I am a terrible teacher

Today I spent my time sweating and yelling at small children. Why? because I was in Nallasopara and its exam time.

It was ridiculously hot today, so hot my sweat stains grew so big they merged into one giant seat stain that decided to consume my whole body. It looked like someone had dunked me in water. I think I was dripping on the children's work. By a complete miracle the electricity worked all day, unfortunately I was in the one room that doesn't have a fan. Whenever one of the other teachers walked through they gave me an odd little stare and hurried on. Thankfully Vikki was just as sweaty, so we can blame it on foreignness and not my overactive sweat glads.

But the yelling. Today I have mostly been shouting Chub! and Bhat Jow! which means Shut Up! and Sit Down! respectively in Hindi. I occasionally shouted Cheating! but they didn't understand that and carried on. One child got so used to me yelling at him (I briefly silenced an entire classroom on one occasion) all I had to do was glare and he scurried away from me. I am pleased and upset by this behaviour. I really want the children to like me... but they can be so annoying. I try and make up for the yelling by giving in to their requests for handshakes and high fives. I think this is working.

Anyway, I am a terrible teacher. Some of the children are failing miserably. In one of my classes only one child passed. I think its because I forgot to teach them the alphabet properly. I mean, no one has bothered, so not all the blame is on me, but when you're staring at exam pages you wrote where the alphabet tails off around J you start to wonder.

The frustrating thing is I feel like I've learnt so much about teaching and what to do and how to help and be patient... but none of it will be used again as I'm leaving before the new term starts. Not that I would want to stay and carry on, I'm missing flushing toilets and toasters too much. But still. I was watching them today (inbetween the shouting and yelling) and some of them I could see trying so hard and I just wished I'd tried a little harder and getting things through to them. One of the girls is a bit of a lost cause and last lesson we started working really hard at getting her to write her name and in her exam today... she didn't do it, but she got the first 3 letters right! Which is a start! Between all the depressing exam results we did have one happy moment. All our step 3 spontaneously started singing row row row your boat complete with actions (which we taught them!) so at least one thing stuck!

A clash of cultures

I spent last Saturday in the company of lots and lots and lots of white people. It was very strange, I don't see many and tend to stare quite a lot when I do. I wonder where they're from and why they are here. I spend most of my time at the school or hanging out with the volunteers and I'm on good terms with the man at the internet cafe (he knows my name!) and the man in the local shop I nearly feel like a local (except the other local still stare at me). So I've had a very limited amount of interaction with other foreigners in the country. The ones I have met have all been slightly odd and have a strange ex-patty vibe about them that I don't mesh well with. They're all in the country but not part of it. On Saturday night I spent a lot of time with those kind of people.

One of the old volunteers is now a teacher at the American School of Bombay (ASB). They had organised a fundraiser (poster above) for somewhere that flooded. They had entitled it 'Embracing India'. The fact that they're in India but have to have a fundraiser to embrace it really says everything about the school. The ex-volunteer invited some of our students to perform with her class in the fundraiser (they did an adorable dance to the Slumdog Millionaire song Jai Ho). So on Saturday we trooped along with a bunch of the kids to take part.

I think they all enjoyed themselves, they were incredibly well behaved, no one had to be taken out half way through to use the toilet and only one fell asleep. The ate a ridiculous amount of samosas, buscuits and juice and one threw up on the bus home. But for the rest of us everything was a little bit off. The school is incredibly rich and well supllied and is attend by the children of diplomats and the like. One classroom has more space and supplies than our entire school. The children seemed quite confused to see our kids, like they didn't really understand what India was made up of. The were preserved and protected within their little walls surrounded by shockingly green grass and just knew nothing of what was outside.

The whole fundraiser was very sweet and earnest, and I really don't want to be down on their effort, because it is a massive thing they're doing. But it was just so 'lets all spend the evening helping the poor and then waste more water making the grass greener outside'. Everything was made out to be so far away, like it was another world that was broken, not the one they were living in. The strangest thing was when they played a video of the area that had been flooded. People were wading through dirty water, they were living in little blue tented communities and didn't have access to clean water and medical supplies. The children sat behind gasped in shock, 'how terrible' they murmured, 'look at where they live'.

After the performance we took our kids home. Half an hour drive from the American School we dropped some of them off at one of the slums, another two we just had to leave on the street becuase they weren't entirely sure where their house had been moved to, a couple more went to the shack you saw a couple of posts below and the final couple we walked to a busy street corner. There, the rest of their family had already rolled out their sleeping mats on the pavement. They went to the toilet in the gutter and then curled up for the night. Without even a little blue tent over their heads. I wish the gasping children could have seen what was just outside their door.

For Grandad

On Sunday my Grandad died. He just celebrated his 90th birthday. It has been a hard couple of days, thankfully exams and having a mountain of children screaming around you are a good distraction from the sadness. I've had a lot of emotional phone calls with home. I feel very helpless being so far away. I love him and miss him terribly.

I never really knew my Grandad, but I think I understood him as person. I will miss him watching over me as I made a mess of mowing the lawn, the gleeful look on his face whenever he got a big score playing dominos, the way he used to sneak into the back room to listen to the racing results and seeing him waiting by the gate whenever we went to visit.

He was wonderful.

Ages ago when I first got here Uncle Paul said to post pictures of all the food I'd been eating. Around that time I wasn't really eating anything, throwing up a lot and having 'loose motions' so I didn't have much to show. Now I eat a lot, too much really, and I'm fattening up! In the evenings our 'maid' cooks for us. Depending on how she feels it can be amazing (parathas with vegetable curry) or terrible (plain noodles with one pepper). We've taken to forcing her to put at least four different vegetables in our food, she resisted well but we've finally crushed her. Sometimes when she comes first thing in the morning we're all still asleep and she starts making wierd things in the kitchen. One morning we were confronted with a plate of spicey noodles, another we had a mountain of eggy bread handed to us after we'd all finished eating. The oddest one was some pickle made from the sour fruit that grows in the tree outside, she left it out in the sun on the roof and then presented it to us. It was horrible, we left it in the kitchen for 2 days and then threw it out.

Anyway, here are some pictures of the food I do eat. Everyday at school I have this (though a much smaller portion). Coinsidentally this is the plate of food I had on the day of my 'episode' and I threw the whole thing up again about 30 minute after this picture was taken. Its rice with daal and the most incredibly spicy vegetables I have ever eated in my life. I usually have a tiny portion just to make the food more interesting. One day I got a crazy idea in my head that I would start building myself up a massive tolerance to spicy food by just eating loads of the vegetables everyday. This lasted one day. I had about a palm sized portion, started feeling funny half way through and by the end I was red and sweaty, my nose was running and blood was pounding in my ears. We eat with our hands at the school and my fingers as well as my mouth were burning. They are evily spicy. None of the teachers think this though, one of them rejected them once as she wanted something spicy.
At Nallasopara we only get bananas and biscuits because there's no gas to cook, except on thursdays when we get Samosa Pao from the 'restaurant' across the street. Samosa Pao is awesome. Its a massive samosa that you shove in a bread roll. Pao means bread, you pronounce it pow and I love it because if someone ever asks me what I had for breakfast I can say Peanut Butter POW! like I'm in batman or something! here is Samosa Poa. Its actually Vikki's because I devoured mine before remebering to take a photo. She'd already bitten it and decided it was too spicy so she gave it to a dog. She loves the Nallasopara dogs.

On Saturdays we take the kids to the beach or park and get dinner at a cafe after. We rotate Marsala Doosa (crispy pancake filled with yellow potato stuff, odd donut shaped polenta things and Pao Bhaji. I don't like the donuts. I love Pao Bhaji and not just because of the Pao which they butter on both sides! Top, bottom and middle! Its the tastiest thing ever. Here it is!

I also quite like the Doosa. So much so that I've yet to remember to take its picture. The cafe also does incredible fresh juice. When you order the juice you see them go and get the fruit off the shelf to make it. The pineapple is good, but the orange is heavenly, it is the greatest juice you will ever drink in your life. I have it every week and whenever I do I think of how jealous dad would be if he knew how good the juice was. Here is my juice, I had a little before I remebered the picture. Pineapple is in the background.

We goout to dinner sometimes and quite a lot we get takeaways (anther reason why I am fat). Mostly falafel or pizza. Once we made a terrible mistake and got Chinese. I ordered soup. It came in a plastic bag. I will not be ordering chinese again.

A bit of a reality check

Since I started planning to come to India I've know that I would be working with street kids. Since I got to India I've been constantly confronted with the poverty and the shanty houses and shacks the cover any available space. You can't escape any of it. We live in a pretty well to do area and all the allyways around our building are full of little corrugated iron and blue plastic structures, the street that we drive along to get to school is lined with them and no railway line is without its little hut communities dotted along it. But yesterday it really hit me, and it was kind of a shock. What I never realised that most of our kids are street kids not slum kids, and theres actually a massive difference between to two. When people live in a slum theres a communitym support, electrcity and security. You have to pay to live there. But on the street you're subjected to anything and everything. Theres no protection for your home or whatever few belongings you have. Its so easy to forget where the children come from and what they go home to. In the school they're all just regular children who need a hug when they cry and who you shout at when they're being annoying.

I've mentioned our maid before, stroppy but lovely. Shes 16 and always very well put together. Her mum works at the school and all of her siblings (she has 8) go to the school. I know the whole family quite well. Her older sister is pregnant and managed to find me a blanket and a pillow when I had a bit of an 'episode' at school the other week! Anyway, yesterday we went out to the open yard where we do exercise, but it was really hot so one of the teachers suggested we go down to the sea where there's more shade. As we wandered down, our maid's little sister pointed out her house. Its the one in the photo above. 11 people live there. 11. I was just comletely blown away, I still am. I saw slumdog millionaire, I wasn't expecting much, but I was expecting 4 walls, something resembling a door. But this is just props for a roof. I have no idea how they survive here. I have an apartment, that occasionally has running water, a bed, fans, a closet to keep my clothes in and I look and feel like crap 90% of the time I'm here, and the other 10% only happens half an hour after each shower. They all sleep outside, theres room for about 4/5 people tops under the roof. How do they cope during the monsoon? I don't really know what else to say. Seeing her house is the first time I've come close to tears since I got here.

Shout outs!

Firstly to mum and dad for sending an awesome box of eastery happiness to brighten up our dying apartment. We made pink and yellow eggs to eat for breakfast on Easter Sunday and whipped ourselves up an easter tree which is in our family photo below.

And secondly thank you thank you thank you Katy for your Canada post. Vikki figured the chocolate was meant as a cruel joke but we never made it to the shop on Sunday so it ended up being our only easter chocolate and so was much appreciated (and also why the others didn't make it into the picture).

Thank you for the post, it brightens up our day!

Thanks for the sympathy!!!!!

I'm so glad other people think that the world becomes slightly less happier when your laptop dies. It makes me feel slightly less pathetic. I will pass on the sympathy to the others, we're all suffering together.

For anyone keeping track, the broken items in are apartment are:
1. Television
2. Plumbing
3. Toaster (we hold bread over a naked flame to make our toast)
4. Desktop computer (flooded)
5. Desktop computer (dead on arrival)
6. Laptop
7. 3 dining table chairs
8. Washing Machine (we store cutlery on it)
9. Fan in bedroom (you have to give it a good push to get it going)
10. Lego brick speaker for ipod
11. The big speakers we found to replace the lego speaker
12. Every single flyscreen (they're held together by duct tape)
The fridge made a valiant attempt at dying on sunday, it was fixed though, we only lost a tub of ice cream.

For anyone placing bets on when any of these things will be repaired I'd start looking around 2010. I will die of shock if anything gets done before we leave.

Did I ever tell the story of the toaster? Its really not that interesting. The holdy down mechanism was broken when we got there so our maid (an adorable but stroppy teenager from the school who cooks and cleans for us... when she can be bothered) used to jam a spoon in the lever to make it stay down. I found this shocking until I had to stand there for 5 minutes holding it down while the lever dug into my finger and just started jamming a spoon into it too. Anyway, one day the ants (that infest our apartment) swarmed into the toaster and our maid decided the best way to tackle this was to spray it with bug spray... about 6 times. So since then we're all a bit against using it.

In case the post seems a bit depressing I do have good news! Last night we spent a jolly hour checking our hair for lice and we're all nit free!

A bad blogger at exam time

I have to say, I am feeling slightly ashamed by my lack of blogging. I just had a lottle scroll through katy's blog of her adventures in Canada and she really does kick my ass at posting things. She's done about 4 posts in the last 2 days! Anyway, my blogging is probably going to get even worse as yesterday our lifeline in the apartment, the laptop, died. It is extremly sad, well maybe not that sad, but at least quite sad. The tv was broken when we arrived and now with the laptop dead the most exciting things we have to do is read a book and play cards, its like being in olden times. There will be no more DVD watching for us and now we have to trek over to the internet cafe to do important things like check gossip blogs and facebook. We've got a bit of a computer graveyard going on at the flat now: one dead laptop, one dead desktop, and one desktop that could have worked if it hadn't have been on the floor during the flood.

Its actually happened at the worst possible time. Exams are in a couple of weeks and as the 'teachers' we have to write the crazy things. Yesterday I spent about 5 hours sitting on the computer desperately trying to think of different way to test that the children know the alphabet. I have 4 exams to write, all for the little kids. Their English is not so amazing and they can't read much beyond the alphabet. They can speak it ok, so their oral test is fine, but the written one is going to be hard for them. We're suposed to arrange the test so everyone can get at least 40% so my first four pages involve tracing the alphabet, coping 3 letter words and writing their name out. I'm praying they'll all manage that. The volunteers have a crazy folder system in place so they can keep each other informed with what has and hasn't been taught, but this hasn't been kept up to date so we're just teasting them on the things we've taught them. I'm sure it'll be fine!