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.
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