My plans for overlanding it to Japan from India are in better shape today than they were last week. I worked out the core route and feasibility some months ago, but I’m off to Delhi next week to try getting my Chinese and Pakistani visas. I also hope to book my return flight from Japan in the next few days. That done, it will just be a matter of doing the actual trip.

I intend to hitch quite a lot of it, and couchsurf where I can. Hopefully that will make the trip more interesting, but I’m still aware that I’ll be moving fairly rapidly over a long distance, so I’ll be skimming over the surface of most of the life and culture. That skimming should stop when I get to Japan. First, because I’ll be with my brother who lives there, and second because I intend on working on an organic farm in some mountains for a few weeks, so I’ll get to know a little area in a bit more detail.

I’m not looking forward to going to Delhi, but hey-ho, it’s got to be done! With my visas sorted I can focus more easily on Hunar Ghar until I go.

I’ve been getting a bit hassled by the police this week, as has Deepak because of his association with me which I feel slightly bad about but I can’t do much to change that situation.

On our way back from MGIS last week we got off the bus on the main highway about 7 km from our house. It was 1am and at that time there is no transport so we decided to walk. Much to our bad luck we ran into some police. It wouldn’t be such a problem ordinarily but the combination of my being white and us saying we intended to walk 7 km through a couple of ‘tribal’ villages (which many a bigoted, idiotic, narrow-minded and racist police or town person consider u:ber dangerous) was too much for them to cope with.

Our exchange lasted about 15 minutes with them interchangeably threatening to put us in jail for the night/make us sleep on the street in the town/send us to our friends house/let us go, and likewise talking in a reasonable way before every so often going off on one barking and garbling nonsense when all I wanted to do was get going and go to bed. That meeting finished with a car arriving that was going our way which they waved down and chucked us in the back and we got home a little earlier than if we had walked anyway. It was unfortunate that none of the policemen had ever seen me before, despite the fact my being associated with that town for over two years. If it had been the middle of the day I could have taken them on a walking tour of shop keepers and chai wallas who could vouch that I’d been there for quite some time.

That was Thursday night. On Sunday the police from our village turned up asking for my passport and visa ( which I’d already given to them several months ago). These police are more civil, and we popped over to the police station later that day with all the bits of bureaucracy they were after. We were lightly interrogated by a policeman claiming to know nothing about me and what we were doing, despite us having explained it to him all before. He then said I couldn’t live there without permission from the District Collector. I pointed out that that is true, but said we’d go and get the permission. To this he responded that actually, I couldn’t live here anyway. He doesn’t care where I live, so long as it isn’t on his beat. As it happens Deepak and I were thinking of moving to Mandwa which is a town right by the village where Hunar Ghar is as there will soon be mobile connection there. It will save two hours a day on the motorbike which will be great. But we don’t want to be ‘blacklisted’ from where we are now, as that has it’s uses too.

The main problem is, I think, that if something happens to me they seriously get it in the neck from their superiors who’d face bit pressure from the UK authorities. As far as they are concerned the villagers are all pretty much blood-thirsty murderers, so in their eyes I’m in danger. I explained that I understood that (not the bit about them being a bunch of killers) and that I would probably have even greater preference to my staying safe than he does, but that didn’t swing it and I was order to leave the next morning. I was coming to Udaipur the next morning anyway so no problems there, and I’ve now got the wheels of contacts going to try and get the situation sorted.

Dogmatic views of people that result in a generic racism is a disasterous problem, and not just in India. As a British middle-class white man I’m in the section of society that is probably least likely to ever be on the receiving end of exclusion. In some ways then I’m lucky to experience what it feels like to be continuously segregated. Whether it is the stares that follow me down the street, the children shouting out at me on a daily basis, the people that walk into my house and question me, the very occasional stone thrown or the police hassling me, I can know to some small degree what it feels like for too many non-whites in the UK, and the endemic racism faced by nationals worldwide. It is remarkable what a little novelty and lack of knowledge about another can create. It’s even more remarkable how widely acceptable negative values are. All it takes is the ability to have autonomous thought, but sadly that is greatly lacking so populations just go with thinking what other people thinks, doing what other people do and blindly following the suggestions of the media as to what they should think.

Where that leaves me now I’m not sure. I wanted to go back and stay in the village tonight, but I’ve spent too much time on the computer this morning to be able to reach there today, and am slightly wary about staying in Rohida. It is an extra complication that I would rather not have to think about at the moment.

Things I need to do since Ash left and before I go, in brief:

• Arrange eye tests for all our children and staff
• Visit MGIS again
• Arrange teacher training for our teachers at MGIS
• Sort land allotment
• Have a village meeting
• Hire two more new female teachers
• Hire another ‘Deepak’
• Give Deepak an introduction to Rishi Valley materials
• Give our teachers training in Rishi Valley materials
• Build (or get going on building) two new rooms
• Get folding tables made for the current rooms
• Enrol 30 new children
• Make our budget
• Set in place or new phase-wise structure and assign phase co-ordinators
• Get Pakistan and China visas
• Cross off the last thing on the list

Hmm, although it doesn’t look like I’m doing terribly well a few of them are near being done, but not quite. Six weeks and counting!

…Staff

Deepak has confirmed that he will stay for at least another year, until January 2010. Preeti and Raj Kumar, our new teachers, have also confirmed that they will stay. We met Gopal today, a man who works for RBKS in the same area as us, and he said he has a couple of women in mind for being the two other new teachers we are looking for. By the end of next week we may have all our staff problems sorted, except for the person to help Deepak in his work.

Understanding

Today we had a discussion about discussing things and the relatedness of everything. Everyone contributed really well and I think they began to understand how this relates to learning in Hunar Ghar. Want the children to learn how to write neatly? Let them learn to sew and make necklaces by threading beads onto string. They enjoy this immensely and it develops the necessary fine motor skills. We talked about everything having meaning and making more sense in context, and I think this made sense to them. We talked about experience making things easier to understand. Want the children to learn about evaporation? Leave some water in a glass for a few days or go to the kitchen and boil some water. We talked about the difference between learning (something I do) and teaching (something that is done to me) and the implications of this. I really think a deeper understanding of Hunar Ghar came to the teachers today.

Job

We were at MGIS and I asked for a job. Pascal, a co-founder and ‘principle’, said yes.

Rain

Lots of it, so people’s crops are doing well.

Deepak

The trip to MGIS was very god for his understanding, he’s really grasping the depth of learning possible at Hunar Ghar, beyound a string of activities.

Ash and I revisited Mahatma Gandhi International School in Ahmedabad a couple of days ago. It is from there we took inspiration in the field of project based learning. I remember, when we first went, thingking what a simple idea it is yet one with such massive scope. Infinite, in fact. I just wish our facilitators could see it the same way!

Hopefully they will soon; the people of MGIS are really ace people who are open to what we are creating at Hunar Ghar. Next week we’re going to visit them again with Deepak and our facilitator trainer, Paras Metha, for a couple of days. We were chatting with one of the teachers (who happened to introduced us to the royal family of Sirohi, the district where we live. I can’t wait to find out what royal chai tastes like!) when Anjou, the headmistress came over and said we should bring down all 6/8  (depending on when we hire them)  of our facilitators to go through some training with theirs. That, if we can go about it in a really meaningful way, could be totally fantastic.

I hope also that MGIS will use Educate for Life and Hunar Ghar as a learning tool; our schools are very different and invovled very different people but we’re working for similar ideals and the different expression of these ideas and values is really interesting. The rural and urban are really different learning environments and it could be great for our kids to exchange and see whether these preparations for life we are trying to give them really holds true!