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New in New Delhi! (old post)
28 March, 2008
Well it's been 3 whole days since I started my new job at the Ministry of Education. It has been exciting to say the least, and overall quite overwhelming.
First of all is the mental exhaustion of not only having to meet a ton of new people and remember a ton of new names, but also having to wrap my head around all the work that is going on and keep up with all the acronyms and information I need to familiarize myself with (It's a lot of stuff, since our office basically deals with education planning across all the states of India). And on top of it all, having to do most of it in Hindi. My Hindi is quite miserable and I can barely squeeze out enough sentences to fool rickshaw drivers and not have them take me for a ride for being a foreigner. Yet now most of the people around me carry out long conversations with each other and with me in Hindi and all I can do is smile and nod and hang on to the few words I can pick out and pretend I understand what they're saying. It works out for the most part until they ask me a question and I am still left staring at them and smiling politely and then they think I'm weird.
The other tiring part is the feeling that I am an impostor just waiting to be found out any second. I know that my being here is totally God and not me because somehow or the other they decided to make me a Senior Consultant (on Pedagogy/Quality-related issues) which means I get my own brand new desk and computer and my own personal assistant (read 'lackey') and have people twice my age reporting to me, including the Directors in charge of education planning from half the states of India. I keep waiting for them to somehow discover how young and inexperienced I actually am and to strip me of my title and throw me out on the street. Meanwhile I have to tread carefully and just hope noone asks me directly how old I am…today someone guessed, "so you must be around 30 right?" and I had to laugh it off with "um….give or take a few years…"
But it sure is exciting having a job where I get to sit all day and think up ways to improve the quality of education for India's underprivileged majority…which is exactly what my passion is and exactly what I've been doing in my studies…except that now all the stuff I've written and studied about actually has some chance of having some tiny impact on the real education system! It's kinda like getting to actually meet in real life the characters from a book you've read years ago. It's so crazy…today I spent the day evaluating the Education Budget and Working Plan for 2008-09 for the entire state of Delhi, and got to grill the Director of Education on all that the State government is planning to do for the coming year to achieve Education For All. Tomorrow we tackle the state of Bihar. It is so overwhelming to think that something I say (or don't say) could actually make a difference in the way that education is carried out in this country…I feel so totally unequipped and inadequate to actually be telling people what to do! All I can do is desperately pray for wisdom from above, and remember that 'It's not by power nor by might, but by my Spirit, says the Lord.'
Well it's been 3 whole days since I started my new job at the Ministry of Education. It has been exciting to say the least, and overall quite overwhelming.
First of all is the mental exhaustion of not only having to meet a ton of new people and remember a ton of new names, but also having to wrap my head around all the work that is going on and keep up with all the acronyms and information I need to familiarize myself with (It's a lot of stuff, since our office basically deals with education planning across all the states of India). And on top of it all, having to do most of it in Hindi. My Hindi is quite miserable and I can barely squeeze out enough sentences to fool rickshaw drivers and not have them take me for a ride for being a foreigner. Yet now most of the people around me carry out long conversations with each other and with me in Hindi and all I can do is smile and nod and hang on to the few words I can pick out and pretend I understand what they're saying. It works out for the most part until they ask me a question and I am still left staring at them and smiling politely and then they think I'm weird.
The other tiring part is the feeling that I am an impostor just waiting to be found out any second. I know that my being here is totally God and not me because somehow or the other they decided to make me a Senior Consultant (on Pedagogy/Quality-related issues) which means I get my own brand new desk and computer and my own personal assistant (read 'lackey') and have people twice my age reporting to me, including the Directors in charge of education planning from half the states of India. I keep waiting for them to somehow discover how young and inexperienced I actually am and to strip me of my title and throw me out on the street. Meanwhile I have to tread carefully and just hope noone asks me directly how old I am…today someone guessed, "so you must be around 30 right?" and I had to laugh it off with "um….give or take a few years…"
But it sure is exciting having a job where I get to sit all day and think up ways to improve the quality of education for India's underprivileged majority…which is exactly what my passion is and exactly what I've been doing in my studies…except that now all the stuff I've written and studied about actually has some chance of having some tiny impact on the real education system! It's kinda like getting to actually meet in real life the characters from a book you've read years ago. It's so crazy…today I spent the day evaluating the Education Budget and Working Plan for 2008-09 for the entire state of Delhi, and got to grill the Director of Education on all that the State government is planning to do for the coming year to achieve Education For All. Tomorrow we tackle the state of Bihar. It is so overwhelming to think that something I say (or don't say) could actually make a difference in the way that education is carried out in this country…I feel so totally unequipped and inadequate to actually be telling people what to do! All I can do is desperately pray for wisdom from above, and remember that 'It's not by power nor by might, but by my Spirit, says the Lord.'
posted by The Big Banana | 4:35 PM
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