Oh, the places you'll go!

If it's not too presumptuous to say so, I hope to endow Rising Star children with a legacy: a legacy of reading. I found literacy rates to be low, both among children and teachers. But the library, in its two-week history, has already been uproariously (and I mean that quite literally, given the noise level accompanying the enthusiasm) popular.

Library periods weren't part of the curriculum, and yet I wanted to allow everyone reading time. After much head banging and cogitating, I came up with a solution that struck two birds with one stone. We shifted the schedule and now have half an hour before school begins, during which one third of the school attends math tutoring (also sorely needed) and the rest reads library books.

Thrice a week in the afternoon, there's English tutoring (which I am designing to be a phonics reading program; the reading instruction in India is traditional and based solely on memorization). The tutoring classes take turns using the library, which allows those children, many of whom are also in math tutoring, to look at the books.

Here's Ragu with one of the library's most prized holdings: a Disney book. When I was organizing the library, I removed the Disney stories from the stacks and arranged them on a separate shelf. I didn't want these (if I may say so) unpoetical and sometimes ungrammatical books mixed in with the others! Unbeknownst to me, they were to instantly become precious commodity. Most popular of all? Lion King.

 The teachers were not quite as willing as the children. It took not a little persuasion and patience to convince them to pick up a somewhat longer book. Several of them are reading Charlotte's Web with me. We look up words on Wikipedia (concrete nouns) and on an online Tamil dictionary (verbs and adjectives). Several had never used the computer before and it was moving to see their excitement at seeing Wikipedia for the first time. [The painting on the wall was done last month by a volunteer who's a high school art teacher in the States. It took me a moment to make the Jungle Book-India connection.]


Brothers Yokeshkumar and Vigneshkumar showing off the book they read to me, for two stickers apiece.

Just never forget to be dexterous and deft.
And never mix up your right foot with your left!

Today

My pride and joy is our new library. We've had great books sent from American donors, and I've spent the last two weeks organizing and setting it all up. The response has been phenomenal; I have to kick kids out every afternoon when I need to leave. Here's Rasheed Basha and Gokulraj, two guys crazy about books.

 

I meant to blog more frequently, but the days are very full. I have to remind myself to eat and sit down occasionally. Today I made sure kids knew where to go (we added tutoring classes in the morning, and the younger students get confused), helped latecomers hurry along, taught mini-English classes to various teachers (Rajesekaran, Dhanesekaran, Indumathi, Mathavi, Thanika), taught first grade library hour, taught second grade (aka hell's angels) library hour, shuffled kids to afternoon tutoring hour, observed four tutoring classes and made sure teachers were pronouncing words correctly, helped one teacher learn how to use Wikipedia and the printer, brought library books to kids not in tutoring hour, checked out library books to approximately 1452 yelling children, had 4 others read to me, stayed behind to clean up the aftermath: a serious mess of a library, made copies of math worksheets, finally went home, helped boys with their reading, ate, helped another with his reading, discussed some problems with the directors, crashed.

These are the children of Rising Star

Here I am finally figuring out this blog thingamajig, stalled as I was by internet failure, electricity failure, and stomach failure. The power is in and out constantly, sometimes ten or more times an hour. My stomach, fortunately, has been mostly in since a rather painful and seemingly interminable initial bout of what we'll politely call "indigestion." Suffice it to say that I thought I was dying and certainly hoped I would (lest this deter any potential visitors, it was actually NOTHING and would never happen to YOU)!

But on to the kids: Rising Star Outreach is a home for 140 children whose parents have been affected by leprosy. Although the disease is curable and not nearly as contagious as commonly believed, patients in India have been compelled to relocate to leprosy colonies. Their children live a grim existence, at risk of developing the disease themselves (there seems to be a genetic factor in its transmission, although unsanitary and crowded living conditions also play a role) and unable to go to school. In fact, the little girl to my right on the above image had leprosy as a baby.

An additional 40 children are "day students" who attend the school but do not live on campus and are not related to the leprosy affected. They are the children of our drivers, cleaners, or construction workers, and walk in from the adjacent village.

 The kids are divided into eight "families," each with a housemother. A family shares a minuscule apartment of three rooms; there isn't any furniture and life is acted out on the concrete floor.

A recent tonsure day:

The children do their own laundry (by hand, I might add):

I often do feel like I'm Alice in Wonderland, that I've fallen down a deep hole and have landed on the far side of the moon. Ubiquitous unaccustomed sights provide constant entertainment: cows wandering down the middle of the street, families of five perched precariously (or not?) on a motorcycle, construction workers wearing saris.

What next? A large blue caterpillar seated on a mushroom, quietly smoking a long hookah?