DukeEngage | Duke Center for Civic Engagement

India celebrates Friendship Day on the first Sunday of August. This holiday usually spills over to Monday, as the majority of Friendship Day participants are children. In the schools, classmates give each other "friendship bands," which are ribbons with things written on them like "Best Friend" and "Friends Forever." Older students celebrate friendship day by going out to the clubs. Similar to Valentine's Day in the US, Friendship Day is heavily commercialized but also very sentimental. Both holidays celebrate the presence of loved ones.

The kids at Adigmet were buzzing over Friendship Day today. Many students ran up to me, extended their hands, and chirped "Happy Friendship Day, ma'am!" I shook their hands happily; some of them practically squealed with delight.

In our Telugu class, there is a boy named Shankar who I really like. He sits with the girls instead of the boys, and often tries to sit as close to me as he can. Though he may not know as much English as the rest of the students, he works quietly and diligently, and often draws matching pictures to accompany his sentences in English.

Shankar and I have also bonded over our love of food. When we were learning the alphabet, Shankar burst from his seat upon mention of the letter "i." "ICE CREAM!" He yelled as loud as he could. Shankar also asks me when he can eat lunch roughly every 5 minutes, but does it in such a sweet, unobtrusive way that I cannot help but sympathize with his growling belly.

When I came into class today, Shankar pulled me aside and held out his hand. He opened his palm to show me a plastic beaded bracelet of large alternating clear and rainbow-colored beads. Even though it was plastic, it was much nicer than any of the other Friendship Day bracelets, and was certainly not just a ribbon. "Happy Friendship Day," he said excitedly, and tried to put the bracelet on my wrist.

I felt really uncomfortable. Where did he get this bracelet, and why was it so much nicer than the others? Gently, I gave the bracelet back to him, and tried to explain that I couldn't accept it. He persisted. I felt guilty either way: if I accepted it, I would be succumbing to favoritism and knew that some other student probably deserved the bracelet more than I did; if I did not accept it, Shankar would be crushed. I walked up to the classroom to begin teaching the lesson. Shankar took his seat, the bracelet clutched in his hand.

At the end of class, Shankar approached me again.
"Please ma'am, for you" he begged, looking up with a face of complete earnestness. "I cannot, it is too beautiful, you keep it," I replied.

Shankar, believing that he was not understood, enlisted the help of one of his female friends to translate. Both tried to dangle the bracelet in my face. I realized this was getting ridiculous. I tried to convince his friend to take the bracelet, but she would not. Finally, I did the only thing I could think to do.

I placed the bracelet in Shankar's palm and closed his hand over it. Holding his hand, I said "You have many friends, Shankar. This is a beautiful bracelet--chala bagundi. Give to someone who needs it." He looked at me for a few seconds, and slowly began to smile. He stuck his hand in his pocket, the bracelet still clutched in his palm.

"You come tomorrow?" He said.

"Yes. Three more days, then back to America." I answered. Shankar hesitated for a moment, then ran out of the class to join his friends for lunch.

Today Adigmet was closed for a holiday. All of the classroom doors were padlocked shut except the one closest to the entrance. Inside that classroom were two teachers, the headmaster, and about 12 kids. All the children ran outside to see us; the adults slowly followed, lost in conversation.

Beyond the walls of the school, it was monsooning. It was lightly raining, as it had been for the past two days. Everything had a lush coating over it, as if an artist had suddenly decided to paint over his picture much more vividly. Colors were deep and contrasting. The pink blooms on the giant flower bush in the middle of the school stood out like Lucky Charms red balloons in a bowl of milk. I suddenly felt very hungry.

Two girls from my Urdu class skipped over to say hi. They were the only students from my Urdu class still at the school. They laughed and pointed to the goosebumps on my arm. The monsoon has made the air chilly, with a sharp wind. I swear the temperature has dropped twenty degrees in the last few days. It feels amazing. One girl was wearing a light blue transparent stole over a thick black oversized raincoat.

The kids gathered around us, but they weren’t shouting and trying to grab us like usual. Something about the novelty of our appearance on a school-less day made them calm. A couple of them went off to go play futbol, a couple more ran over and tried to talk to us in broken English, but most were just content to talk with their friends while watching us. I had a giant urge to jump at them and yell “boooo!” just to see what they would do. The school was never so quiet.

Even though we may furrow our brows and grow hoarse from shouting, we love these kids. Though they may not know have to behave properly, they have a certain kind of joy around them that only comes from innocence. Yet these kids have faced more that I probably ever will. They bring a kind of resiliency to the classroom. “Don’t touch me, or I’ll fight you!” “I’m going to yell as loud as I can continuously in an obnoxious high-pitched voice so that you will notice me!” “I will stand in your window and throw rocks at you just so that you will come over and tell me to go away!” All of their behavior issues are just cries for attention. We try every day to return this attention positively in hopes that they understand just how valuable—and easy—learning can be.

After several minutes, we wave goodbye to the children, tell them we’ll be back tomorrow, and descend into the muddy bowl of the outdoors.

The raindrops slowly turn our footprints into puddles leading towards the exit.

The following post should be read with this song playing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaGSexu6qzc

This is the soundtrack of our time in the car.

This song, entitled "Cinema Cinema," has quickly grown into a group favorite. Radio Mirchi ("Spicy Radio" in Telugu) plays "Cinema Cinema" as one of about 30 songs on its playlist throughout the day; it's the Indian Top 40 equivalent. Radio Mirchi songs differ from American ones in the respect that they all come from Bollywood or Tollywood movies, and each song lasts approximately seven minutes. In between, we listen to almost as many station identifications as commericials, so that 10 minutes of commercials may follow each song. Each commercial or station identification (the two are practically synonymous) may not have the pulsating techno beat of its Bollywood counterparts, but nevertheless remains entertaining. We sometimes make a little game out of identifying the Hindi and Telugu words we recognize from the commercials and songs.

Radio Mirchi plays the soundtrack to our lives in the car. For hours each day, our trusty driver (Ravi, Jagdeep, Shyam, or Mahesh) weaves through Hyderabad traffic, darting as quickly as possible to our next destination: school, reflection session, stationary shop. Our drivers nimbly avoid every car, pedestrian, or cow that blocks our path. Our car lurches over bumps, swerves to avoid rickshaws, and is fluent in the ever-daunting language of Car Horn Honkingese. The relationship of the car and the road is one of tact, finesse, and just a pinch of bravado. Sometimes I am surprised that we reach our destination in one piece, yet at the same time I never doubt our safety.

American traffic moves like flies buzzing. It may be sparse, but every driver thinks solely of him or herself and disregards others unless they hinder their travel. Indian traffic moves like raindrops on a roof. Cars, rickshaws, motorcycles, trucks, and scooters start in different destinations, pool into a gutter (or major thoroughfare), move together seamlessly and then disperse and evaporate, individual once again. In other words, traffic may look haphazard, but it flows.

It is this flowing motion that often lulls us into naps. Over time, the jerking and jarring becomes almost like a giant cradle rocking us to sleep. Of course, the intensity and effectiveness of this "cradle rocking" depends upon our individual car seats.

Within the car, each one of us has the option of taking one of the following seats:
1) Front seat (1): this seat is the most spacious, and is usually reserved either for the tallest member of our party or anyone who is feeling motion sickness from the roads. Sometimes, one of us may make a special request with the group to sit in the front so that we can carry on a conversation with our driver.
2) Middle seats (3): These seats are coveted, due to the fact that they absorb most of the shock from the roads. Though these seats are often the first taken in the car, we subconsciously rotate the seat order as a group for the purpose of true seat equality.
3) Back seats perpendicular to middle seats (2): In the back of our car, we have two benches that each fit two passengers. The seats closest to the middle seats are a little more comfortable for the reason that you can lay your head on the back of the middle seats' armrests and take a quick nap.
4) Back seats closest to the door (2): Watch your head! Occupants of these seats sit directly above the back wheels, and often have to be careful of their heads when we travel over speed bumps or brake quickly.

The back bench occupants often tend to be more chatty, often because it is less comfortable to sleep. Even so, as our car zigzags through the seemingly unpenetrable mass of congestion, we all eventually drop off into sleep. The sweet sounds of Radio Mirchi play in our dreams.

It starts about midway through our second hour of teaching today. There I am, pointing to the sentence "Mother is in the kitchen" to our Telugu kids, my hands white with chalk dust, and my ankles start to ache. It feels like a dull headache, or a bruise, but constant and just in front of my Achilles tendons. It doesn't go away.

After the kids are busy writing about cutting vegetables and boiling rice, I survey the damage. Yup, they're swollen like usual--a tender bump on either side of my tendon, just behind the fibula bone. Sweet.

My ankles belong to a pregnant woman who's eaten nothing but soy sauce for three days straight. Don't worry though Mom--this swelling is from the heat.

Coming from the land commonly referred to as Dixie, I thought a little heat and humidity was nothing. If I could stand a day-long Civil War reenactment where it's 95 degrees in the shade, India would be a piece of Bastille Day cake (more on that later). Oh, but I forgot about a modern convenience that many parts of India (and my southern ancestors) lack: a little bit of A/C.

Air conditioning, oh air conditioning, how I love thee. You take away heat AND humidity! You dry my sweat, you make me not feel lightheaded, you help me sleep at night. You help me look and smell good all day. You make my life complete.

At all of our project sites, we forgo the glory of air conditioning. Usually it isn't too bad with a light breeze, but some days (like today) the heat index can top 100. That's when things start to get sticky--literally. We just keep drinking water and doing a bit of character building of which we have grown so adept. It's no big deal, really.

Today the air conditioning stopped working in our car. Apparently there's a diesel shortage in Hyderabad, which somehow correlates with the fact that the air conditioning would only work when our driver was braking. For the first day ever, we hoped to get stuck in traffic. Otherwise, we would hotter than the cast of 300.

I guess for some people it's not that bad. Jiajia, from Beijing, notes that she's used to the heat because many places in China are without glorious A/C. She's a trooper, unlike the rest of us.

The less hardy members of the group seem to be coping with the heat as easily as I am. Alice, my roommate, also shares my love of our air conditioner for a different reason: before we go to bed, we spray DEET into the air conditioner so that it will circulate around the room and and kill all of the mosquitoes that bite our faces at night. This will ensure that no part of our body is swollen from neither heat nor insect chomps. Also, over the weekend, our power went out, along with the awe-inspiring A/C; people were unable to return to sleep once they started to sweat and ended up waking for the day Saturday morning at around 8 AM.


This story, like all others, has a moral: air conditioning is just that--conditioning of air. We are trained to be cold. It's true--I would salivate at the thought of coldness, but I am already too dehydrated to do so. All I can do is run my swollen ankles upstairs and bask in the rare glory of dehumidified bliss.

PS Today we bought 2 kilograms of cake to celebrate Bastille Day. We also bought another cake for Anita's birthday, which is tomorrow. Collectively, we have spent over 1000 rupees on 6 kg of cake in the last two weeks. Don't worry though--the heat keeps us thin.

Pranayama, the yogic art of deep breathing, promises to reduce stress and develop a steady mind. The Prasads informed us that we would begin instruction in Pranayama next week. Proponents of this ancient art claim that a mastery of Pranayama is the only physical exercise one will ever need. That's good, because after a full exhausting day of child wrangling, a little bit of deep breathing is the only exercise I can stand.

Each day at the Adigmet government school, our exercise is the dangerous tightrope walk between the discipline of students and the discipline of ourselves.

Our third through fifth grade students' English abilities barely extend beyond knowledge of the alphabet. Many come from abusive households, others may get their only meal of the day through the free lunch program at school. We cannot expect these children to understand most of what we are saying, nor can we expect some of them to afford pencils and notebooks. Still, we try.

It's just that the discipline barrier easily supersedes the language barrier.

Every time we teach, we face a range of challenges. Kids from other classes run into ours, and make almost as much noise as our kids do when they scream at them to go away. We will lock the doors and windows, but the students will hit and throw rocks at them in hopes of our acquiescence. Inside the classroom, kids will have screaming contests, oblivious to our constant shushing. Some kid will slam a book on another's head, which incites a fight.

Once I had to literally pull apart two clawing girls who were caught in a vicious catfight in the back of my classroom. One of them had taken a lunch tiffin, not knowing that the tiffin's owner would communicate her need for its return by kicking, punching, hair-pulling, and biting. Doing all she could to fight back, the tiffin-stealer feebly tried to hold off the sharp slaps of the tiffin-owner with a few jabs of her own, quietly sobbing. I don't know if she was crying from hurt or fear. The tiffin lay on the floor, forgotten. Both girls were ten years old. Neither was actually in my class.

We can almost sense when a behavioral eruption will occur. We learn to sense the subtle changes in the social barometer, which is almost always followed by a raised decibel level. We watch for flailing limbs; we listen for too-loud laughter and the "phwack" sound of one kid smacking another upside the head with our textbook. And slowly, we learn to navigate through the storm of children who have never learned another way to make someone listen to them. We listen--sometimes too much, because we are nervous and unsure of what to do--and we continue to listen. Sometimes, when even our loudest shouts are not loud enough, we can do nothing but listen.

We must discipline ourselves before we can discipline them. As much as we can teach the kids the art of silence, they can also teach us the art of patience. And man, do I need it. Each day brings about its own challenges, but slowly becomes easier than the last. Soon, maybe we won't even need Pranayama--we'll have had to develop our own deep breathing tactics in the field.