One of the advantages of being in a place like India (i.e. a place where nothing works ever) is that it takes the simplest things (your toilet flushing, booking a train ticket successfully, getting on a bus and it reaching somewhere in time, walking down the street and not getting molested, an internet connection) to make you very very happy. So, since I've bored / worried / upset / terrified / irritated you all with my angry rants, thought I should take advantage of a (albeit minor!) success to write a happy blog. Plus, now that the whole world has started blogging, I've got to keep up with the Joneses (or the Kirans), henna? (do you like my little Hindi touch there? These might continue at random 'Henna' means 'isn't it', by the by)

So, just had a very successful morning, not least because I've finally started to make some progress on the 'whole what the hell do I do with lots of very naughty but very enthusiastic children charging round my office' question. Since yesterday was spent trying to stop these 13 year old boys drawing pictures of penises all over my newly-painted wall (surprising difficult!), the question is getting rather pressing. The problem is that this centre / office based in East Delhi (close to the slums as my unfortunate family accidentally found out) is meant to be running 5 so-called Learning Centres here in East Delhi under a government Universal Elementary Education programme (the UEE Mission, or 'eeeyooooooouuuu' mission as my sometime nemesis sometime target of violent abuse & swearing (aka 'the f***ing pathetic little s***') likes to call it). Only, this being India, 1) not enough money was allocated 2) whatever money was allocated has miraculously evaporated somewhere in the government offices 3) the paper work wasn't finished from the last round - all of which means that there's no UEE mission this year. Nicely they've let us know this in February (it was meant to begin in November, but never mind), although somehow I suspect that they haven't yet informed DFID and the World Bank which are funding the projects. Added to all of this are the problems already affecting India's struggling (and mostly failing) education system - despite the govt's repeated assurances of the wonders of its education system, I refuse to accept that any country in which certain areas have 2% literacy (no joke - 98% in Mewat district of Haryana are illiterate) is succeeding. The fact that only 4% of the GDP is spent on education (despite the recommendations back in 1966 from an Indian-sponsored commission that said even tiding over the crumbling education system needs an absolute minimum of 6%, and all the govt assurances in the late 1990s that 6% of GDP would be spent on education by 2000) doesn't help the situation to start with, and the general bureaucratic chaos and corruption that characterises most of Indian govt schemes has had the inevitable effect. Moreover, sick with their hopes being dashed every time the announcement of a new miracle scheme is made the communities are rapidly losing mobilisation and motivation to encourage their children to attend school. But still, rubbish elementary education support is still better than no elementary education support - and now there isn't even that. Oh, and I just found out that the reason some of the kids couldn't come to the centre yesterday was because their little shack in the slums (what little housing they had) was demolished on the weekend. Nice.

(hmm, sorry, I can see the inevitable downturn towards rant! About face, back to my successes….) So, where does my 'office', 'learning centre' or just humble (though not so humble now the plumbing works, woop woop! Ells & sarah be very relieved - literally, ah ha [that's a king john style 'aaahh haa', if you know what I mean {I think I need a better way of showing brackets!}]) abode fit in? Having successfully managed to stem the tide of the naughty 13-year-olds single-handedly yesterday - in true Indian tradition all my staff abandoned me when I needed them the most. It's a national characteristic my boss claims, semi-proudly - I realised that what these kids need isn't another set of unskilled and untrained teachers working to their own specifications in a system that changes as soon as I b***** off (which since I'm travelling from Friday is sooner than they think), they need to be able to learn how to manage their own development - whether emotional, educational or social - within this chaotic world that surrounds them. They have to be able to anchor themselves to learn what they can, gain what they can and make whatever use they can of whatever materials and resources (human resources included) currently happen to be available. Though I wrote it much better in the big fat action research proposal (2 hours, 2,400 words, thank you oxford!!) I just drafted, full of lots of nice UNESCO research findings and latest educational development theories. Anyhoo this amounts to the most simple solution - ignoring them, giving them some books to play with, pens, paper, colours and pencils whenever they demand them and answering their questions. What pleasantly surprised me though, was how good they were at it. The most straightforward solution (and crucially for India the cheapest solution) really does work. In a country where rote learning is the order of the day, you'd expect them to be stumped when told 'go learn on your own'. Instead, it's a testament to their commitment to their own education and development - at a time when it seems everyone else has given up on them - and their intelligence how ably they were able to learn (when they stopped drawing penises, that is). After leaving the older boys on their own unsupervised (there's a dedicated room at the office - the 'centre' - that's for the children, which by a series of complex and intricate padlocks stops them charging into my office every two seconds), I looked in after about an hour to find a full scale English lesson in progress, with one of the more capable students writing up exercises on the board, who would consult me when he or one of the others was stuck. Partially I guess it's the natural child instinct of mimicry (i.e. they partly were only 'playing' at teachers and students), but whatever the motivation it is entirely unstructured but entirely successful 'self-instruction'. Moreover, they were doing this with under impulsion to stay from any adult figure. This all fits in very nicely with DCI's own theories about the power of peer-to-peer education (more inputs for the action research, woop woop) and self-driven learning, as well as what I was arguing about UNESCOs/WHO's 'life skills' - the "abilities for adopting positive behaviour that enables individuals to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life" (such as self-awareness, decision-making and creative thinking, problem solving and critical thinking, interpersonal communication and the ability to empathise) essential skills for living/survival that are often denied to children in developing countries who have to grow up too quickly and aren't fully allowed to develop socially and personally. (check me out, yeh!). All this seems all the more borne out by the fact that today there have been more children than for the whole of the last week and yet it's been quieter and more studious than ever before, every nook and cranny stuffed (not literally, no torture of children encouraged here) with littl'uns colouring, older kids doing maths, big kids teaching English to the little kids and no-one (for once!) trying to distract me and steal my laptop. And, I managed all this single-handedly, woop woop.

More exciting though is the fact that DCI is a research and development focussed NGO, which means that its primary aim is to conduct pilot schemes and trials - research, basically - into techniques, principles, methods and processes of development. Which in effect means that if I write this up properly (and I've half done it already - not least because the kids are leaving me alone and letting me do my work because I've got them working like this… see how it goes) it'll either be published or go towards developing a more substantial micro-pilot self-learning education scheme (which I've already beautifully envisaged along the lines of a youth club or play & learning centre, driven by principles of active, self-managed learning and responsible management of the learning environment). And in the meantime I've managed to initiate a self-managed learning centre here, helping the kids to actualise their own educational and personal development, which will hopefully have a far longer impact than any a b c I could ever teach them and hopefully be able to survive whatever stupid things my nemesis does while I'm away and after I've gone. Since his crazed shouting is already a running joke between me and the kids (rapport-building workshops eat your heart out!) it might just do that. He's been trying to tell me for weeks that the kids are all no good and naughty (for f*** sake, they were brought up in a bloody slum, you expect them to be the models of good behaviour and not to be enterprising) and that they only come to the centre to ogle each other, but it looks like my counter-claim - that even if that's why they come, when they're here lets do something positive with them - has been borne out. He gets extremely pissed off at my what-he-sees-as encouraging them to play and not study but when they react in such a positive way to someone who seems interested in them and what they just learnt I feel encouraged. Plus it's well cute having little kids pottering through and proudly showing off their paintings every few moments (even if they did take the piss out of my pig I tried to draw. Modern art innit). So, a minor victory and who knows how short-lived, but a victory nonetheless.

So a happy rant for once. To make up for it I'm going to publish the extremely rude and hate filled rant I wrote the other day, if only because I promised Rachel I would to distract her even more from work! It's entitled 10 things I hate about India (although 'you' is generally directed at the irritating little sob, my nemesis), but I only managed 6 before I ran out of rant…

There it ends! And to reward my feelings of success earlier today the naughtiest kids just succeeded in irritating me as much as they could - including trying to lock me in my office. In fact they're trying to steal stuff from my office now as I type, so I'm being immensely childish back and steadfastly ignoring them. Yes I can see you cheeky bandh pickle sneaking behind me… right on that note, better had go! Lots of loving, from your ever-ranty jess xxx

p.s. photos here (no facebook sign-up required):

http://oxford.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2190859&l=93da1&id=36802108