Integration tutorials, Jazz Festivals, suspected rabies, a Women's Rights March and turning 24

The two weeks since our weekend away have been relatively uneventful. My school timetable has ballooned and is now packed with lots of individual supervisions.

I’ve been covering some English 1:1 tutorials and have been entrusted with some of my own (more rewarding) maths sessions. More recently I’ve been asked to teach year 12s integration, possibly a greater challenge than anticipated but good to keep me on my toes! I have started to appreciate the rewarding side of teaching too. One of my pupils, Montu, a teenage boy who is described as constantly looking stoned, has finally grasped long division! Literally made my week.

Weekends have been spent attending school sport fixtures and cheering the boys on. This in itself usually attracts more local attention; resulting in Future Hope sports teams having quite a fan club, or at least a lot of Indians watching their game! The sports are held on a large open green space in the city known as the Maidan. Originally used as a hunting ground, it now acts as one of the only large parks in the City and draws some parallels with Richmond Park, London. No deer or running yummy-mummies here though.

Maidan with the VIctoria Monument in the distance.

We’ve also discovered some of the larger markets, both local traditional market stalls and the brand new, American-style shopping mall, Quest. The latter is home to a western supermarket selling freshly baked bread. On discovering the bakery section I quickly purchased a large multigrain loaf and am quite ashamed to say I demolished it whole. My western cravings were bad that day!

The same day we found ourselves chilling out and dancing with some of the locals at a Jazz Festival. Set at one of the many country clubs in the City, we found ourselves dancing to an American Jazz band until 10:30pm (entertainment finishes early here). Even at the club we were of more interest than the band to some of the guests, with a couple of people trying to slyly video our dancing. Luckily one of the volunteers has learnt the helpful phrase, “Don’t video us, we’re not a circus” or words to that effect. I could have understood if they wanted to capture us playing air badminton (badminton without the equipment) but no one took any interest during our energetic rally on the lawn!

Jess, Georgie, and Alice at the Jazz Festival. Jess is our new addition and handily fluent in Hindi.

The school is in full preparation for the end of term school fair, or Mela as it is referred to over here. It’s a whole-school, fund raising event and all the students perform routines, whether it be singing, dancing or circus acts. They children put on food and game stalls and even make arts and crafts to sell. I’m looking forward to the entire thing coming together. Wanting to be the best volunteers we can, the 7 of us have decided to perform a medley from the Jungle Book. The initial deliberation over song selection took quite a long time and a lot of thought, always wanting to ensure there weren’t colonial/ racial/ religious references. Oliver, The Lion King and Jungle Book were about the only 3 that made the cut. In addition to our medley, the four girls have decided to attempt a popular dance from a famous Hindi Film. This led us to dancing until the early hours one morning, repeatedly watching a Youtube tutorial video and constantly saying “What on earth did he just do then?” If you want to know what some of the routine will look like, check out the song’s official video. Our version will have less champagne and skin on show.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7k_U1ZXybo

India’s national motto should read, “The best laid plans of mice and men....” Saturday 7^th looked to be a really exciting day: lunch with the middle school boys, an afternoon Hindi dance class, Indian cinema in the evening finished off with a night out for the big 24! Instead I spent 8 hours in a hospital with one of the other volunteers who had suspected rabies. Although not what I originally planned, it was still an experience.

Bureaucracy had raced us to the hospital from the train ticket office. We spent the first 40minutes filling out various forms in a room ironically titled “Emergency”. Had it been a real emergency (which arguably suspected rabies is) I suspect the pace of progress would have been just the same. “Excuse Miss, place your severed limb here while you fill out these ten forms..... No Sir, the heart attack can wait. What was your postcode?” The time taken from arrival to injection of the rabies jab was 6 hours and 41 minutes. Luckily Georgie wasn’t foaming at the mouth.

Saturday night I found myself at a rich young Indians house party. Here it would seem most men, or rather boys, think the best way to impress a girl is to brag about the amount of pot you have smoked and where to find the best joints. Needless to say I find this whole performance quite repulsive and a real bore. But once most other people had drunk and smoked, the dance floor opened up and the party was much more my type of thing. Don’t worry mum I’m still going with the whole T-Total trend to stay on the safe side and you know I wouldn’t even touch a cigarette. And Jemima – I found a crazy Indian dancing friend. They loved the parachute move!

Despite the 3am close on the previous night, we were up at 7am on Sunday to participate in a “Women’s rights March” in Kolkata. Being white, Alice and I were photographed a lot and were even interviewed by the Telegraph newspaper (Kolkata version). We made it to the front page of a supplement section; I was expecting a bigger spread.

I spent my birthday teaching, and supporting the school athletics team at an inter-school tournament. In the evening we went out for a much-craved Italian dinner with the friends, finished of with a sampling of drinks at out third country club in Kolkata, The Saturday Club. Fantastic day. Lots of children wished me happy birthday; each on their own is worth a hundred presents, and a few even made small cards and paper presents. Its a birthday I'm unlikely to forget! 

Hopefully the final two weeks of term will fill me with more satisfying teaching moments, and memories with the kids that I’ll treasure for years. My time is passing so quickly, I’m already planning my return trip!  

A random weekend on the coast, part II

On Saturday we travelled from Bhubaneswar to Konark on a local bus. The 65km journey which cost 45p saw a bus, which comfortably would carry 30 passengers, heave 80+ locals plus us 4 white girls along the country roads. No exaggeration. The bus conductor affectionately referred to us as mousey for the duration of the trip, apparently translating to “Mother’s sister”. We’re going to check this with a local before we start shouting it in the streets.... The conductor spent a lot of his journey shouting over the many heads “Mousey, mousey. Good?” A thumbs up from me and the basic Hindi words “Chella, Chella”, translating to “Go. Go.” got the seal of approval from the other passengers. I dealt relatively well with the heat and continuous crushing bodily contact; the moment the bus slowed to watch a husband and wife knock seven bells out of each other was extremely uncomfortable and one of those sobering moments I’m grateful to be born into the society I am.

Alice squashed on the bus, and Georgie in the back ground. "Mousey Mousey!"

Konark is home to the incredibly impressive sun temple, constructed in the 13^th century incorporating engineering way ahead of its time. A guide led us around the spectacular site for 2 hours, divulging lots of stories and legends whilst also doubling as our protection from the many requests we received for photos. The temple was again littered with thousands of karma sutra carvings, including some along the theme of zoophillia. I won't quote our guide completely but the sentence started, "here is woman standing, here is dog.....".
A short 3km tuk tuk drive down the road led us to the coast and a completely unspoilt seaside village. The whole village were playing their role: men returned from the day’s fishing and heaved the boats onto the shore; women carried the fish from the boats to the small trucks on top of their heads; children collected the discarded fish. I say fish but there was an array of different species which could have easily competed with a fish market counter. Shrimps of all sizes, eels, sword fish to name a few. The sun was setting and so we took a rather uncomfortable 23km tuk tuk journey along the coastal path twisting through conservation areas.

Puri was out final destination. Initially a small fishing village, it is now one of India’s four most holy pilgrim sites in India. We watched the sun rise before heading to the town’s main attraction, the huge Jagannath temple. Being a foreigner we weren’t able to enter the temple but instead were able to view it from an arguably better vantage point which used to be a library. Old book shelves and the crumbling architecture show signs of its previous life. We could have stayed there all day, proving an excellent people watching spot from where very few locals noticed us, and, as such, went about daily life unchanged. One distressing sight was an old lady laid out in the middle of the road begging, obviously suffering from starvation. There is no escape from the poverty.

Looking out over Puri in the Library. I'm on the left, Alice centre, and Georgie right.

We checked out all the other major tourist sites before retiring to the beach. Camels replaced the traditional British seaside donkey rides and locals played cricket using anything they could for wickets and bats. Georgie and I decided to take full advantage of the Bay of Bengal and went swimming, fully clothed I hasten to add. We are still in India after all. This attracted much curiosity, particularly when my top went see through – luckily I had a swimsuit on underneath!

We enjoyed an evening of cards and tasty food, caught fresh from the sea before jumping on our return sleeper train back to the smog of the city.

We’ve already started planning our next weekend away. One exciting trip I've got on the horizon is a 14 day trip with 6 of the pupils from Future Hope which is taking place over Christmas and NYE. We're trekking around Darjeeling and the Nepalese boarder mountains. It means I'm unlikely to get phone signal over the holidays but hey, when in India....