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.