Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
Nearing the start of my third week at the project the routine has started to set in. I get up around 8.30, leave the house at 9, and by 9.30 there are eight small Indian children sitting in front of me, expecting to be entertained through 'joyful learning', a phrase quoted from the P2 handbook. Joyful may be a bit optimistic, I could go for jovial at a push. It's surprisingly difficult to find enough work to fill two and a half hours- after we've got our breath back and done a few renditions of heads, shoulders, knees and toes it's about 9.36. The first week was difficult as we had no idea of what we were supposed to be doing, what we needed to achieve and the level at which kids of this age should be working. Now we have more of an idea of each child's ability we can set work accordingly and have reasonable learning goals. Most of the time is spent teaching the alphabet and numbers in English. The children know the alphabet and all the numbers but only as a meaningless string of sounds that they have recited over and over. Using a few simple but effective exercises we're slowly but surely putting meaning to the sounds. One of my favourites is the number circle which involves laying out the numbers 1 to 10 on flashcards in a circle on the ground, shouting out a number and making the kids run to the number. They get it wrong quite a lot but I think after a few weeks of doing it every day they'll definitely improve. One of the most disheartening things with teaching is the fact that it takes time. I have to keep reminding myself that the work I'm doing is only a small part of a much larger picture. Hopefully what we're doing will make some impact on these kids learning but when you come back day after day and little Ritika still can't recognise the number 8 and Nikhil still can't write a G properly despite practising a million times you start to wonder if you're doing something wrong. Ultimately you just have to do what you can to the best of your ability and hope that something does sink in.
We eat our lunch and have a little nap for an hour then go back to teach for one hour more. The rest of the afternoon is spent carrying out community surveys which involves all 8 of us volunteers sitting in a community member's house asking them questions such as 'do you or any of your family suffer from aids/alcoholism/domestic violence' and other gems such as 'do you s*** in a field/a hole in the ground/a toilet'. Being as it is what with none of us speaking Hindi and all our Project Executive has to translate the question for us, so in effect, the afternoon is spent with all 8 of us sitting in a room listening to a conversation in Hindi. There doesn't really seem to be a set objective for the questionnaire yet either which adds to our feelings of unproductivity. Selfish as it may seem, it would be really nice to have something physical that you can look at and say "I built that" just to get that nice little sense of achievement which, let's be honest, is one of the main reasons people do these sort of things for- if they're saying they just want to help people for no benefit of their own then they're probably either lying or completely insane. I just want to do manual labour in the afternoons! That's a sentence I never thought I'd say.
So after our afternoon sessions we walk back down the mountains to get picked up by the jeep although sometimes I choose to carry on the journey by foot which takes about twenty minutes. It's quite nice after dealing with the kids all day to just switch on my iPod and switch off my brain- back home you don't realise quite how much you get the chance to switch off when you're doing the day to day things that you've been doing your whole life. When you come into situation that's completely different from what you're used to, your brain is constantly working to try and take everything new in, your senses are working overtime to try and process all the new things they're being assaulted by. Then your brain has to process them and convert them into memories which it then has to file appropriately under 'India Trip '09' or 00100111 01101001 01101110 01100100 01101001 01100001 00100000 01110100 01110010 01101001 01110000 00100000 00100111 00110000 00111001 00100111 which is binary for 'India Trip '09'. You can always notice the people who are new to a place because they're the ones looking around at everything in awe, even things that seem completely mundane to those who see it every day. I try and imagine someone who lives in one of the villages here going and living my life for a day. The morning walk to work would be quite an adventure- a scary one at that, where as for me it's the time I switch off my brain- time which I think is essential for everyone. Of course when things stop being so exciting and become routine, boredom starts to set in but I just try and remember that in a few weeks this will all be over and I shouldn't be wasting valuable time being bored.
- comments