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There’s not much history of education in the area where we built our school, that’s why we built it there after all. But it means that there is also a shortage of people educated enough to be teachers; Ash and I found ourselves with a bit of a chicken and egg situation on our hands.

Something that is important to us at Educate for Life is building local capacity at all opportunities, it makes sense on so many levels that it just seems the most obvious thing to do. If we employ a local teacher, say from Bakhel, the village where our school is built, then first up they speak the local language, which is obviously pretty useful. Another quite obvious point is that they also understand the local customs and cultures, which can vary as much as the language does in India and are important to get right. Then there is the fact that we want our schools to compliment and be woven into the societies where we build them, and there is no better way than doing that than with everyone being local.

Read the rest here.

As part of an on-going process of making life at Educate for Life a bit clearer, we’ve made all our accounts available online. Read our Accountability page.

Ash has asked me to put a post up, as he can’t connect to the internet just at the moment.

I spoke to him in India yesterday for quite a while, or rather he spoke to me. He was so excited about all the great stuff that was going on that
he had an awful lot to say!

As I touched upon in my previous post, the teachers are really starting to shine. Ash described to me what we used to dream of creating in a school, a school where the children and teachers work together as equals, where everyone finds their work fulfilling and finds it its own source of motivation, where people get together and have useful, sensible discussions about what is going on at the school, which parts need attention and how they can make it better. A place where people are always looking for ways to further improve what is happening there, a place they feel proud of, can feel proud of themselves and feel like when they are working harder for the school, they are actually working harder for themselves. It seems that we are now a long, long way down the road to Hunar Ghar being like that, and we’re really very very happy about that indeed!

Ash and I set out 4 years ago to design a charity that is always redesigning itself, which can act as a space for all people concerned to
develop their greater potential and in doing so create space for people around them to do the same. Running the charity itself is one way it has allowed Ash and I to use more of our potentials, we can definitely see it in the children and the teachers too, but now the teachers are really seeing that increase in their potential too, and are working to expand upon that which is tremendous.

Hunar Ghar is not in a special village and it doesn’t have special people (ok, they are special to us, but you know what I mean ). Everyone involved are just regular people. These are the people that are described as primitive and backward, they are the poor and destitute masses, the poverty stricken third-world that apparently has no hope in life unless helped by the developed people. Yes, we have helped them, but we haven’t done it all for them as aid and development charities typically do. We’ve created a space for them to do things in and trusted in them as decent responsible people who know better what they need for themselves than we as outsiders do. We’ve helped them try again when it has gotten hard, and supported them through the process as people that we care about and that matter. Now that process is underway it will become more and more self-fulfilling and the importance of us will be come less and less, which is the key to sustainability. All the times when it’s looked too difficult and too dire, and we maybe slipped into doubting ourselves momentarily, are now long in the distance as the people of Hunar Ghar have show to us what they are capable of.

And this is what everyone is capable of and it is what schools normally deny them through forcing them to become dependent on teachers, and teaching all the wrong work ethic values, teaching and development that is focused around the ends and completely neglecting the means. It’s what development agencies take away from people by managing everything for them, making all the decisions and controlling everything. Schools and charities typically take space away from people by dictating to them how to behave and what to learn, but supported space is exactly what people need to find their own boundaries and find their own sense of responsibility. Just as it has been incredibly important for the development of Hunar Ghar that Ash and I have been away from there for long periods, as well as there, so in schools, and work, and society people need the opportunity to learn-self control, self-ability in a forgiving environment.

It’s hard not to be inspired by all the fantastic goings on at Hunar Ghar at them moment. The teachers and team have taken it and made it their own, and are even making Ash and I feel a little redundant! On Saturday the teachers invited Ash to sit in on some of their classes and asked him to provide some feedback; these are the same teachers who 20 months ago would sometimes storm off home when we asked them to do informal learning with the children.

I celebration of this(!), I have made special effort this last week to finish of the website redesign that I started a couple of months ago. Our website was stagnating, and did not represent the charity properly. We’ve updated the design, added more content, got rid of the old rubbish (there were still pages on there talking about us just starting a school!), added more photos, and over the next few weeks we’ll be adding more photos still as well as current videos of the school and information from around the inter-web that corroborates with our thoughts on education and development.

It should then be a more accurate account of the charity, increase transparency (such as our quarterly accounts in India being available for download) and clarity, and  will be a better resource for people interested in informal education and development.

Whilst sitting on the bus today I was pondering the paradoxical nature of Indian relationships and thought someone somewhere out there in the blogosphere might also be interested…

It was the sheer friendliness of people here that got me thinking. I know I’ve spent half of the past four years here, but it still surprises me sometimes. Everyone is incredible warm, welcoming and genuinely pleased to see you and a great deal is made of this being a cultural entity. However, I wonder how much of it may also be because the lack of any other form of social security. Not to undermine how great people are, but relationships are everything in India. If you need anything done, so much depends on who you know, if you’re ill or need someone to look after the kids, it’s always family and friends who are turned to and I’m sure this, to a large extent drives the social animal that is the average Indian.

On the other hand, there is also an aspect of Indian society which is totally contradictory to this. The hatred of the other. I suppose this is a universal human characteristic, but it’s amazing how many times people will treat other with complete disdain. I can think of 2 reasons things are this way, although it’s obviously more complex than this. One is the system of social organisation around religion and caste and the second is the sheer size of the population- both encourage the separation of people. With religion and caste, difference is encouraged because it also confirms your membership of your group, not merely because you wish to reject the other. Living as part of such a populous nation means that if your were too friendly, you’d end up with a lot of free-loaders (they have no social security after all).

Today, on the bus two ladies sat down next to each other and within minutes were talking as if they’d known each other since birth- a common occurence here- but a little later, the same ladies were incredibly rude to a local lady wanting to sit next to them, without any particular cause. This illustrates the seemingly contradictory management of relationships I was thinking about; I imagine it’s the same the world over, but just accentuated here.