Diwali

Travel Journal Excerpt, November 27, 2006:

Occuring this year on October 21, Diwali is one of the biggest festivals in India. Celebrated by Hindus, Sikhs, and maybe even others, it is a family holiday involving feasts and many firecrackers. "The festival of lights" it is a symbol of good triumphing over evil and houses are dressed in lights and candles until it looks a lot like Christmas. Although Diwali itself is a specific day, it is celebrated over a whole week and is much more complex that I know. For me personally, Diwali meant that I had an entire week off from class and therefore was free to travel.

After weeks of planning, the students in my program had divided themselves into three traveling groups. One group of nine stayed in Uttaranchal, choosing to travel northwest up from Mussorie for a week long trek to Milam Glacier in the high Himalaya.

Another group of eight elected to head out of the mountains and west into Rajastan where they went to Jaipur and the desert city of Jaisalmer from where they took a day trip riding camels into the Thar Desert of western India.

The third group consisted of myself. I had long before come up with three places in northern India wanted to visit during the program, on weekends or during some time off. This list contained the Punjabi city of Amritsar, Dharamsala in Himanchal Pradesh and Rishikesh in my home state of Uttaranchal. During my week off, I avoided other people's attempts to tag along with me and went to the first two places on the list. (If you are worried that I might not get to every city on the list, you should know that I'm writing this during my last night in Rishikesh.)

A friend I met through couchsurfing.com last spring was traveling through Europe, Egypt and as I found out the day before I left, had been in Delhi visiting a friend of hers for the past two weeks. I emailed her that I was coming to Delhi for a day and we decided she should travel with me for the week.

Leaving Friday afternoon, I took a few hour ride in the back of a crowded jeep down to Kathgodam where the nearest train station is. Even though I was a little car sick coming out of the winding mountain roads, I felt liberated to be rid of the pressures of school and intoxicated by the freedom of traveling alone again.

My night train arrived in Delhi very early in the morning and I found myself in a bad part of town outside Old Delhi train statiom before the sun came up. After fighting off a crazed mongrel dog that appeared out of a dark hole under an overpass I found that some people in Delhi begin their day as early as I did this day. I sat down and enjoyed a cup of tea slowly, trying to kill time as I was supposed to meet Hala at noon in the middle of the city.

The new, and incredibly clean, subway system opened at 6 and I took a train south towards a guesthouse in which I had stayed before. After checking in and taking short nap, I got up and headed out to meet Hala where we had agreed, stopping to grab some pastriesfor breakfast. While I waited I paged through my Hindi textbook and a man who came to offer me a taxi sat and talked with me a bid when he saw I was studying Hindi.

After he left to chase down more people to hawk his taxi business, I walked around and around the block on which I was to meet Hala, but she never appeared. Seeing me pass him a couple times, a man began questioning me on what I was doing and took me across the street for a snack. Finally I used a cabby's cell phone to call Hala and found out she was running late but on her way.

When she finally arrived, she, her friend, Ajay, and I walked around a bit until he had to go. I convinced her to come with me the next morning although she wanted one more day in Delhi and after a dinner at Pizza Hut (I know I know... American restaurant????... WTF?) listening to the pop and crack of 10 million people playing with fireworks, she headed back to her friend's place outside of town and I went back to my hostel.

Dodging the explosions the entire way and filling my lungs with the resulting smokethat filled the streets, I arrived at my dorm bed with a headache, and dehydrated from a long day in the sun with little water.

To make matters worse, I had taken a malaria pill after dinner but hadn't had any water to wash it down. When I layed down on my bed in the tent set up on a rooftop in Delhi, I was exhausted, my head pounded and my throat burned mercilessly.

Feeling too sick to actually get up and walk down to the street to find some bottled water, I allowed myself to drift into a light sleep. For hours that night, I lived in a painful and surreal world. Flashes of red and green filled the room as fireworks exploded outside my rooftop windows, while I lay in a stupor of exhaustion adn dehydration, too weak to attempt to remedy my situation. All sleep to be had came in short stints, interrupted by either a banging explosion from outside, or a painful one from inside my head or throat.

Finally and mercifully I found some form of deeper sleep and woke up the next morning more rested after double digit hours of sleep, but still dehydrated. My throat was sore in one distinct spot for days. Getting up and buying some water, I headed to the train station to meet Hala for the second full day of my week off for Diwali.



[Next stop... Amritsar, The Golden Temple, and the Ninja Turtles!]

Eschool

Travel Journal dated November 3, 2006

For the past couple years, I've been intoxicated by my inescapable lust to wander the globe. One might even say I've become what I never thought I would be, a romantic dreamer. I found inspiration to travel in every lecture hall, in the pages of every book and magazine, and hidden in the contexts of every commercial, television show and movie. Ive become obsessed, and my life's focus has shifted entirely from a career in science and a higher education in academia, to any possible way hat I could work by still feel free and able to fund my lustful habit.

The allure of exploring has drawn my gaze from and diminished my value for passions that would otherwise be keeping me content at home, including climbing, cooking, sports, friends, family and love. While these old or new passions put up a noble fight, I am a slave to my lust and they are unable to keep me alive for long.

However, over the past month, I have found something that has begun to rival my eed to travel, and that has positioned itself as a possible career requiring higher education, that I think I would find rewarding.

While many of the students here, if not most, are still unsure of their projects while we work at an NGO, CHIRAG promoting sustainable practices and assistance to the rural Indians in the Himalaya, I've been spending 4 or 5 afternoons a week participating in mine, often not returning back at our resort-ish skite until well after dark, 6:30-7pm.

After class in the large chairless meeting room at CHIRAG, I have a quick lunch of rice, dhal, vegetables and chapati and I rush to a nearby primary school to teach English to 75 children in 5 grades (1st to 5th) separated into two sparse class rooms.

Usually my friend, Matt, comes with me, and upon our arrival we are greeted by small dirty smiling faces and the tiny children standing and shouting in unison "Good afternoooooon sir!"

For about an hour we attempt to keep their attenion, often losing out to any number of distractions resulting in eruptions of screams and giggles. We spend most days in the room or the 4th and 5th graders because as they are the oldest children, they know the most Hindi (the kids speak Kumaoni at home but are taught Hindi from 1st grade) and English.

Often we do spelling exercises usually involving drawing pictures of common objects and then having them spell out the new words in English. Sometimes we give them full sentences and cover gramatical issues such as this/that, here/there and in/on. Obviously as our Hindi improves, teaching becomes easier as we are able to express the rules in a language they understand. But still, these children are learning English as a third language, often being taught in their second.

Every class ends with a song. Most days, while preparing more exercises on the black board we are serenaded by lines from songs shouted from the bodies piled on the floor. The children knew many English songs already such as slightly different versions of the ABC's, Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, Ba Ba Black Sheep, Old Man Babu (old McDonald) ad other songs that I'd never heard before. One worth remembering goes:

Johnny, Johnny!
Yes Papa?

Eating sugar?
No Papa!

Telling lies?
No Papa!

Open your mouth!
Ha-Ha-Ha!

Early in my time there, I decided to teach them Row, row, row your boat. Writing the four lines on the board, I went through each line word by word with the children repeating me loudly. They are well practiced and very good at repeating the teacher. Then I would sing one line at a time and they'd attempt to repeat it, but often they couldn't accurately get all the sounds right. Particularly they had trouble with "life is but a dream."

One line they immediately mastered and which they would repeat during real exercises was "Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily!" which they pronounce as "mewiry." Heart-breakingly cute.

After a few weeks, the children had the songs mastered and we could sing the entire song in rounds, without any warmup. On occasion I would even encounter children from other villages on the mountain roads, who knew my name and as we walked away would yell, "row row row your boat!" in a heavily accented, high voice.

I still hear my name sometimes when walkign the main road toward the school from CHIRAG. It feels so fulfilling to not only be allowed to show up to a public primary school and teach the children English or an hour, but to be so obviously appreciated by the students, their families, and the community as a whole. Not only to exist in their community, but to be treated like a respected member of it, who they are grateful is there.

When row row row your boat was mastered, we introduced another, more difficult, song, The Itsy Bitsy Spider. The children appreciate having hand movements while singing and they ook to this song right away. ALthough they never completely mastered it, they developed their own version which is shorter and cycles into itself so it can be sung over and over.

Many days are ended by an invitation to have tea with the one teacher, which is never rejected even if we are in the middle of an exercise or song because of the implication of politness and ettiquete. These days I really appreciate when our friend, Monisha, comes with us because her Hindi is very good and she can translate with the teacher, who doesn't speak English. When she is not there, Matt and I try to make do with our limited Hindi which sometimes is awkward and other times humorous as the phrases we know are strange or even ridiculous. Examples of both are, "This room is large and airy" and "I am a spoon."

By 3:30, we are usually back on the road to CHIRAG because we teach another class at the NGO at 4pm. This class is for adolescent girls and boys, in 8th and 9th grades who volunteer their time and walk half an hour or more after school to learn English. These students know more English and so it is very rewarding to see their improvement over time, even though class is hardly more than three hours a week.

Because of our efforts, along with other student-teachers who volunteer their time to teach more and less advanced students at CHIRAG, the NGO is organizing a permanent program for adolescents willing to take the extra time to learn and practice English. Its extremely rewarding to know that my actions planted a seed that has now been given the opportunity to gow into a potentially very successful program for the underpriviliged youth of this isolated rural area.

Yesterday, Thursday Nov 16, was our last day of teaching both at the school and at CHIRAG. Matt Monisha and I went to the school for the last time, and on the way, we bought out all the notebooks we could find in the small shops, over 70 in all, and presented them to the teacher to be distributed as she felt was right. Monisha translated our intentions to save them for teh very poor students who couldn't afford school supplies, and the teacher responded that all the kids are poor and that she was thankful for our gift. For our last day, the children lined up outside and sang their entire repetoire of songs in Hindi and English while we took pictures and videos and sang along with them.

Even as I write this now, my heart aches knowing that I won't have the honor of being allowed in their lives every day, while their songs warm my heart, make me feel alive, and make me forget my lust to quickly move on. That is significant.