Happy Pongal!

Hello Everyone!

Well, it has been an eventful couple of weeks since I returned to Dharmapuri. Back in Canada, the holiday excitement kind of dies down around New Years, especially for those of us who believe that no holiday between New Years' and Easter is worth celebrating (Valentine's Day? Family Day? Puh-lease.)

In India, this is different. January marks the festival of Pongal, a harvest celebration which I have been told is sort of analogous to Thanksgiving. In rural areas it's a huge deal, since a lot of people in these parts go to various cities or other areas for work. Pongal is when almost all families are reunited, and everyone comes back to their native towns and villages for a celebration.

In addition to this, Pongal is when Puvidham has their annual day. This is because it has always been difficult to get the parents to come to school at any other time of the year, for the same reasons as above. The annual day is done during the Pongal festivities, so that everyone can see what their children's school has been up to. Of course, this runs into the difficulty that the children must be absent from their festivities because they are preparing for their annual day.

Strangely, though, no-one really seemed to mind much, and all the kids were really intent on practicing their dramas, songs and dances all day, every day, with the teachers throwing in whatever revision they could during the down time. For my part, I spent some time with the fifth grade class as they rehearsed their drama and their dance, set to a song from a Tamil movie. Not much help was needed, though -- by the date of the performance, they not only knew their own lines, but also the lines of most of the other children!

One highlight for me was going to the hostel a couple of days before the big event to participate in their Pongal celebration. Since the whole point is to celebrate the bounty of the crops, there was a lot of good food! First they made an offering out of some rice and curry, spread out over a banana leaf and covered with bananas and jaggery (a sugar byproduct, I can only liken it to hardened molasses). Then they lit incense and set fire to a few sugar bricks to cries of 'pongaloo pongal!' While I was really interested in everything that was going on, I was secretly really anxious about all the good food I saw before me, well, not getting eaten. How do these things work? Luckily, only some of it was 'offered,' the rest was portioned off among all the children in sweet jaggery-filled rice-and-curry balls (if you're not salivating now, you really should be). The whole things was fairly short though, just a few minutes and then some more for photos, followed by a lunch so big neither me nor any of the kids could really move afterward.

It was hard for most people to even get nervous by the big day, since they had prepared so much for the presentations. The overriding sentiment was just one of complete excitement, which really got intense from about 4 PM on, when the kids began their two-hour-long makeup and dress session. Everyone, from kindergarteners on up, had themselves covered in makeup, from eyeshadow and bright red lipstick to fake moustaches to a sort of white foundation. Full disclosure, a) I know nothing about makeup so the above may not be accurate, and  b)I thought a few of the kids looked a bit like scary clowns because of the combination of that cream and the red lipstick (which was applied by absolutely everyone).

The presentations were a lot of fun, everything went perfectly and the parents seemed to really enjoy it -- so much so, that they gave their unanimous vote to having it remain at Pongal time (possibly to the disappointment of some of their children). In addition to the dramas and dances, two of the first graduates of the school came up and told the parents about how they were doing, and what they were studying. A visiting dignitary also came from the National Child Labour Program, which supports the work of the school, and gave a very nice speech -- I understood very little of it, but he was talking about the school's history and how it is an example for other schools in the district. He used the analogy of a rice paddy, which one has to nurture carefully in a small plot before planting the larger field, and said that the school was like that small, well-tended plot. Neat!

That is it for now, I promise pictures of all of the above will follow!

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

Okay, it's coming a bit late, but I figure it's only the second week of 2011 so I'm not that far off!

...I just realized that it is actually the second week of 2011, and I panicked a little. Where did 2010 go?

Part of the reason I am surprised at how quickly 2011 has appeared is that I spend the last few days of 2010 having the best time I've had in a while. The reason? My family came over on the 19th of December, and spent an amazing three weeks in the country. While the story of their visit may not be as exciting as the holiday travels of some of my colleagues, it was lot of fun and makes for a good story/blog post!

(Disclaimer: the holidays were a bit of a family reunion for me, so the blog post which follows is a lot about the family. If you are a member of my family, or someone who knows my family, this entry will probably be quite entertaining. Otherwise, I make no promises! Also this is easily the longest post I have ever written, so apologies to everyone about that)

As mentioned in my previous blog post, I spent the last week before my parents came at Timbaktu, in Andhra Pradesh. While it was an excellent experience, towards the end I really found it hard to concentrate on anything except the pending family reunion. From the time my parents' plane touched down at 4:30 AM on the 20th, my life was a series of double takes – it was really weird seeing my family in settings that I had associated with not being with my family.

Anyway, the first few days were pretty chill, we took it easy until my brother's flight landed on the 24th. Since my mother was catching up with her siblings, my father and I spent a lot of time wandering the airport. My father has an avowed hated of all things touristy, so we just roamed around randomly, our 'sightseeing' consisting of crowded Bangalore markets and whichever plants caught his eye. For those of you who don't know, both my parents trained as botanists, and are unable to turn the 'botany' part of their brains off.

My brother came to Bangalore on the 24th of December. His flight was rerouted to Kochi (Cochin) in Kerala due to heavy fog in Bangalore, and was delayed by about 8 hours. In a show of sibling devotion that I will never let him forget as long as he lives, I waited at the airport for a good 7-8 hours, alone, for his flight to land.

Since JS (my brother) only had a week in India, things got hectic the day he arrived. On Christmas day, which, as other have pointed out, feels nothing like Christmas if you are not freezing your buns off, we headed to Dharmapuri to visit Puvidham. He, my father, and I stayed the night and into the 26th, and my father taught a botany lesson that morning. After a few hours of nomenclature and sketches of flowers, we had a nice lunch with all the kids at the hostel and were off. Shout out to Raju for driving us back to Bangalore and showing us the scenic shortcut while you were at it!

The real action began the day after we got back from Dharmapuri, when all the aunts, uncles, and cousins from Bangalore piled into a 12-seater minibus and headed off to visit my aunt in Hyderabad. Hyderabad is about 600 kilometres from Bangalore (roughly the distance between Toronto and Montreal), and given the swanky new highway that had just been completed, it was possible to make the journey in just 8 hours.

On the way there, we made a bit of a detour, however. You see, my mother had been born in a small village between Hyderabad and Bangalore named Koilkuntla. I had always wanted to see it, and it sort of held a place of mystery in family lore since my mother always talked about it but on our previous visits to India, forbade us from going there because the sight of village India would, apparently, overwhelm our delicate Western bodies and we would surely fall ill and die.

Well, as I pointed out about a month before they were to land, I had survived being in a village far smaller than Koilkuntla for the better part of four months now, and nothing untoward had happened to me. After some more begging, pleading, and rationalizing, my mother caved, though she still wondered aloud why on earth we would want to go to a place like that.

The road to Koilkuntla is a sizeable detour off of the main road, and involves driving through vast fields of sorghum, chickpeas, and groundnuts, as well as the many small villages, the odd town, and one truly massive cement factory seemingly in the middle of nowhere, sort of attached to the side of a mountain. We measured our progress by our proximity to the nearby town of Owk, which no-one could pronounce without giggling a little (or a lot; my family is very, very easily amused).

Once we got into Koilkuntla, we were immediately greeted by an immense throng of great aunts, great uncles, and more cousins that I knew existed. Since my father is an only child, and I had only met my mother's siblings in my previous trips, I think it is fair to say that in my first five minutes in Koilkuntla, the number of family members that I knew was doubled. We were immediately treated to a massive meal of rice, sambaar, vegetable and chicken curries, sorghum rotis and a sort of sorghum porridge (specially requested by my mother). We ate to our hearts content and thanked our hosts profusely.

Eating that much turned out to have been a mistake, however, because we then embarked on a tour of the houses of all the relatives who were not at the first house (yes, there were more! I now know where all my family is hiding). Everyone offered us tea, coffee, snacks, another meal, all of which we declined. However, Indian hospitality is Indian hospitality, and polite refusals are merely a sign to one's host that they should try harder to persuade you.

The houses were a blur of unfamiliar-yet-familiar faces. One face stands out, that of a great uncle, my grandmother's younger brother, who, from photos I have seen from his youth, was a spitting image of me some 50 years ago. During the visit, I came face-to-face with this great uncle, realized that I was looking at a five-foot-tall version of my 75-year-old self. The experience was jarring to say the least and I have spent the intervening time denying all resemblance to said great uncle and claiming that I was really adopted.

As we passed from place to place, I remember my mother, aunts and uncle being shocked at how much the houses of their childhood had shrunk, both literally and figuratively – most of the houses have passed on to multiple children, who have since divided one small house into two or three smaller ones, putting up walls in the middle and filling in courtyards. The entranceway that my mother once came through on her way home from school now has a wall placed in the middle of it, and a house has been built on the spot where their tamarind tree once stood.

We stayed the night in Koilkuntla in a guest house that was, contrary to my mother's warnings, quite clean and well-kept. We left for Hyderabad the next morning, begging the forgiveness of my aunt there for shortening an already brief visit by our stay in Koilkuntla.

Our stay in Hyderabad was fairly short and relaxed, but fun – we spent time with our youngest cousins and their new, hyperactive puppy (who is shaping up to be quite the guard dog, waking up the entire house at 1 in the morning because my father had stepped out of his bedroom to check his e-mail).

Definitely the highlight of the visit was a drama put on by the three younger cousins called “The Adventurous Sisters and the Murder in Egypt.” Any agents out there should sign these kids right away because they definitely have potential. And, to boot, the play was written and rehearsed in under three days! Once the Adventurous Sisters had cleared the stage, every other member of the family was called upon to do their bit as well. For some people, this was not a challenge: my brother, who is himself a talented actor, did one of the monologues he is giving to theatre schools across the country (break a leg, JS!). My mother and her two younger sisters, who possess an encyclopedic knowledge of Hindi movie songs of the 1950s through 1970s, did an eerily impressive song-on-demand session. My father cheated and sang the lullabies he sang from my brother and me. I impressed the assembled gathering with my complete inability to sing anything, even old lullabies, in tune.

That was the Hyderabad visit. The next day we headed back to Bangalore by the direct route, and I promptly fell asleep when we got back. I awoke the next morning to be informed that it was a new year and that I had missed a terrible party on the apartment's rooftop. The next day, my brother left for Vancouver and my father and I fled Bangalore, which now housed the fearsome Hindi-singing-trio of sisters (kidding, mother and aunties!).

Actually, my father and I wanted to go back to Puvidham to continue the botany lessons that he had started. The folks at Puvidham had indicated that they wanted some more classes for the children, and they also wanted my father to advise them on creating a herbarium which would record all the plants that grow in the reforested area around the school. The next three days were a blur of a lot of us learning about plants and how to classify and collect them. Perhaps because I haven't been doing anything science-y since I got here, I was really keen to learn about all the tricks of the trade, and have been collecting and classifying plants with the kids and teachers here hand over fist ever since. More on that later.

There's not much left to say about the visit – the next day we headed back to Bangalore by train and spent a day together with everyone before my parents headed back home. Then I went back to Puvidham. All in all, a quality vacation! Thanks for coming, parents, and thanks to all the family who made those three weeks possible and awesome!

Oh, one last thing – I couldn't figure out initually what to write for my first blog of the New Year, so I made a few 'resolutions' which were really more like observations but which seemed appropriate given the New Year's mood I was in. So, without further adieu, some thoughts:

1.I think that the ability to spend more time with my Indian family is one of the most positive aspects of my placement here. Before starting placement, I had spent a lifetime total of four weeks in India, during two visits in 1997 and 2005. I've been getting to know them a lot better and they've shown me a lot of things I would not have seen if I had come here, so to speak, on my own. I've always wanted to come to India for a longer period of time, and I am glad that placement has offered me the opportunity to do so. In 2011, I would like to keep spending time with the family, and especially make a return to Koilkuntla, for a longer period this time.

2.Related to #1, I am realizing just how crucial being able to speak the language is here. I've been trying to pick up more and more Tamil and, to a lesser extent, Hindi, but it has been slow going and I feel that I have not made much progress at all in that area. There are some times I feel like I should have gone to a country where I would not be so clueless, language-wise, even though I am really enjoying it here. Anyway, I'm not one for New Years resolutions, but I know that I need to step up my efforts in terms of learning the language, and quick!

Thanks for reading! If you're interested, check out my parents' New Years Greetings, which has their take on the trip, and also the placement map from my previous post, which now includes the route taken on the Koilkuntla-Hyderabad trip!

Merry Christmas!

Hello again!

So before I leave for our Hyderabad trip, I thought I'd share some pictures from the last few weeks, from the Field Trip posts below (note: this is the second of two posts, see below for the other one).


Since the pictures are taking a while to upload, a funny story. So Elonnai, another IDSer who is doing her placement in Bangalore, invited me out with some of her friends here to a trivia night at a pub. I felt pretty in the zone, since random knowledge and drinking are two of my real strong suits. Things are doing pretty well, and our team was cleaning up (we ended up coming in second). Anyway, the MC was saying something about Australia and asked if there were any Aussies in the crowd. There being none, the bar kind of went into an awkward silence, which Elonnai and I, in a bout of inspiration, decided to break by shouting "Hey, we're Canadians!" To which the MC looked right at me and said "Canadian? No, no, no, anna! You are South Indian only!" He then proceeded to tease me in Tamil and ask about how much I liked Rajnikanth (a famous Tamil actor). It was at that moment that I realized that thanks to my moustache, a remnant of Movember, I was definitely the most desi-looking person in the bar, including the actual desis, most of whom were clean-shaven and in jeans and t-shirts. Possibly this is a sign I should shave?

Anyway, fun times. Here, have some pictures! I am sure that is what everyone wanted for Christmas. This first album is a collection of pictures from the field trip to the dam, and my time at Timbaktu in Andhra, both of which you can read about in the previous posts.



The next album is one which I was totally going to write a blog post for but then I didn't. Long story short, I saw a bunch of temples back in October. Enjoy!


Finally, the piece de resistance: a map of all my travels. I had a pretty awesome nerd-out session with Google Maps and made a map showing all the trips I have made so far. This includes the exact location of Puvidham, found via satellite map and my map reading skills (thanks, Remote Sensing course!), as well as the (almost) exact road routes I took in getting places. Why? Why not? (for best results, click the link below to see it in a new window)


View India Placement in a larger map

Field Trip number two!

Dear readers,

The last two weeks of my life have been pretty hectic! A couple of days after the field trip mentioned in the last blog post, I headed out to visit another school in Andhra Pradesh for a while. After coming back, everything was a rush of activity as my parents, and then my brother, arrived from Canada (woo!) and we've been showing them around. Tomorrow, we set off in a giant 12-seater van for the second ever epic massive road trip to Hyderabad, compliments of the Shaik clan (aka my mother's family). The first ever was during my last visit to India in 2005, and the Andhra countryside has only just recovered.

But first things first. My visit to Andhra two weeks ago was pretty amazing, so I'll start there.

When I started working on an 'alternative' curriculum project back in September, it did not take long for us to realize that I could not really understand a large part of the exercise, since I had no idea of what 'alternative education really meant, in an Indian context. We decided that the best thing to do would be for me to visit a number of other schools to figure out how things ran, so that I could better understand the environment in which the school operates. So far, I have vaguely-formed plans to visit a few schools all over the map, but the first one to work out was one called Timbaktu, in Andhra Pradesh. After a few phone calls and e-mails and setting of dates, away I went!

The Timbaktu Collective is a pretty amazing organization, and the Timbaktu compound (for lack of a better word) is a pretty amazing place. It is in a pretty dry area of Andhra Pradesh, known mostly for its groundnuts. You immediately know you've arrived at the collective's area when the hills around you start to look very, very different. They look different because they, unlike their neighbours, have forests growing on them, the culmination of almost two decades' worth of land regeneration work. In talking with one of the directors – all of whom live in the same compound as the children and staff – I learned a great deal about the Collective's activities, which reach beyond the school itself. Since the conversation was, admittedly, brief, I will forward interested readers to their website, where you can see their projects in greater detail.

Since I was there to observe the school, I spent most of my time with the kids. Since I arrived on a Saturday, the children were enjoying themselves – I joined a game of cricket which I failed miserably at, so I mostly stuck to the sidelines. The kids here seemed really comfortable with me as a visitor, which I imagine must be because they get so many of them. I was a little disappointed, though – I was demoted from my post of 'uncle' for the duration of my visit. Instead, I was referred to for the whole visit as “Adam brother!”

Linguistic aside: most Indian languages have some titles of respect for those older than you. People slightly older than you will be called 'big brother' or 'big sister,' while those a little more old will be called 'auntie' or 'uncle.' If one's proper name is used, it will be in conjunction with one's title, like 'Adam uncle.' For aunts and uncles, most languages also differentiate between those older or younger than your parents, or those on your mother's side or your father's side. I have steadfastly refused to learn these distinctions in any language.

The rest of the week, I sat in on classes and did some teaching wherever I could. Mostly I stuck to the odd game of hangman, or teaching some English songs – mostly Christmas carols and 'skinni mirinki dinki dink,' which I have decided is my key to communicating with small children all over the world. I also gave some of the dramas that the Puvidham teachers had written and used, since they were curious about the teaching material that we were making. Mutual learning for the win! It was a really positive experience and I learned a lot. I hope to be back there for thesis research at some point, since I would like to look at the different teaching methods employed by alternative schools, and the choices behind those methods – but that requires me writing a proposal, now, doesn't it...

The ride back was eventful, in that I ended up taking a bus to a place I had never heard of before. There were no direct Bangalore buses, I guess. That and I ended up walking through Bangalore to my family's place at past midnight. I'm really enjoying all the random bus travelling that I am doing, much to the surprise of most people I meet, who generally do everything in their power to stay out of buses and bus stands in general. It works for me because it requires little planning, is cheap, and completing a bus journey makes me feel good about being able to get around in a language I barely speak (if you want linguistic confusion, try asking someone for directions in Tamil while trying to read bus signs in Telugu in a city where most people speak Kannada. Thanks, Hindupur!).

Anyway, that was Timbaktu! I have spent the last week since then hanging out with my family, and showing the place in Dharmapuri to my family, who just arrived. Tomorrow we head to Hyderabad, so I am going to sleep now!

Field Trip!

Hello Everyone!

It's an exciting time of year now, and my life here in India has definitely been no exception. As I write this, I am impatiently waiting for 3:30 AM Monday morning to come and bring my parents with it, and for my brother to arrive on the 24^th (edit: parents are here now, hooray!). Over the next three weeks, I'll be showing my folks around my new life in Dharmapuri, and then going on a sweet road trip to see the village my mother grew up in and meet family I've never seen before! You can expect a blog post about that in the new year.

But what have I been up to lately? After all, while it seems only yesterday that I wrote my last blog post, I am assured by reliable sources that more than three weeks have passed in the real world. So, here goes:

I finished my stint as a fifth grade teacher last week. The new Puvidham curriculum is split into a number of four-week modules. The last week of the module provides a sort of closure to the module – on Wednesday, all the classes present what they learned in the last month to the whole school, in the form of a drama and songs.

The 5^th grade class did a drama on one of the stories they learned, about how oil is formed. Other dramas included the 3^rd and 4^th grade class doing one on soil formation and the 1^st and 2^nd enacting a baby cuckoo bird's search for its mother. I will write more on the curriculum process in another post in greater detail. For now, I'll just say that I was very impressed at how the new process makes such extensive use of everyone's creativity: the teachers and the students really shape the way learning progresses, and it has been a joy to see things take shape, from the initial brainstorming and story-writing to the final product at the end, the drama presentation.

Thursday and Friday were a bit of a break, the students got a break from the normal routine to have two days of unspecified activities. I was not quite sure how this would turn out, but I figured it out pretty quick when I arrived on Thursday to a chorus of “Uncle! We will go to the forest!”

Huh. Well, I'm always down for a hike and I had heard that there was a lake a few hours' hike away, so I suggested this course of action to them. Their first reaction was “woohoo,” and their second reaction was “are you sure we are allowed to do that?” This last question convinced me that this was an excellent idea. The only small problem was that I had no idea which way to go.

This is where a curriculum that is based in self-reliance and experiential learning is awesome. It is perfectly acceptable for a teacher to tell their class to take the teacher on a field trip, rather than the other way around. All I had to do was make sure that I knew the way back so that we could get back to school.

After they argued on the best route to take (I probably should have gotten worried at that point), we set off towards the dam. Two miscalculations became evident. First, noon on a hot day is not a good time to start a hike. Second, if you must go at midday, it is generally a good idea to bring more than three bottles of water for a dozen people. But our spirits were high, and the route was beautiful.

As an envirosci nerd, I was in heaven seeing the changing landscape and the different ways people were using the land. To indulge my curiosity about everything I was seeing, I gave groups of children 'assignments,' like telling me what different trees were, or the different crops and how they were grown. I learned many things: firstly, the kids know the names of more plants at the age of 10 than I have ever known in my life. Second, most of them can explain, in their second language, the local practices of paddy agriculture, crop rotation, and intercropping. Thirdly, all the children had some relative along the way and were eager to show their land and what they did with it. One of the girls' grandfather grows sugarcane, and he gave us some, woo!

I also learned that taking a dozen children to an overflowing dam is a terrible idea. The lake we went to is an artificially made one; the local river has been dammed to provide irrigation water for the area, which is usually quite dry. Since the rains had been very good this year, water was spilling over the edge of the dam, creating sort of a natural algae-covered waterpark. There was a part of the dam where one could slide down about twenty feet or so into a shallow pool at the bottom. Of course, everyone did this at once – what happened next is a bit fuzzy. No one was hurt, though I feel like the stress of watching them shaved a few years off of my life.


(edit: for anyone who is confused about this dam -- an irrigation dam has no moving parts, it is just a big wall that people put up across a river to trap water. When the water level gets really high, it flows over the other side which slopes gently downward. I would not have let children play in the vicinity of hydroelectric turbines. Just clarifying.)

Anyway, that was my last week at Puvidham before the holidays. But there's more! Last week, I took a trip to Andhra Pradesh, a state to the north of Tamil Nadu, to visit a school there called Timbaktu. More on that in the next post!

Another long-overdue update!

I have been meaning to post this for quite a while -- I actually wrote the bulk of this post last week -- but laziness prevented me from uploading it until now. However, a series of excellent updates on a lot of my favourite blogs have inspired me to get off my behind and write something. 

It feels like a lot has happened since the last blog update, and at the same time it feels like there's very little to write about! I have certainly not gone on any crazy trips since being to Goa three weeks ago.

I guess it's good, in a way, since most of my blog posts have been about travelling to some far-off place and not really related in any way to my placement. Since I like to flatter myself that my work/life here is pretty interesting, I'll write about that for a bit.

As for the life part, I'm still staying in the hostel. This involves waking up at about 4:00 to the first sounds of activity (I'm not honest enough to say what time I get out of bed, though). Since breakfast and lunch are cooked at the same time, the older kids have to get up insanely early to prepare meals. There's usually an adult who does most of the work but lately the kids have been doing everything on their own. I'm pretty amazed at the energy of these kids – I mean, even the smallest kids are up and doing chores by 6:30 and the bigger kids (by which I mean, ages 12-16) pretty much run the hostel on top of doing their studies.

Part of my living here is that I eat my meals at the hostel as well. Breakfast is usually uppuma, which is cracked wheat boiled with spices and eaten with sambaar, which is like a really soupy dal (lentils) with some vegetables. Dinner is ragi mudhe, which is a big brown ball of ragi, a local grain. That too is eaten with sambaar. Lunch, which I eat at the school, is rice – also with sambaar, as well as yogurt (or curd, which is just really runny yogurt). Aside from the ragi, which is a bit of a shock at first, I guess my diet is not as exotic as some folks out there. I am sort of missing cooking for myself and keeping my own house, but the advantages of not having a mountain of dishes to wash and not paying for food or rent are so far winning out. Also, my diet is conspicuously heavy on grains, and low on everything else (except chillies, getting lots of those). A few weeks back, I got pretty unwell and since then I've been stashing some 'supplements' in my room at the hostel, which means mostly a lot of fruit and nuts, plus, of course, some awesome junk food.

The school day here starts around 9:30 with a series of prayers/songs. Then class is from 10-4, with a lunch break of an hour and a half (!). Up until this week, I was observing classes, meaning that I sat in class and watched how things were going and took notes and wrote about the new curriculum and methods. I guess we figured after 8 weeks of that, I'd pretty much gotten the hang of how the place worked, so now I'm teaching a class! Turns out the principal here was teaching like three classes herself so we spent the last little while putting together a new curriculum for the grade 5/6 class (which is a continuation of the curriculum we have for K-4 here), and hey pronto! The class is now mine to teach. How will these tender young minds be affected by being exposed to my tutelage? Only time will tell, folks. I have to comment, though, that these are some of the smartest kids I've seen anywhere. Class is mostly in their second language (even when it is not me teaching), and the material is far from easy.

After school, the kids have a while to play before they go home around 5. There's usually something to keep me busy after school. I keep a running documentation of the progression of the curriculum from K-6, help write and rewrite the curriculum itself, since it has only just been introduced, and, lately, help with some proposals. We've been planning to expand the school to the point where we can rely on fees from students' families to cover the main operating costs of the school, all while keeping about a third of the kids here on subsidized/no fees. The fees for the rest of the students would be as low as possible while still maintaining class sizes and being able to pay the teachers. It also means we need to apply for funding to increase the school's infrastructure to the point that it can handle this number of children, hence the proposal writing. That's been a fun, engaging project – on a related note, if anyone knows of any Indian/western agencies that fund this sort of educational/infrastructure work, give me a shout. I'm a little out of my league on that one.

Usually I finish at the school at around 6-6:30 and head back in the night. Often, while walking back, I am reminded of my pre-departure medical briefing that I went to with my friend Richelle, now in Sri Lanka. The doctor told us both, point blank, that the greatest risk to both of our lives on placement was late-night traffic, especially motorcycles, and especially in rural areas. Well, doc, thanks for the heads up – motorcycle dodging at night after work on the hilly, curvy roads that lead me home is something a daily routine. Though to be fair, buses are far worse – motorcycles don't push you off the road!

At night, I have been developing a few habits. Once I get back from the school, I play with the kids for a while – they have an undying passion for climbing me, being lifted by me, or playing games or singing songs with me (I suspect that it has something to do with the fact that none of these things are homework). Sometimes they also borrow my camera and take a couple hundred pictures – the kids here have taken over seven thousand pictures since I got here. I also have a few personal time things, for example my newfound ability to relax with a movie for a while. But not just any movies – the only way I can justify burning valuable time like that is to make sure that I am watching movies conducive to my Tamil or Hindi learning ability. That has meant a lot of Bollywood, as well as, lately, a bunch of 'multi-language' DVDs – at the bus stop in Dharmapuri, there's a stall that sells English movies that have been dubbed into Tamil, Hindi, and Telegu. Most of them also have subtitles in English. Most of them are action flicks, meaning that the language is mostly pretty simple. Oh, and they cost less than a dollar so there's that too. So far, I've seen Tamil dubs of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and a mountaineering film called Vertical Limit (tagline: 'it'll leave you hanging....'). Since writing this, however, my DVD player has met with an untimely demise. Dear HP: if your products can't survive a two-foot fall, then I can really never be a customer of yours. This is a serious stumbling block in our relationship. So I am currently without any of my DVD awesomeness. I've discovered Tamil music, however, so that should be an adventure!

I usually end the day accessing the internet after 10 PM, when it is free for me. As previous blog posts have indicated, this involves a complicated setup involving the roof of the hostel, the scaffolding of our water tank, and duct tape.

I'll try to upload some more pictures of this by the weekend, so that you all can get a glimpse into my daily life. That's all for now!

Good times in Goa!

Trip to Goa, Oct. 31 - Nov 4

Hello All!

This past week, I've had a bit of a break from the normal day-to-day life at the school as the children received a ten-day break for Diwali, since this is the one of the main times when families get together during the year. My family in Bangalore used the occasion to plan a trip for us to Goa, which was very nice of them considering most of those involved went along despite the fact that they were missing out on school/work commitments to do so. But hey, a vacation is a vacation I guess, and the rooms were booked so off we went!

Goa is a wonderful place, separated from Karnataka (Bangalore's state) by the Western Ghats which we crossed in the dead of night. It was colonized by the Portuguese and was one of the last states to become a part of India – so the culture there is very distinct. This manifests itself in things like the different names (most Goans have Portuguese names like da Silva or d'Souza), the abundance of churches, and the very beautiful, very different, architecture. Oh, and it has gorgeous beaches!

We spent the first day there recuperating from the long (16 hour) train ride from Bangalore to Vasco da Gama, one of Goa's chief towns. Said recuperation was aided greatly by the hotel's seaside location, meaning that within two minutes of our hotel room we had access to a pool, a restaurant, and the beach. We made some ventures into town as well as to some of Goa's beach shacks, which are, well, just that. They're wood and thatch structures on the beach where you can get drinks and some tourist-friendly Goan fare. Culture shock from day 1: As we were on a tourist beach, there were very few Indians there! I found myself surrounded by white people for the first time since leaving Canada. This was also a shock because aside from some Brits and Americans, most of the white people were Russians who spoke very little English (or any Indian language), making communication difficult. Many Goans have learned some basic Russian, and there are signs in Russian dispersed through most tourist areas. The tourists were also of an older, fatter, generation. A generation that did not know shame, at least where swimwear and body weight were concerned. To escape the bikini-wearing grandma squad, we planned our escape for the next day.

This escape took the form of a rented scooter from the hotel watchperson. Note to travellers: the watchman is your friend, since he is likely to have cheaper hookups than the people at the front desk. We paid Rs. 500 ($11) for a two day rental. Side note – if I ever quote a price, I am not sure whether it is the Indian rate or the tourist rate, since I tend to get both. This one was negotiated by my cousin so I assume that it is an okay deal! Now, I had never ridden a scooter before, but after a two-minute explanation by my cousin I felt fully qualified. To my credit, I took my first and only spill in a parking lot made of sand and loosely-packed gravel. We saw Fort Aguada that day, which you'll see in the photos above. After a little discussion, we decided to visit Colva beach, as there was a resort there which my family used to go to. It was a 50 km drive or so, which is a formidable distance when you don't know the roads, the bike only goes 40-50 km per hour, and both drivers are inexperienced. Suffice to say, it was an adventure. Getting into Colva, after a few detours, we even managed to get a flat tire which we got patched up – though the bike kept wobbling funny afterwards. To top everything off, the resort we had meant to visit was closed, meaning that all we ended up doing was getting lunch, relaxing on the beach for a while, and going back.

The ride back was also pretty eventful; we got stuck in a traffic jam, also the first Indian traffic jam I have ever been in. Note to the uninitiated: traffic jams in India are insane, especially if you are on a bike. The general tendency is to traffic weave among buses and cars – you can't opt out either, because doing so blocks the way for the bikers behind you, so you have to keep going (I have to say, Toronto cycling experience really stood me in good stead on this one). So on we went, narrowly avoiding rocks, buses, lightposts and concrete dividers – although I did manage to jam my cousin's foot against the median so that was kind of bad... though I consider it his comeuppance for telling me repeatedly, while going at top speed or through an intersection, “no, go that way!” Aspiring motorcycle passengers take note: the driver cannot see which way you are pointing, he is more worried about not dying. Near-death experiences aside, the drive was gorgeous! I highly recommend scooter rentals to anyone visiting Goa, definitely the best non-guided way to see the place.

The next day we made another scooter trip to Anjuna beach, which was less than 50 km away. It was quiet and touristy, we smoked hookah in a clifftop restaurant, which was amazing. Then I got ripped off hardcore in the market there, which was slightly less awesome. In many ways, it was like a robbery – I came, was surrounded by people, the rest is a blur and then when I came to I was missing a significant amount of money. Although robbers don't usually give you potential Christmas gifts, so that was nice I suppose. We also had a nice drive back through a torrential downpour which I found exhilarating.

The trip to Anjuna also marked my first up-close-and-personal experience with corruption – exiting the hotel, my cousin was driving and we were pulled over by a roadside cop. He proceeded to run us through the mill of questions, and it was revealed that my cousin had 'forgotten' his license (reality: he did not have one). While he went off to the hotel to look for said imaginary license, I conversed with the officer. Having heard that the best course in this situation is to be obscenely respectful, I showed a lot of deference, used 'sir' a lot, and so on. Those who know me will know the pain caused to my soul by such a display, but that's another story. Anyway, when my cousin arrived, sans license, he informed us that he would write us a ticket for 950 rupees ($21). I told him that I would pay, at which point he told us that he would 'help us out' because I 'spoke so well,' and reduce the fine to 500 rupees. Of course, a ticket was conspicuously absent from this transaction. I decided not to push the issue, which I have been kicking myself for since, despite assurances from people that insisting on paying the official fine can lead to negative consequences from police officers who want the bribe.

After this whirlwind of activity, it was time to leave the next day. I think I would need to come here for at least two weeks before I would be able to actually relax on the beach. There is just so much to do and see! Though now, after a nice break, I am pumped up and ready to get back to work and finally tackle the dreaded T-word (more on those developments later; I should really write a serious post one of these days).