Thursday, August 26, 2010

Visitation Rites

Listening to some Al Green in a 2 BHK flat in Chembur, Mumbai. We moved into this place about a month ago, to this city 6 weeks ago and to India about two and a half months ago. On a week's bedrest after a rickshaw accident, just the latest in a string of unfortunate events that have kept me out of the classroom over the past few weeks. Maybe it's just the painkillers talking, but I'm feeling optimistic. If life is like a Hindi movie, then the over-the-top succession of blunders and mishaps I have experienced can only lead to true love and/or wealth beyond my wildest dreams.

On one of the handful of days I've been out of bed my co-teacher and I visited a few of our students' homes. We need to get to all 55 of them soon, so we took a big chunk out of our to-do list and made it to 4 houses. To our credit, finding these homes was almost impossible. The parents had given us their addresses in writing, but an address in rapidly expanding north Bombay won't lead you farther than a neighborhood within a general area of the city. Main streets have names--no street signs--but smaller streets aren't recorded anywhere, as far as I can tell. Here is how we located our destinations:

Step 1: Call the student's parents. Connection is dropped several times. Call until you get through. Ask for a landmark near the student's home.
Step 2: Get on Anchal's motorcycle and start driving in whichever direction you feel is appropriate. Stop and ask no fewer than 3 people how to get to the landmark. Once you have a majority response, go that way.
Step 3: Once you arrive at the landmark, ask around for directions to the specific chawl that your student lives in. A chawl is like a tenement building, or a group of tenement buildings, made up of one-room family homes. I'm not clear on the difference between a chawl and a slum, but I think a chawl has more permanent infrastructure (concrete buildings, roofs, plumbing). Most of our students live in chawls.
Step 4: Leaving the motorcycle, enter the tiny lanes of the chawl. Ask where your student's family lives, using the father's name. Someone will bring you to the room or point to the correct curtained doorway.

If I had gotten my act together and bought a memory card reader I would have posted pictures of these neighborhoods. We still have 51 to see, luckily. At all of the homes we visited, families of 5-10 people (including uncles, aunts, grandparents and cousins) lived in a room the size of a small college dorm room. The kitchens were separated from the living area by a solid or makeshift wall. Some rooms had one twin-sized bed, and others had just two plastic chairs. They were all spotlessly clean. All of the families seemed to have been preparing for our visit all day. Anchal and I were given seats while the family stood or sat on the floor. The referred to Anchal as "sir" and to me as "teacher" (I don't quite understand this nomenclature but I was grateful that they didn't use "madam," which makes me feel like I should be wearing a hoop skirt and holding a parasol whilst playing croquet on a lawn with peacocks). We were fed very sweet chai, biscuits (which parents sent their children to buy especially for us), samosas and this sweet porridge with almond and raisins that is my new favorite food. By the fourth house I thought I would die of overeating, but we were not allowed to leave until we had tea, at the very least. Teachers generally garner a lot of respect here; I can't imagine rolling out this kind of red carpet for any of my teachers when I was a kid. Undergirding all these pleasantries is an acknowledgment of a social hierarchy, explicit in the seating arrangement and distribution of expensive food. I wavered between guilt for assuming a privileged stance in these homes (and eating treats that the families probably couldn't afford), and fear of causing offense by refusing the generosity.

None of the parents spoke English and Anchal was my Hindi translator for the afternoon. Once we got the hang of interpreting we were chattin' up a storm, although I know that Anchal took some liberties with my words. He assures me that he only made me sound more interesting. All of the parents we met were deeply interested in their child's education and questioned us at length about the methods we're using. Because we don't have kids copying from the state-standardized textbook, which is the norm, it would appear as if we're not actually teaching anything. The language in these textbooks would be out of reach for a seven-year-old from an English-speaking home, let alone a kid who doesn't know the English alphabet. Some of the stories in the books are also just really weird and full of grammatical errors. Anyway, some of the parents and staff at our school are understandably suspicious about the absence of these books, and we still haven't found a way to make all of the verbal work we do in class visible. Our uncomfortable position was slightly eased when the mother of one girl in our class filled us in on the latest mom-gossip: their kids have started speaking English, so we must be doing something right. Hallelujah.

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Livin' (Just Enough) for the City

For the past four-ish weeks it has rained on Bombay, every day. The heat in the monsoon is manageable and the humidity lifts palpably after each short, violent shower. The rain itself is welcome in a city where many people go without potable water, and the erratic downpours arrive with so little notice that you have to stand at least a little in awe of nature's veracity. The problem with the rain in Bombay is that the rain hits buildings that are mildewed and decaying and seeps through the walls into places where people are trying to live. The rain contributes to the puddles, which become knee-high and chest-high floods due to a complete lack of drainage, especially in the slums where we work and our students live. Worst of all, the rain dampens and disperses the heaps of putrid trash and sewage that fill what seems to be every unoccupied centimeter of land in the city. What's that inside your shoe as you wade from the train station to your school? Don't ask, and for the love of God, don't look.

The monsoon has a way of toppling your defenses. Fresh off the bus from Pune, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, the other Fellows and I were simply giddy about the move to the big city. We pitied the fools who were placed back in Pune, where you can't get a drink past 11 on a Saturday night and the only means of transportation are overcrowded buses and overpriced rickshaws. TFI set us free from training after our first week here and we all dispersed to our respective homes or temporary lodging. We reconvened for a meeting a few days later with more complaints than we could verbalize: I can't find an apartment within my budget and above my living standards...I nearly fell out the open door of the local train...I carry an umbrella but arrive to school completely drenched every day...My school is in Asia's largest slum and today I was trapped there for hours because of the flooding. None of us were lookin' too cute. The boys all smelled like hell. I came down with a fever one day and didn't get up for two-and-a-half weeks. In the haze of illness and fatigue, the things that had enlivened a sense of adventure in me were now assaulting my senses. Every time a stray piece of trash found its way between my foot and my sandal I wanted to projectile vomit. Making my way around the city alone took the wind out of my sails in a serious way...negotiating with rickshaw and taxi drivers (who, despite what you read, do not tend to speak English), asking 17 strangers for directions on the train and going with the majority opinion, being stared at shamelessly by every. single. person. all. day. long.

My school, on the two days I've been well enough to attend thus far, became the best thing about Bombay. Its name is Shivner Vidya Mandir School and it is in Asalfa Village, on the northeastern-ish side of the city. Asalfa is a slum that feels...friendly. The lanes are well-swept and the shopkeepers are helpful. When I arrive in the morning everything is quiet, and it becomes noisy only at midday when the morning school shift ends and the afternoon shift begins. There are 27 schools in a 1 km radius of Shivner, and the area is flooded with kids. The front entrance to Shivner is famously elusive, and the other Fellows at my school have not been able to navigate their way through the crowded homes to find it, so we use a back door that resembles the entrance to a public toilet. Our day starts at 7:30 AM and ends by 12:30 PM to accommodate the afternoon students. The school is small and one-story, with a paved courtyard at the center surrounded on three sides by about 12-15 classrooms (and on one side by a dump). Our classroom is just big enough to fit the 55 students and 2 teachers in our 2nd standard class. It has one table, a chalkboard, an overhead fan and three rows of double-bench desks that are too high for some of our kids to write on. The infrastructure in our school is much better than some; we have tiled floors and a ceiling that doesn't leak when it rains. The floor and walls, however, are caked in a layer of mud and whatever else is tracked in, and a carpet of flies perpetually covers the floor. The school is an English-medium school, but our principal does not speak English. The kids in our class range from 5 to 10 years old and most cannot read, write or speak in English. They are, however, completely adorable, and they add a little spice to my monsoon. I've been recuperating in bed the past two weeks, feeling sorry for myself and counting all the days of school I've missed so far, but things are looking up: it hasn't rained today.

Pictures coming soon, I left my camera cord in Wisconsin.