DukeEngage | Duke Center for Civic Engagement

Today in class, Bethany, Jiajia, and I continued to perfect our teaching techniques at Safrani. Over the last couple of weeks, we have developed a system to harness the strengths of our Urdu and Telugu children while helping to address their weaknesses. For the first 20 minutes, Jiajia would go with the lowest testing students and work with them in small groups to improve their English. Bethany and I focused on writing activities for the rest of the students, including work with adjectives and vocabulary such as colors, shapes, and basic objects. After this, I work with advanced students on reading comprehension and vocabulary. Through our system, we have been able to address the needs of both the advanced, intermediate, and beginner students in one class period.

A few observations that I have made during our work with the students from Adigmet:

Many of these kids don’t even have pencils. Why is a mystery, because the majority of students seem to be well fed and have appropriate clothing. Pencils in India sell for a pittance even for the poor, which makes their lack of pencils even more frustrating.

The children continue to be eager, but must be kept busy. What many of us learned was that if you keep a group of fourth graders in a closed space with nothing to do, chaos soon ensues. We learned this on the first day, but it took us some time to develop a curriculum that was appropriate for the kids.

Without a stick, we must engage students by encouraging learning, not by punishing noncompliance. We saw soon into the program that the textbook had its drawbacks. Despite some good writing exercises, the book had some exercises that weren’t appropriate for the class level. To respond to this, we tried different projects such as Bingo and small group reading to get students involved in active, not passive learning.

The vocabulary is often a barrier to the students. Our efforts to introduce Bingo games and active learning have been effective in improving the vocabulary of the students. However, this is a long term commitment that we are trying to address with our AID posters.

Although our work has been very specific, I have often wrestled with the issues in India today. When we go to nice hotels or restaurants, I cannot help but thinking of the endless millions who do not have even running water, food, or sanitation. In a country without proper sanitation or water, millions enter the middle class every year. We laugh sometimes at the seven children crowded into a rickshaw meant for four, but each time it means a greater chance that one of them won’t make it home because of a lack of seatbelts. The lack of proper roads, water, safety, and sanitation makes it impossible for the country to grow. Only with a proper investment in India’s infrastructure and education will India be able to make the next step towards fulfilling the potential we see in our students every day.

On Tuesday, we continued to work with both the Safrani and Adigmet schools on their respective projects. As always, our first stop was at Adigmet to work with students on English language training. We focused more on isolating the students who needed work on the alphabet and helped them through most of the letters. The use of groups in the schools, especially for the Urdu classes, helps to bridge the language barrier while making us seem more welcoming to the students. The groups have been very successful in keeping students engaged and motivated throughout the class period.

At Safrani, we conducted our last day of drawing before we start painting the plywood boards for the art project. The students were very eager to continue drawing. To encourage them to draw new animals, we rearranged the pictures that they choose from to draw so that they were more likely to pick less drawn animals. Interestingly, this varied between grades, with some classes really excited about drawing rabbits while others were eager to draw fish. Our work at Safrani will continue on Thursday with the adding of colors that correspond to grass and clouds onto the plywood boards.
 

Tonight was Anita’s 21st birthday party and it was a party to remember, Indian style. Don’t get me wrong. We did not completely forget why we were in India. Today we went to the college we are working with and held our traditional Friday science experiment demonstrations and creative writing workshop. We also continued training our replacements to take over our jobs for when we leave and continued to set up a school student council, newspaper, community service club and drama club. However, once our work was done, it was party time.

We felt like it was prom night. We spent the past week getting our proper attire. The girls had to go to the tailor several times and ask for help dressing on multiple occasions to make perfect every detail. All six girls wore saris and bindis. Daniel and I wore traditional Indian formalwear, but I distinguished myself with my first turban. In order to capture the beauty of the moment, we spent about forty minutes taking pictures before we left. Looking at us, you would think we were heading out to an Indian wedding. The drivers were very impressed with our outfits and we were all excited to show them off at the party. The girls would probably not be the only girls at the party wearing saris, but we two boys would probably be the only males not in Western dress.

All four Prasads joined us for the party. We arrived at Chiraan Fort: “The Club for the Privileged” according to the slogan. The club is in the Deorhi Nazir Nawas Jung Building of the Palgah Palace Complex. Translation: it was really, really nice, first class, top notch as they say here. We sat at tables in the garden between the fountain and the palace’s imperial entrance. Anita got to meet many members of her extended family and reunite with family members she had not seen for a long time. Her uncle, who hosted and organized the festivities, is the club’s oldest member and saw to it that we all thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. I think Anita’s family was very excited that we all attempted to wear Indian formal clothes and much fun was had by all. The food was great and Anita’s uncle gave us a private tour inside the palace. We had a blast to put it mildly and were some of the last guests to leave the club.

We have certainly seen firsthand the two Indias on this trip: the India of the impoverished and the India of the privileged.
 

Today was another interesting day at both the government school and Safrani. At the government school, we continued to evolve our teaching techniques to better engage the children we are working with. Focusing on small groups has really helped to keep the students dedicated and focused on the task of learning English. The twist we have added in some of the sections is spending extra time with the lowest level students. With them, we are trying to focus on the mastery of the alphabet so that they can better comprehend more difficult words and phrases. For many of these students, the fact of life forces them to leave school at an early age to take care of their families. Even if we cannot teach them English to a level of fluency, having them even partially literate in English lets them function more easily in Indian life, where nearly all government signs and many ads are in English only.

At Safrani, we worked on the art project that we started a few weeks ago. Today, the children colored the pictures they had drawn in the previous week. Their drawings were very good and the coloring went well, with the students often finishing with time to spare. Their creativity was evident in the diverse array of colors they used for animals: pink zebras, green giraffes, and orange pandas were just some of the interesting color pairings. Most did use the normal colors for the animals they had drawn, but it was also nice to see them drawing with other colors as well.

Today was also Anita's 21st birthday. Following on our Bastille day celebrations, we added a 1kg cake with Happy Birthday Anita written on the cake, with Anita in Telugu. However, her cousin also brought a 1kg cake. Our current cake inventory is about 3.5 kg, owing to what we have eaten over the last two days. Regardless, the cakes were excellent and will be consumed quickly, hopefully by this weekend. Nothing like three cakes to celebrate an exciting beginning of the week.

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.