DukeEngage | Duke Center for Civic Engagement

As we near the end of our last week in India this summer, we rush all around Hyderabad in a flurry of errand-running, tying up loose ends, and prepare ourselves for eminent goodbyes. Visiting Hussian Sagar lake, check. Check on progress of our sari blouses, check. Prepare posterboard for our students to sign their names for us to remember them by after we leave, check. Each item we cross off on our to-do-list is a stark reminder of how close we are to leaving. I feel a bit overwhelmed, like I had when we first arrived in Hyderabad and were trying to launch our projects, except this time instead of trying to get the ball rolling, we were regrettably having to halt the projects (until next summer!) that have gained so much momentum since they got off the ground and are now flying.

People begin to ask us how we feel about leaving, as our first of many waves of goodbyes start. I am torn between looking forward to being back home and sad that I will be missing the India that has become a home for me in the past eight weeks. I have a permanent bond to Hyderabad now, the city that had shown me so much about its inhabitants and myself.

With each cultural event I attend, the more I feel like I belong here. After a tasty and authentic home-cooked meal at the Prasads, we participated in a Raksha Bandhan festival – Hindi for “bond of protection.” The festival celebrates the bond between brothers and sisters and also solidarity and kinship between people not necessarily brothers and sisters. A rakhi, or holy thread, is tied around the brother’s wrist by the sister. The brother then offers the sister a gift in return and vows to look after her. The Prasads have two daughters but no sons, so they adopt the two males in our group to be brothers for their daughters, reinforcing the close bond we have forged with the family. This is one of many bonds formed over the past eight weeks, and I will be sad to have half a world’s distance between myself and all those I have grown close to in Hyderabad, especially the children at Adigmet that have welcomed us into their lives for eight weeks. I would gladly tie rakhis around their wrists, offering them my protection and kinship, as eagerly as they had tied friendship bracelets around our wrists.
 

How do you break it to a child that you’re only going to be seeing them for four more days? That you’ll be returning to America and that you’re not sure when and if you’re going to return, that they won’t be seeing you every day like they have for the past seven weeks?

For the past couple of days we’ve been slowly letting our students in our Urdu and Telugu classes know that next week was our last week in India. Every day after class they stop us before we leave and ask, “Tomorrow? Coming tomorrow?” And like clockwork, for the past seven weeks we’ve replied “Yes, tomorrow.” or specifying which day we were coming, like “Monday. We’ll be here Monday.” But recently, we’ve added “We’re leaving soon.” to our usual reply. They paused a little, considering what we mean by “leaving.” We tell them we have six, five, and now four more days here. They think over this for a moment, and we can see their wide smiles starting to form a frown. But they don’t dwell on it and almost immediately start looking for confirmation that we’ll be here tomorrow.

Today we decided to make a general announcement to both our classes about our departure, so that it wouldn’t come as a surprise when we stop coming to class next week. We assembled our rowdy Urdu class as best as we could, screaming kids and all, and slowly told them that we were leaving for America next week and will be here for four more days. They gather around us and repeat in broken English what we’ve just told them, leading us to believe that they understood what we said, but us being gone after next week still had not sunken in yet.

However, when we told our Telugu class, the reaction was stunned silence. We stood in front of the class before today’s lesson (body parts and directions via Simon Says) and broke the news slowly; the class’ teacher was there in the room to help us explain. When we finished explaining, the children sat stock still, nobody making a single sound. After a few moments of uncomfortable silence, we ask them if they understand. One of our boys starts shaking his head. “What don’t you understand?” we ask him, knowing that he has a pretty good grasp of English. He continues to shake his head, more vigorously now, and like the silent class, we’re at a loss for words. But once we start playing Simon Says, the kids seemed to have returned to their normal lively selves, temporarily setting aside their disappointment and making the most of the rest of the time we have with them.
 

After a week and a half of trying to purchase tickets for a Tollywood movie, we finally succeeded and went to a showing of Ready (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ready_%28film%29) this afternoon. Movies are a big deal in India – it’s near impossible to be able to buy same-day tickets for a showing since movie-going is so popular. There are multiple __ollywoods according to region in addition to the well-known Bollywood. Ready is a Tollywood film, meaning most of its dialogue and singing is in Telugu, the local language. Unfortunately for us, there were no subtitles, so we were confused for most of the three-hour long film. The language barrier didn’t prevent us from being entertained though. The cinematography was so over the top and the song and dance scenes made us want to have a dance party right there in the theater. Anita and Mathavi were able to give us a debriefing of what was going on in the movie afterwards, so we weren’t completely lost as to what had happened.

Before going to the movie, we taught at Adigmet as usual in the morning. The more and more we look through the lessons in their English reader and workbook, the more we realize that the book is not applicable to the students’ lives and the nursery rhymes that the students memorize will not help them learn communicative English. Learning about Little Jack Horner pulling a plum out of his Christmas pie, trying the explain to 5th graders what Christmas is and what a pie is (festival and cake with fruit inside is what those are know to them as) does not engage both our Telugu and Urdu students enough to learn beyond rote memorization. We’ve decided to part from their English readers and we brought them children’s books that we have read ourselves as kids. Reading these books to them, I am reminded me of myself when I was learning to read – how did I put words together with meanings and turn these meanings into stories and understanding them? Was there an eureka moment when everything fell into place? How can this happen with our students?

In our Urdu class today, there was a surprising role reversal as the girls scrambled to teach us Urdu. I don’t think I’ve ever seen them so eager and focused before, when they would either look at us sullenly like we were assigning them menial labor or run around and wreck havoc. We were teaching them English words for body parts and one girl accidentally said the body part I was pointing to in Urdu. I repeated the word slowly and with a horrible accent that they were adamant to correct. Soon the other girls started pointing to various body parts and making sure that I repeated the Urdu words after them. They led me around the room, pointing at various objects and excitedly teaching me the Urdu words for them. They were excited to be in a role of giving information, a stark change from being on the receiving end that they’re used to.
 

Saris – one of the quintessential icons of Indian culture. It is said that the shape of India looks like a woman in a sari with her left arm extended, poised and graceful. Six yards of fabric artfully wrapped around the body, accentuating femininity and grace yet seemingly a huge hassle to put on. There are three main parts to a sari: a petticoat, which is like a long underskirt that goes under the part of the sari wrapped around your waist, a blouse, which covers up your bust and shoulders like a cropped undershirt, and finally the most visible part of the outfit – six yards of fabric folded and tucked into the petticoat, wrapped around the midsection, and draped over one shoulder, completing the look.

We started off at Kalanjali, a high end department store sporting the slogan “Our Weaves Are Our Worship” expecting to find the glamorous fabrics that we’ve seen in their billboards all over the city. We found them, sure enough, in a myriad of shades and patterns but they were overly expensive so we eventually had to decide on a balance between being functionality and glitziness, since we doubt we’d find many other occasions to wear saris again. After most of us purchased our saris, we had to buy matching blouses and petticoats.

Our quest for blouses and petticoats brought us to a sprawling open-air market called Big Bazaar. It had everything expected from a bazaar in the city – food, vegetables, cheap souvenir trinkets, and plenty of chaotic hustle and bustle. The petticoat stand blended in with its neighboring shops, but we were so surprised when we walked in and found ourselves surrounded by fabric in every hue imaginable. Rainbow reams of fabric lined the walls and were stacked up on shelves all the way up to the ceiling. The variety was overwhelming and we gladly handed over our saris to the shopworkers for them to find matching shades. Our experience at the blouse shop was similar, with colorful piles of fabric all over the floor of the shop in addition to stacks of blouses all along the walls. After three hours of hunting around Big Bazaar, we finally bought matching blouses and petticoats. The whole sari affair was great chance to see parts of Hyderabad we’ve never been to before and experience something routine that people living in the city would do day to day.

On our way back, we had an extended conversation with our lovable driver Mahesh that started with Hindi/Telugu/Kannada lessons (mostly him telling us how off our pronunciations are) and ended with us singing to each other – him, a film song in Telugu and some of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star that he remembered from fourth standard, and us Twinkle Twinkle in its entirety, leading to much laughter.
 

“Left! Left! No, back! Forward, right!!” The students in our Telugu class yell out directions to a blindfolded fellow student, trying to direct him to another student halfway across the room. Frantic gestures accompany shuffles as the children mime directions to the kid in the middle of the room with his hands over his eyes, tentatively stepping over bookbags strewn like obstacles across the floor, trying to hone in on a certain direction that will lead him to his waiting buddy.

We thought up this game to help our Telugu class learn and apply directions, but we didn’t think that this game would reflect our teaching experiences for the past four weeks since we arrived in Hyderabad. I remember our first couple of days visiting the schools we were teaching – we hung back, trying to take in everything that was going on in the classes. We were unsure of ourselves as teachers, feeling around for advice, direction, anything that could help us get a sense of where we can start and where to go with our students. Simultaneously confused and excited, plans were made, remade, scrapped and completely new ones thought up to replace them. Many people were consulted, from the Prasads whom we <3, to the headmasters of schools and local artists. All were extremely helpful in guiding us through the process of molding our lesson plans to the abilities and needs of our students.

Now, almost at the halfway point of our DukeEngage experience (for reals?), we feel like we have a good idea of where we’re going, confident that we’ve ironed out major kinks. We’re still forever adjusting our plans though, tweaking them to fit our students as they change and progress, but with less meandering with each passing day. We have a better sense of what’s going on around us, more in tune with the signs people are giving us and the direction they are nudging us towards. More and more we can judge what can be realistically accomplished in the time we have here and what we can do to help those goals along.