and redesigning the curriculum to ensure a high quality student-centered learning environment, connecting with and learning from other similar existing projects, helping with publicity and fundraising for the project, and helping Melinda with whatever other research and support she needs. I’m also using some of my time to partner with an education consulting company called Destiny Education that’s based in Bombay and Pune (how I got connected with one of their directors is another crazy God-inspired story). They consult to schools to improve education quality and train teachers, and next week I’m going to travel with them to Bihar (the poorest state in India) for a training seminar they’re conducting for over 300 teachers and principals from a network of Christian schools for poor children all over the Bihar.

It is an incredible experience and I feel like I’m learning a whole lot from diving headlong into doing things I’ve never done before, training teachers that are twice my age…it’s fun! Though a bit difficult to establish my credibility when they’ve been teaching for years and I…well for 2 weeks. But it’s been working out so far.

The vision for the school is for a Nursery-to-Std.10 school that provides excellent quality English-medium education to disadvantaged children both in the local villages and eventually to children from other areas, who could not otherwise afford access to such education (which in India is typically reserved only for the very rich). These may include Dalit children, orphans, children with HIV/AIDS, children who live on the streets, train stations or in slums, as well as children of Indian Christian workers. The school will be spread out over 6 acres of land, with two additional acres devoted to a Children’s Home for those that need a home. This will be a place of healing, counseling, and will provide a loving family environment to these children. Our vision is for the school to be a loving and joyful environment that stimulates active and creative learning rather than the passive rote-learning that characterizes many government schools in India. We want an environment that nurtures children’s physical, emotional, moral, social, and spiritual development. We also hope to foster community renewal by training future leaders who act for the welfare of their larger community, who refuse corruption and who live out values of common human dignity, righteousness, justice, peace and sacrificial love. We also hope to partner with parents to address some development needs of the local communities, such as providing basic health and nutrition education, literacy and ESL classes, vocational training, etc.

This is an exciting vision, but there is still a long way to go. Last January the school had only about 100 children and a few teachers and no real leadership or plan or vision. Over the last few months it has slowly been coming together and growing – there is now a Headmistress and a staff of 5 teachers; we almost have a complete school board, and have put together an initial budget, although resources are very scarce and fundraising is a huge job! Another accomplishment has been the construction of a temporary school building which will serve as the school facilities for the next couple of years, until we finish constructing the final school property on the 6 acres of land that we have to build on. There are now 175 children currently attending the school, 20 from a nearby Children’s Home, and the rest from the surrounding local villages, from Nursery to Std. 2. There are still many needs, such as more capable teachers, more funds to allow us to meet the budget and to raise the teacher’s meager salaries, some more classroom resources, a capable school principal, continual training support for the teachers, a computer, a website, etc. But we trust that God will fulfill each of these in time, as he has done until now, and it’s exciting to watch this process unfold!

Back in India...

Being back in India has been interesting. I quite surprised myself by how ‘Westernized’ I have become and how unaccustomed I was to India when I arrived this time. Anyone who knows me by now knows that I am one big confused mess of cultural identity. I think the peak of my ‘Indianness’ came just before I left India to move to Canada (age 15) – I was heartbroken to leave and completely identified myself with India and saw all Indians as my brothers and sisters and couldn’t wait to come back. This feeling has been replicated to a slightly abated degree each time I have returned on holidays.

Yet this time – the first time I am finally close enough to see the light at the end of the tunnel of my education and am actually contemplating a move back to India – I found myself recoiling at the sea of Indianness I was thrown into as I stepped off the plane. I couldn’t help feeling distanced from, indifferent to, even cringing at some elements of life here – the dirt, the noise, the crowds, the mud, the traffic, the corruption, the people everywhere, in your personal space, in your life; the degree to which people sometimes blindly follow tradition, submit to authority, the conservativeness, the tendency towards narrow-mindedness and parochialism in people that have never been exposed to the different perspectives that come with travel and a multicultural environment. Some of these were things I loved about India before…but somewhere along the last 8 years of living in North America, without realizing it, I really have grown used to the convenient, clean, whitewashed, streamlined, cosmopolitan life in which I found myself in Toronto and New York.

And yet when I was there I never fully fit into the North American lifestyle either. I always missed elements of India – the feeling of community, the strong focus on relationships, the informality, the hospitality, the warmth, the extent to which people are willing to sacrifice for friends or loved ones, the sense that people here aren’t so self-conscious about image and needing to be ‘cool’ and dress fashionably and have a dazzling personality in order to be accepted into the group, the simplicity of people and relationships here, the ‘aliveness’ of this place…

So now I’m just basically confused about where I fit. I guess over the last few weeks I have slowly been getting re-accustomed to life here; the elements I initially found jarring have slowly started growing on me again. Of course it doesn’t hurt that I have a bunch of old school and church friends from when I grew up here, so it has been a blast catching up with them, having sleepovers, being fed lots of good Indian food everywhere I go, hiking hills in the pouring rain, singing old songs, going on impromptu midnight drives to the next city (Lonavla) just to have a cup of coffee and drive back; shopping with my friends for ridiculously cheap pretty Indian things with the added accomplishment of having been able to bargain to half the quoted price, people dropping in unannounced, just hanging out for hours and talking about nothing and not really caring… I’m loving it.

I’ve realized that to some extent I can really be happy anywhere. Whether it’s a place full of memories and old friends like Pune or a place that’s completely new and unknown like New York, I usually end up finding people I like and things that I like about it and I end up enjoying myself anyway. It turns out that my happiness is not really dependent so much on where I am, but is usually a direct reflection of the state of my spiritual life, and of the relationships I build around me. In a way this makes it easier for me to be able to accept and follow wherever God sends me next – which helps since at this point my life is one big blur come December 2007. But still, I can’t help feeling that that blur will somehow inevitably be tied to India …despite my ambivalent reactions to this country, I find I keep getting drawn back here somehow. After all, it’s in my blood.

* * *
It’s always interesting to see how my reactions to India change with each trip home, the more distanced I inevitably become with the time spent away. I found an old entry I wrote on a previous trip 3 years ago, on August 8, 2004 – actually some of it isn’t all that different from now:

“Coming home” to India is simultaneously exhilarating and anticlimactic. Everything is so much the same, yet so completely new. Sights and sounds and smells that are so familiar suddenly flood my senses in a totally new way, as if I was experiencing them for the first time, and everything is so magnified, remarkably tangible, strikingly different. The sound of a rickshaw pulling away; the sharp salty pungent flavour of butta on my lips; the flurry of brightly coloured saris and noisy crowds and vivid smells on the streets; the lush ‘aliveness’ of the overgrown monsoon weeds; the hum of the fan and screeching of crickets and voices of watchmen as I lie on my monsoon-damp sheets – I eagerly drink it all in as I wade through the flood of memories each sensation triggers. And yet the old glove no longer fits quite right – I have grown so much, that I have as much trouble recognizing myself as everyone else does. So all these familiar objects are now seen through totally different eyes. They are as new to me as I am to them, and we are still in the process of getting reacquainted. So it’s not quite what I expected, what I hoped for, what I am used to. It never is. I am always a different person, and the world will always be filtered through my altered perspective. The ‘good old days’ can never be entirely relived, my ‘saudade’ (nostalgia?) can never be fully quenched. There is no going back.

On This Day of Independence

(July 4^th, 2007; Flying through NY, hovering over Liberty)

I am not ready for take off. Still not used

To the feeling in my stomach when I get

Unmoored, hurtled into white, travelling light

In transit to an unknown desi nation

Leaving behind fragments of forgotten life

All locked away in neatly labelled boxes.

I miss the comfort of having my feet planted

In the familiar footprints left by many

Old shoes; it takes too long to break in, to

The walls we build so carefully around us

Of independence, space, and privacy –

One man’s dream, another’s prison cell.

If loneliness is the price of liberty

Lend me the cords that keep us bound together

As one. Come, unity. Here, take my roots,

And weaving it through yours, we’ll let ourselves

Fall into one another. Let us dare

To make ourselves dependent, on the beauty

Of hearts that feed each other words of life.