Independence Day (and other happenings)

Being as I am too disorganized to set aside time to write in this blog, I am going to do some (not so) short, random notes on things that have happened in the last couple of weeks.


1. Independence Day, Aug. 15th.

We had the day off (hurrah!) and attended a morning assembly which consisted of speeches, songs, poems, and dance performances. Most of the children put on their traditional dress, which ranged from brightly colored woven Tibeten robes, to iridescent silk saris, to billowing Korean hanbok, to kilts and tasseled Chinese hats... It was quite the spectacle. I wore my salwar kameez, being a bit stuck as to what constituted traditional Canadian clothing. Most of the people who didn't have their traditional garb with them wore Indian clothing. We all sat outside in the sun, sitting patiently (or impatiently, in the case of most of the students) through the lengthy Hindi poems and meandering speeches, and standing up to cheer and catcall for the Bollywood-esque dance performances.

Independence Day in India was a whole new look at patriotism, for me... Their independence was so recently and so painfully won, and this enormous, kaleidoscopically colorful, incredibly diverse country of 22 official languages and hundreds of other languages and dialects, is holding itself together and celebrating its nationhood with passionate energy. There are 1.12 billion people in India. That's 1,120,000,000 people. Approximately 4 times the population of the United States, in approximately one third the land area. When you consider the furor about the large Spanish-speaking population in the United States and the concern that it will undermine the national unity of the country - well, try to imagine at least 22 populations of similar sizes, all speaking different languages, all coexisting in the same huge patchwork of a country. It's an incredible thing, to me, that it all manages to hold together... Yet hold together it does.




Dancing! Oh, those feisty middle-school girls...










Diversity! Warming the hearts of administrators the world over...









However, the Raj seems to be alive and well!









Korean elementary school girls in their hanbok. So cute!










2. Camp with Grade 11.

I went to Poondi, the school's "wilderness campus"/camp with grade 11, last weekend. Swimming in the lake, lots of fun... The hilarious part was that we drove for hours to get to our "wilderness" but the shore across the lake was a consistently-used thoroughfare for the neighboring villagers, so a parade of women carrying firewood, children herding goats, and men herding cows walked back and forth all day. Overall it was delightful and relaxing to spend some time with the older kids, hang out without any electronics, and just lie about reading and swimming. I finished the Dharma Bums, which was marvelously appropriate.

We also made a sauna on the last night - the camp help guys lashed together some stripped saplings into a rough dome about 3 or 4 feet high, which we covered with a large sheet of canvas. After heating big rocks in the bonfire, Mr. B scooped them up in a shovel (wearing only chappals!) and deposited them in the tent. We ducked in with a bucket of lake water, closed the canvas, and proceeded to get that tent so steamy that you couldn't see from one side to another even when you shone a torch straight across. When the rocks began to cool, we'd throw open the tent and go dashing down to the lake to cool off... Well, me and Ben, anyhow. The kids, for all their brave talk, were mostly too wimpy to go into the lake after they left the sauna and realized that the outside air was quite chill. The girls in the sauna: "Oh, it's not hot at all, yaar. It's just like summer in Bombay, isn't it?"





Our camp. Complete with tents-already-set-up, cooks that came from the school, and a big undercover area! Roughing it, KIS style...





Bonfire!


















3. Middle school and high school kids.

Hate 'em. Well, not quite. Disappointed in 'em. They are consistently rude, racist, disrespectful, snobby, ignorant, and have a huge sense of entitlement. I don't want to start this rant right now because I don't have a lot of time, and it deserves an entire entry, but I will at a later date give you a good, solid rant that covers:
- middle school and high school, socially/developmentally/etc
- racism at this school
- why the school is not as academically successful as it could be, and why most of the kids/staff don't care

I do like the high school and middle school kids, still. I like most of them. I'm madly in love with a few of them. They have a lot of potential, and some of them are really quite cool. But I'll tell you one thing - teaching the middle school has made me appreciate the elementary school LOADS more.


4. Hiking.

Went on a hike yesterday that absolutely kicked my butt, and it was just a "B" hike (they go up to D). I can't imagine how I'll survive a D hike, much less the kids! I suppose we'll get into condition. It was a fairly severe downhill hike, and my shins/calves/quads/butt are all in tremendous pain today. I feel wimpy. It was a spectacularly beautiful hike, though, ending with a gorgeous waterfall that we were supposed to hike down to and swim beneath - however, as we were sitting perched on the cliff overlooking it, having lunch before commencing the climb down, it began to pour in torrents of monsoon rain and we abandoned the idea in favor of slogging back along the path-which-had-become-a-stream to where a bus was picking us up.




Early-morning laundry hung out on a rooftop to dry, taking advantage of the only sun of the day; it rains continuously starting early afternoon, every day.







Morning mist on the mountaintops. It's difficult to capture in a photograph.









Stopped to rest - here are some of the students and one of the student teachers. She is probably the tallest, most red-headed female in India right now.









Sitting overlooking the cliff.















The falls.

Madurai - "The City of Divine Nectar"

Last weekend, I went on a staff trip to Madurai (check out: Madurai on Wikipedia). It was a trip down to the "real" India - and I didn't realize just how much of a strange, misty, mountain kingdom Kodaikanal was, until journeying down to "the plains," as anything down from the hill is known.

Our bus left Kodai at 6:30AM, and we began the dizzying trip down the side of the mountain. I've never gotten sick myself, but most people recommend not having anything to eat before beginning the ride, and taking some motion sickness tablets if you're prone to that sort of thing. The change in altitude is huge; Kodai is at 2,133m (7000 feet), and Madurai is essentially at sea level. Plastic bottles shrivel in on themselves, the greater pressure of the plains beating down on the thin mountain air inside them. It makes your body feel odd - for a lack of a better word - to suddenly descend 2 kilometers and experience about a 15 degree (celsius) difference rise in temperature. Suddenly the cool, clinging mist of the mountaintop becomes a sticky, stifling humidity. It feels like a warm, pleasant blanket at first, but then as the midday heat rises and the chill of Kodai is chased from your bones, it just feels HOT.

That's what brings out the smells of India, though. I mean that in the best possible way - yes, you get the occasional whiff of pure sewage, but it's mostly this rich cocktail of spices, incense, cooking, animals, perfumes, dust and smoke and sweat and exhaust all settled over the streets like a fourth dimension to the world... It's an entirely new way to take in a city which doesn't exist in North America, because nothing really smells. I suppose that animals can smell the difference, but with my wimpy human nose I need a certain richness of scent before I notice it, before it becomes an important and beautiful characteristic of the place I'm in. Here, everything is full of scents. The temples have their own particular blend, a mixture of the powders and ghee spread onto holy sculptures, the garlands of fruit thrown around their necks, the endless strings of jasmine flowers that the women wear in their hair, millions of sticks of incense, sputtering tallow candles, and of course the crowds of people wandering everywhere.

The temples. Madurai - in case you're too apathetic to click the Wikipedia link - is a city of 1.3 million, whose chief attractions are the enormous, amazing Hindu temples, most notably the Meenakshi Sundareswara temple. It was our first stop on the Madurai trip, and I'd never seen anything even remotely like it in my life. Tather than describe it I'm just going to deluge you with photos:

The temples are covered with intricate and colorfully painted sculptures of gods and goddesses - click for a larger version:

There are zillions of things for sale in the temple, some of them devotional in nature, some of them just tourist junk.

For two rupees, you can be blessed by the elephant! It's a very well-trained elephant - you hold out the two rupee coin, the elephant nimbly grabs it with the flexible tip of its trunk, and then taps you on the head with its trunk as a blessing. Needless to say, I received my blessing, despite the biologist in me feeling a bit outraged that it was so far from its natural habitat and family group... They're very intelligent creatures with lifelong, closely-knit family groups. I hope this individual wasn't taken from its family. Where do sacred elephants COME from? Is there a special place where sacred elephants are bred and raised, or do they just snatch them out of the jungle??
Though there were many people at the temple to worship, there were also a lot that just seemed to be there to hang out - they brought picnic lunches in their tiffin boxes and sprawled down against the wall or between a couple of pillars, like this family.
There was a model so that you could see the scope of the entire temple - as you can see, there are actually many different towers, with the courtyard and fountain in the center.

I'm running short on time - I have to go to bed soon, I have an extremely busy day tomorrow - so I'm just going to throw down the rest of the photos and hold off on the long reflections, descriptions, etc (do I hear sighs of relief? Shame on you! Or rather, shame on me...)


We went to a fabric market, an amazingly colorful and bustling market in a huge building opposite the temple. High ceilings lofted above narrow passages between stalls absolutely packed with cloth, as you can see above. After bargaining for lengths of raw silk or jewel-toned shot silk, you can have it made into salwar kameez or anything your heart desires, just 2 meters away, where a row of tailors and their sewing machines wait to fulfill all of your clothing needs:

I bought two ready-made salwar kameez and had them altered to fit me right there, in about half an hour. In fact, see the green cloth in the picture above? That's mine! The other one is gold shot silk. They're both beautiful, and I'm going to try as hard as I can to get away with wearing them in North America.

The heat and walking was exhausting; we took auto-rickshaws sometimes, which was fun, but mostly walked. There aren't any auto-rickshaws in Kodai due to a REALLY REALLY LAME cartel by the taxis; I'm not sure exactly how they got so powerful, but the taxi drivers prevent any auto-rickshaws from operating in Kodai, and keep a rather expensive monopoly on transport. So it was absolutely delightful to beep-beep through the crowded streets in a tiny three-wheeled instrument of mayhem, dodging cows and buses alike, nipping down narrow alleys with giant potholes, the driver reaching up to squeeze the horn as we nosed past pedestrians and vendors. It's a friendly sort of chaos.

And here I am:


Adios! I'm off to camp with grade 11 for the weekend - swimming, archery, rock-climbing, a terrific zipline, excellent hiking... and probably a lot of teenage drama, truth-or-dare, and campfire singing. Apparently they sing Bollywood tunes instead of Kumbayah.

Hiking & the Tahr Pin

One of the great joys of life at Kodaikanal International School is the weekend hiking program. Headed by BB, a Canadian woman who teaches middle-school art, the hiking program is a requirement for every student. More specifically: hikes are sorted by length and difficulty into A, B, C, and D hikes. Every student must complete two hikes of any difficulty. If students wish to participate in the yearly “wilderness” camping trip they must earn their “Tahr Pin” by completing a certain number of hikes in each category, with the specific requirement depending on age. The wilderness camping trip is a full backpacking trip for the older children, and I’m aiming to get my own Tahr Pin and join them as a chaperone. A tahr is an Indian mountain goat; hence receiving a Tahr Pin means that, like the mountain goat, you are ready to explore the most remote peaks and most precarious mountain paths.

Mountain paths… Or severe lack thereof. Before the hiking season started, BB told the new teachers that if we wanted to lead a hike, we should go along with an experienced guide once or twice, and then if we felt confident, we could lead the group. As a foolish Westerner used to the Canadian park system, I thought, “I can do that! How hard can it be? I’m an experienced hiker and I’d love to lead a hike, so I’ll just go on it once and then I’ll be able to lead.” However, I was imagining something comparable to the organized system of national parks or provincial parks in Canada - clearly marked trails that have a beginning and an end, that usually provide a map at the beginning to show your route, and – if it’s really overgrown - have some fluorescent tape tied to trees at intervals to help you find your way. I was not prepared for an initial trek through the twisting, rollercoaster-steep alleyways of Kodaikanal, nor was I prepared for the all-important and all-too-frequent moment of decision: which cow path looks more recently used?

In the past, hikes have gotten badly lost and taken over 6 hours of extra time to return to camp; I suspect that they could have been lost for even longer, but cow paths lead eventually to one of the villages scattered throughout the Panil hills, where the curious inhabitants will direct you back to Kodai. It’s a beautiful landscape to hike through. There’s something deeply satisfying about starting out perched on a hillside, looking across a deep valley to another hillside, and saying, “that’s where we’re going. I can see it, I can see the forest in between, I can see the mist rising up in the distance, and I’m going to be over there in a few hours.” After living at sea level for so long, it’s amazing to have a completely unobstructed view for a kilometer or more, across an aching gap of thin, thin, high-altitude air. Sometimes you can see right into little villages, if you have binoculars. (Which I do! Thank you, EEB department and the Kenya trip… I now carry binoculars with me everywhere.)

At first I thought I would be disappointed by the amount of civilization in our hikes, but it’s become one of my favorite parts. “Roads” quickly turn into rutted, rocky tracks that only foot traffic and donkeys or horses can traverse, and though the townspeople of central Kodai are completely used to the white faces of the tourists and schoolchildren, it’s a different place entirely after walking only half an hour out of town. The village children come shrieking and running out to see the visitors, clamoring to have their pictures taken with our digital cameras and greedily looking at their images on the screen; they want to play football and chase after the hikers asking for more pictures or more play. Women stare from beneath baskets of washing or huge urns of water balanced on their heads, or peer out from behind waving lines of brightly colored laundry. Everything is so COLORFUL, and I hear that it’s twice as colorful up in the North – I can’t even imagine! India is rich in textiles, and many of the things that we in North America would use paper for, Indians use cloth. It’s all brilliantly dyed, bright and patterned and embellished and absolutely gorgeous. The houses are all painted colors that would earn them the reputation of “that one gaudy orange and purple house down on ____ street,” back at home. Here, they're all that bright and entirely it’s appropriate and perfectly beautiful.

I can't wait to get to the longer C and D hikes - you have to work your way up, but eventually they last up to 12 hours, leaving at 6AM and getting back just in time for dinner, and traverse valleys where you have the chance of seeing elephants, bison, and even panthers - well, that was only one group in the past 5 years, but it's possible. Monkeys, of course, are everywhere. The hikes are HARD, though; we're in the hills, you can't really go anywhere on a level stretch. It's the difference between deathly-mountain-climbing steep, and not-SO-steep-but-still-pretty-damn-steep. Oh well. Muscular legs, here I come.

The Beginning Teacher

SCHOOL.

Let me know if this sounds crazy: one month after completing a degree in biology, you decide to move to India. You have never done any teaching in your life, aside from a small amount of tutoring math and physics, all at level grade 9 or higher. Nonetheless, you decide to become the art teacher for the entire elementary school, covering ages 4-13, at a prestigious private Christian school – not student teacher, mind you, but full-responsibilities, going-to-staff-meetings, designing-curriculums, main teacher.

Strangely, this scenario didn’t seem crazy to me at all, a couple of months ago. Even a couple of weeks ago, it seemed reasonable. Two days before classes started, though, I realized that it was absolute madness. I wasn’t able to write this blog entry till now because I’ve been absolutely swamped by making a giant mental adjustment (from college student… to elementary school teacher!), and learning how to deal with scenarios like this: Grade Five. Most of the kids have English as a second language; about one-third are Korean, which presents several problems: 1, their English is not very good and they often don’t understand instructions; 2, they only want to sit with other Koreans and speak in Korean; 3, they constantly try to speak to you in Korean, ask you if you’re from Korea, and mutter discontentedly when you don’t speak Korean, because you look Korean and therefore must be able to speak it and are simply holding out on them out of spite. Many of them have just begun boarding at Kodaikanal, and their families are thousands of miles away. Also, it has been – well, a good 10 years, at least – since you spoke to anyone in grade five, and just spitting out sentences that they’ll understand is a challenge, even when their English skills are good. Furthermore, they really like drawing on each other with oil pastel, when they're not busy dribbling watercolor paint all over the floor in an earnest attempt to put their painting on the counter to dry.

FUN.

And, actually, it is. Because there are also these things: three little girls in grade two, who shout “Miss! Miss!” and then run up and hug me every time they see me, their little heads only reaching my belly-button. There’s the most lovely – and talented – little boy in fifth grade, who came up to me in the lunch line today to tell me that he’d read a book, and in the book there was a picture of a totem pole (that’s the project I’m working on with his class). He was so shy I didn’t realize he was speaking to me at first, because he was looking way off behind me and to the side; but he wanted to tell me very badly, so he just blurted it all out, shuffling from foot to foot, and then darted back to his table. A constant delight can be found in the staff of the elementary school, who teach me so much every day; with their every motion and word, they show me how to be a patient, caring, effective teacher, and how to love these little children surrounding us. There’s also Buddy, the unofficial school dog, who naps on the lawn all day during class and wakes up for recess and lunch to be petted and adored by the children. And speaking of lunch, every day there is a delicious lunch, different each time - why is it that cafeteria food is better than most Indian restaurants back at home? – and every time I completely stuff myself and then fill in the corners with sweet, milky tea. I’m going to leave India a giant blob of paneer paratha (a flat bread with sauces and paneer, which is similar to cheese, but actually condensed curdled milk) and dal (delicious lentil curry).

I’m settling in as a teacher; I still have so much to learn, but this second week is infinitely easier than the last. It’s a bit exhilarating to feel myself expanding so rapidly. The first time I stood in front of a classroom I was terrified; now I feel relatively comfortable. I have an idea of what children will or won’t do, and how to get them to calm down and behave. It’s almost like magic, the way children obey… I think of them as autonomous individuals, and it seems ludicrous that you could say, “I’ve written your name on a bit of paper and put it next to a seat, now you must sit in that seat.” And just like that; they’ll sit in the seat! Of course there is occasionally dissent, but they do it. They can be amazingly, mind-bogglingly disobedient, as well, but I'm learning to cope.

Even the middle-school boys are growing on me!

Love, Jenn