I got my visa today, so it’s all certain now! I only had to queue for 5 and a half hours… I consider it a little initiation into India – if one can’t handle the Indian embassy test, they should just holiday in Southend instead!
A week tomorrow I’ll be in India for the forth time. Now there’s a thought to cause apprehension. I’ve gotten rather used to life back in England, and looking back on what it was like for the six months last year, I wonder why on earth I’d want to go back.
The answer is of course that I love it there, and am bursting at the opportunity to do more hands on work. Yes things can be slow and frustrating, but frustration is something I have to deal with on a personal level, and speed isn’t of the essence, so long as we keep moving in the right direction. I also can’t wait to see Ash and work on the school together, in the same country, for the first time in a long time.
I came up to London today to get my visa. By the time I got here it was closed, so I’ll get it in the morning, and then that is last bit of paper work to complete before getting my passport stamped at Mumbai International!
I had a good chat with Ash today, and I got pretty excited about the fact I’m going to be out in India again in less than two weeks. Let’s hope they let me in, I overstayed my visa last time! (only by a day…)
Ash is coming down to Mumbai and we’re going to celebrate my birthday on the 8th down there, then head back up to the school together.
Ash had a pretty rough time of it today, with frustration, bemusement and threats of violence as he tried to get some bamboo for the school roof. You need to get a permit to collect bamboo from the forest, and we were told we’d missed the date on that and would have to pay some bribes. That turned out not to be true and after much struggling Ash got the permit. (in one swoop of a sentence there I missed out two months of struggling to get it, we can’t reiterate enough just how senseless it can all be sometimes!) When he went, permit in hand, to collect the bamboo today, he was told he couldn’t have it during day light hours. He said he had a legal permit, they then said he couldn’t take it during the day because the village (35km from our own, with our guys left in the lurch for 4 hours) would attack him. They then said he couldn’t take it at night because the men would get drunk and attack him. So no taking it during the day or night, being attacked either way?! They then told Ash that he needed to give them a day’s notice when he wanted the wood. He reminded them that he told them yesterday, then they ran out of excuses and Ash returned empty handed and hacked off – because they’d let him down he’d let down other people. Not good.
But some things are good. The other day one of the teachers, Bhugnesh, came running panting to the school apologising profusely for being late. Ash, who’d only jut turned up himself, asked him what the time was. ’9:02′, was his answer, and he was meant to be there by 9:00!
Ash counted that from a class of 30 odd children, between them in one month they’d had 150 days off school for being sick. No-one thought there was much they could do about this, but when Ash equated that in a meeting into lost work days and thus money, should they have been of working age, the head of the village came into school off his own back a couple of days later and checked out all the children, then went and spoke to the parents of the worst infect ones. These little anecdotes many not seem like much, but they are massively representative of a change in attitude towards the school and what the school can and should offer, and it’s encouraging to see such positive movements starting to seep out of the alphabet chanting and prior ‘that’s not my job’ attitude.
This post is in Hindi, I’m just testing to see if our blog can process non-latin characters. If all you see is random characters, you don’t have any Hindi fonts installed. This can be done easily enough, but you probably don’t need to know how! If you want to know, leave a comment to this post.
मूझे बहुत खुशी आति हैं क्योंकि मे जलदि भारत को वपस जाना हु।
Translation: I’m really happy because I’m going back to India soon!
OK, that’s about the extend of my Hindi, best get those books out again…
Finally, after months and months we have someone to take responsibility for our project. His name’s Deepak Sahlot, and although young (22!) and inexperienced I have high hopes for him. He’s got a lot to learn and in India, where every young professional seems to keep one eye on new job opportunities and better wages, it’s difficult to say how long he’ll be with us, but if he’s ready to put in a little work and learn an aweful lot he could be the face of Educate for Life India for a long long time.
I’ve been away from the school for a few days now, sorting out a system of accounting, briefing Deepak and being ill, but from tomorrow it’s back to the village for final preparations for Republic Day (26th January), with our kids putting on a singing, dancing and acting bonanza for the village.
Ed’s coming out to India on 7th February, and fear that he’ll not approve has made me stop and look again at what’s happening at the school from an outsiders perspective- in the grand scheme of things we still have a long way to go and you couldn’t even compare it schools in the privileged west, but it’s definitely heading in the right direction. In the beginning, building a school in the middle of nowhere was regarded by local people as an impossible fantasy, after a while they engaged and participated from a distance, following our lead but never really investing in the project themselves and now a handful of villagers are volunteering themselves to start up new community initiatives and take charge of things themselves- this is a huge shift in thinking, that has taken place in just 10months and gives me real hope, that with the right people (our coordinator) backing the villagers up, the whole village is in a position to really transform into a model for other villages and schools to follow.