Thank you, Kirsti (and Joseph and Edward and Robert)

Thank you! Thank you, one and all! I was so moved by this Christmas package today that it brought me to tears. What great friends I have on the opposite side of the globe, whom I haven't seen in a year and a half, but yet are so thoughtful.

And what was inside, you ask? Delicacies from Trader Joe's and Whole Foods, my favoritest stores on the planet. How did you know about the dark chocolate-covered almond fetish? And how on earth did you know that one thing I really need right now is star stickers for grading the journals, but had no idea where to find them? They had to be stars. Seriously, this is manna from heaven.

Maybe I'm revealing too much when I say that I miss our talks during Sunday School. Hey, I guess we both had pretty good excuses!

Thank you!

A Swiss Christmas

Wordless Wednesday

Au revoir les enfants

The children left yesterday to visit their families for a week. Although most of them are Hindu rather than Christian, we close for Christmas. And I confess that I have been counting down the days!

May they be safe, may they have enough to eat, may they not be hit or exposed to anything their eyes and ears are too young to witness. 

We sent the children off in style, after a song and dance presentation for their parents. Our volunteer dance instructors, Anne and Diana, have been teaching the students for the past several months. They were all fantastic.

Some of the parents watching the show, with Sarathy's mom in the foreground.

Basha and Mariyambee with their mom. She tends to not bring them back to school until I have to go after them, so we'll see what adventure awaits us next week in the leprosy colony! She also informed me that she's only allowing them to attend school for as long as I'm in India. I guess I'll be staying until they graduate from high school!

Surviving the day in a sari is such an ordeal that I have to document it! With Alamelu, who kindly assisted. It's a mystery to me how they can mop floors and work in the rice paddies all day in a sari, let alone get by without tripping.

Wordless Wednesday

Here's another short video, this one specifically documenting the summer volunteer experience. Volunteers donate money to Rising Star and visit the campus as part of a summer session, which last two or three weeks. They alternate their days between tutoring at the school, working on construction projects at leprosy colonies (such as building latrines) and caring for and dressing wounds.

English Schmenglish

I quite coincidentally came across the English exam which our 10th graders are supposed to take tomorrow. They are in the midst of their "half-yearly exams."

A few choice excerpts from the test (with many more errata, but I'll spare you):

11. Identify the right spellings of the words:

b) crafts man ship / crafts menship / craftman ship
c) monolitic / inscreption / inspcription


12. Replace the underlined word with its equivalent American English word.

a) If you throw wastes in to dustbin than you will find your class neat.


16. Attach a prefix to the word taken from the list

She was ___taken for her mother as the child looked just like her.

a) un  b) en  c) mis  d) dis


23. Which of the options below will the suit the following sentences? [which ones??]

a) she can pass the exam
b) she could have passed the exam
c) she could have been passed the exam


24. Identify the pattern of the following sentence

He work his new uniform regularly

a) S V O A
b) S V O
c) S V C A


26. Complete the sentence

No other girl in the class is  ________________ kamala

a) most claver as
b) more cleverer as
c) as claver as


29. Choose the correct verb form to complete the sentence.

We decided ____________ Home works regularly

a) do
b) to do
c) doing


33. From the context of two sentences given below form a single sentence.

Meena knew that her father brought toys, Meena stopped playing game.


40. Why did Hughie wish to apologies to the baron?


41. What can artistes do to save the planet?


42. What is twofold duty to be acquired by students?


47. Write a short note on bird migration? 


59. Describer the daily routine of chaya and her family?

Wordless Wednesday

At the humble and happy home of our driver, Rajendran. Two small rooms, no indoor plumbing, no furniture except for a small armoire and a TV. Yet smiles and hospitality abound.

Bonjour les enfants

I recently came across this little video, which a volunteer composed during the summer when I was being unavoidably detained in the States. I had to watch it four times in a row.

We are understaffed, again, and I am teaching third grade besides playing principal. And then I've been quarterbacking (no idea where that came from: mark this as the only time you will ever hear me referencing football) homework and study hall until late hours. I have been weary and impatient. So thank you, wherever you are, for showing me our campus from a fresh perspective. We look like a functioning school!

The forest

I've been missing the forest for the trees. The everyday hustle and bustle spreads out its branches in every direction. Children swing from them like monkeys. I trip over the knotted roots as I run from class to class, making photocopies, caring for the sick and the merely hypochondriac (the stomachache that appears faithfully each day at English-reading-time and disappears miraculously for recess and computer period).

But today I'll slow down to assess the forest. There is no other way to put it: the school has undergone a miraculous change over the past year. My only regret is that I didn't test any of the children when I first arrived, because I would love to clearly quantify what I now can only express in somewhat vague terms. But at that time I had no idea of what was possible or that I would stay for longer than a year.


This is what I found in June 2010.

No one had ever heard of phonics. Children spelled the word before reading it: C-A-T is cat, D-O-G is dog. But all too often, you heard: D-O-G is cat. The children were simply memorizing the words and had no concept of letter sounds. Fifth-graders didn't know what sound the letter "b" made. 

Children had very limited access to books. We had one child out of 180 who read chapter books for pleasure. Most children had never read a book all the way through. Our older children read perhaps four years below grade level.

I walked into fourth grade on my first day here and found the children working on single-digit addition. I thought that I must be in the wrong room. Was it first grade? The (new and fabulous) teacher informed me that, no, I was in the right place. It just happened that no one seemed to have been taught anything in about two years in math.

Some of the teachers were hitting the kids. One teacher hit Joseph so hard that he bled on his head. Another teacher was making the kids hit each other as a punishment for giving a wrong answer.

Some of the third-graders couldn't read anything, but no one seemed to know this. There were so many problems that it took me a while to figure it out myself. The teacher merely lectured (sat in her chair and shouted above the rest of the cacophony). I don't think she had the foggiest notion about who could or couldn't read. One child could only read "the" and "and."

Oh yeah, all the teachers sat while teaching. Try teaching second grade while leaning back in your plastic chair. 

While a first-grade teacher was away on maternity leave, a housemother with no skills was covering the class. Her students spent most of the day coloring the floor with sidewalk chalk. 

The Social Science teacher didn't understand key concepts in the book. He asked a 9th-grader what "feudalism" meant. The best definition the class could come up with was "the king and his people." When I asked the teacher to explain it again, he replied, "Ma'am, I do it tomorrow." I reminded him that the following day was Saturday. "Yes, ma'am, I do it Monday."

Did I mention that the English teachers didn't speak English? 

To be continued with: where we are now

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday

Burning the midnight oil

This is where I hang out at 7am on Saturday mornings, proctoring exams with 9th and 10th standard.

When prospective teachers come in for an interview, they hand me three documents: their 10th-grade board exam results, 12th-grade board exam results, and university grades. Even if they are forty years old, this is what they wave at me, mark sheets from twenty-five years earlier.

That's why I'm trying to impress on our kids that the outcome of these upcoming tests is a very big deal and will affect them for decades to come.

This is our first year with a 10th grade at Rising Star, and our first time for board exam preparations. The exams will be covering English, Tamil, Science, Math, and Social Science. Unfortunately, they are fairly difficult. And somewhat irrational. And, unlike the SAT or GRE, there are no practice tests or simple way to study for them.

If students don't pass, they are finished with school, and are not permitted to continue on to 11th and 12th grade. But merely passing isn't enough, either. Kids must score in the 80-90% range in order to be secured a position in an Indian university after graduation. Scores also determine what they can study; if a student does poorly in Math, say, she will not be allowed to major in engineering in college.

This is all determined at the ripe ol' age of 15.

Oh, and poor handwriting will cost a student ten percent of the grade.


Ergo, 10th-graders (and 9th, whom we are trying to prepare early) have a demanding schedule this year. School starts daily at 7am with Science. They slog through until 3 with only a half-hour lunch break. Then they have Math and Tamil tutoring until 6, eat dinner, and have to be back in the library by 7pm.

Here we are around 9pm, some students faring better than others:

Teachers are constantly suggesting to me that the schedule is too lax. When they were in the 10th grade, they studied until midnight and were up again at 4 the next morning. And shouldn't we insert another Math class at 5am? Come January, one teacher wants to hold a Tamil class every evening from 7 to 10:30. Another wants to teach Biology all day on Saturdays and Sundays.

The exams are in April: wish us bonne chance!

Is it just me, or are my third-graders brilliant?

Wordless Wednesday

Is his zany flair for the dramatic shining through?

In memoriam: Grandma Delpha

Grandma passed away this week in my childhood home of Springfield, Oregon. She was ninety-two. Just two days earlier, the three-year-old granddaughter of Rising Star's founder died from a brain tumor. I like to think that the two of them are skipping along together, down the white brick road. Now, they both can.

I didn't think that I'd find a picture of her online, but then stumbled across one of the both of us. From around seven years ago.

Grandma loved to bake, and she was quite a gourmand. For her, baking and cooking were art forms. I still remember when she spent most of the day creating what was to be a very special and original chocolate mousse desert. I couldn't understand why she was fashioning a moose out of chocolate, nor how it was possible to do so. But obviously, that would take all day!

Neither were the culinary arts Grandma's only creative talent. She painted gorgeous landscape oil paintings which hung in her farmhouse on the McKenzie River. Her Christmas gifts to me (and to my siblings and to my cousins) were usually handcrafted: a large doll entirely sewn by hand, bath towels with hand-stitched monograms, a queen-sized quilt that never saw the likes of a sewing machine. For years she sewed every dress I owned. I just assumed that every grandma could and did sew a dress per day and a quilt per week.

Grandma was an avid correspondent. I wrote her letters from Switzerland, from Rome, from Jerusalem, from Nashville (another foreign place), from Los Angeles. She always responded immediately and with great enthusiasm for my adventures. She too had loved to travel when she was younger, particularly to Europe. We talked about taking on the Middle East together. When she felt stronger.

Grandma was interested and eager until the end of her life. She loved to read about new topics and to meet new friends. She was the life of the party, and happiest when surrounded by scores of old and new acquaintances.

Thank you, Grandma, for taking interest in me and showing such loving support. Neither you nor I would have ever imagined that I'd be doing my best to pass it on to 193 children in southern India. 

Wordless Wednesday

Beethoven's about as good as it gets, but the kids are coming close

Please tell me I'm not the only one whose emotions fluctuate like the high seas from day to day and from moment to moment. Is this what children do to you? Sometimes, the weight of my ever deepening affections nearly takes away my breath. It settles until it materializes as a big lump in my throat.

It comes when I am watching our teenagers study in the library at night and admire how far they've come. When Ebinezer runs to me and asks whether I would please let him fill out a math worksheet instead of going to PE (a soft spot for the nerds). And it comes at many other entirely unexpected and serendipitous moments throughout the day.

I never knew it was possible to love quite this much, especially when the relationship isn't consanguine. It surprises and delights me. My one year morphs into two and the children's idiosyncrasies and variegated little personalities emerge more and more. The better I know them and the more time we've spent plowing painstakingly through upturned rows of words, or math problems, the better I love them.

I hardly recognize myself with all this sentimentality, but here you go.

And then, there are other days. Please tell me I'm not the only one who loses it after incessant whining. My official name--which debuted as Principal Ma'am, had a brief stint as Celina Ma'am, and has conclusively ended up as just Ma'am--comes in as many as four syllables. Who knew?

Please tell me I'm not the only one who starts yelling back at obstreperous children who are unfortunate enough to cross my path after 4pm. I promise I'm as patient as Job before then.

Please tell me I'm not the only one who is baffled to tears at how to manage fighting, teasing, stealing and impudent lying to cover it up, mean-spirited comments, and passive-aggressive behavior. Am I?

And please tell me I'm not the only one with just a little bit of anguish at night, wondering whether I neglected a needy child simply because of my limitations, whether I settled a dispute unfairly, or whether anyone went away from me disappointed. Did I do enough that day?

Rat-proofing the kitchen

I came across this scene a few days ago and declared it worthy of a snapshot. A volunteer must have been nervous about little rat feet prancing across the plates and nibbling on a fork. But is the hand towel from the bathroom going to make a difference?

I’ve clearly had a few lessons to learn in India. I just wish that living peaceably with rats weren’t one of them! But unfortunately not much progress has been made, and now I need an escort to enter the kitchen at night. Neither does it help that I’m an involuntary screamer. 

By the way, I highly recommend kitchen rats as an effective method for weight loss. Works like a charm and going to bed hungry is often preferable to trekking in there.

Remember Room 101 from 1984? "In your case," said O'Brien, "the worst thing in the world happens to be rats."

On that note, fun rat facts you’ve been dying to learn. Rats climb straight up the wall like Spiderman. I swear I’ve seen it twice. They throw raw eggs off the kitchen counter (so much for the mystery of broken eggs on the floor).  And then they scatter the shells. They nibble through milk cartons and plastic cookie wrappers. One opened a bag of uncooked rice and devoured half a pound, over successive nights, before I finally threw it away. Rats come in brown, grey, or black. Take your pick!

Bon appetit.

Wordless Wednesday

The weather outside is(n't quite) frightful

Now that "autumn" has made its appearance, the temperature has dropped to a chilly 80 or so degrees. It makes me laugh that some of the kids have started to wear sweaters (but maybe the laugh's on me, because I've donned one myself when it's rained). In any event: this is my kind of climate.

Sometimes I fantasize about staying forever. What's another 50-odd years? They can bury me under the playground. I imagine never ever again having to contend with frozen toes, numb fingers, driving in snow, the dread of fall and wild anticipation of spring.

After all this time, this place still often feels too good to be true.

I wish I had a picture of ...

If only I had a camera permanently at the ready, or if at least Indian pants had pockets! I would display:

a picture of Lola the sheep ambling into the third-grade classroom, where she coyly began to bite off chunks of paper out of the trash can

Karthik doing his homework under the desk (it wasn't homework time!), where he was perfectly hidden from my view, and where the extreme space limitations made it more than comical (thank heavens for tattletales)

Sagayamery sick and sleeping in fetal position on the cold concrete floor (habitually spending the night without a bed, blanket, or pillow turns the kids into bonafide ascetics)

third-graders crying for fifteen minutes when I finally lost my patience and decided to seat them boy-girl-boy-girl (the girls shedding real tears and the boys pretending to cry); are cooties still alive and well in 2011??

Kaviya's proud, bloody, and toothless grin when the last front tooth finally capitulated after being loose for a month (why do some kids lose front teeth in kindergarten and others in fourth grade?)

Happy Deepavali!

Deepavali, or Diwali, is the Hindu festival of lights.

It is a celebration of the victory of light over darkness, good over evil. The children were celebrating not having to go to school. I was celebrating being able to watch them enthralled by the fireworks.

Aravind and Ebinezer

Mariyadoss

Praveenkanth

Soniya

Nadiya, Nagelakshmi, Rosy, and Amirtham

Christraj and Sanjay

As every year on Deepavali, the evening loomed dark and moonless. This is symbolic of the state of the world under the reign of evil Ramana. But fortuitously, heroic (and enlightened) Rama rushes to the rescue.

"Your beautiful wife is mine," jeered Ramana. "Never!" cried Rama. He drew his sword and chopped off one of Ravana's heads. The head grew back at once. Rama sliced off another. But that grew back too.

Trembling with rage, Rama took a magic arrow from his belt. This time he aimed at Ravana's heart. As the arrow pierced Ravana's skin he let out a long, deep moan and fell to the ground.

But skipping to the end:
By the time they reached their city, the streets were lined with cheering crowds. Each person had lit a little oil lamp to welcome them--and Rama and Sita were made king and queen. Il lieto fine.

So we all light candles and set off fireworks to commemorate, illuminating the grim sky.


Tonight reminds me of Bertold Brecht's interplay between light and darkness in his play on the life of Galilei Galileo. After countless references on the topic, we encounter these lines just before the hero's disappearance. The words struck a chord with me when I first read them: despite it all, the night is yet light.

Galileo: Wie ist die Nacht?
Virginia am Fenster: Hell.

Wordless Wednesday

Andaman Islands

In the Andaman islands, I didn't have to settle a single dispute involving a stolen pencil/eraser/pen/5-rupee coin/rubber ball.

There was no hitting/scratching/biting/hair pulling/calling another kid's mother certain Tamil words that I mercifully can't understand.

Instead, it was all bliss and...

Actually, by the time we found a good beach and it stopped raining, it was time to return home. That's what you get from an impromptu, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants and just-take-off-without-clear-destination mindset! All the merrier.

Havelock Island, peaceful and verdant with the ubiquitous water buffalo.

The memorable day when what was supposed to be a half-hour saunter to the ocean turned into a six-hour-long hike. Ten minutes after embarking, it began to rain, and then didn't stop all day. Anne blames me, but I blame the misleading map! We learned that soggy books do eventually dry out.

For the equivalent of two dollars per day, the simple accommodations with ocean vista. What more is there to life than a mattress, a mosquito net, and a fan? Hilariously spartan but very comfortable.

For some reason Anne took all these food pictures and now I need to come up with a caption. The fish was mouthwatering and a welcome change from our continental fare. But--psst, don't tell anyone--the rest of it is getting a little old.

My travel friend, Anne, is at Rising Star for three months as a dance instructor representing Promethean Spark. Her spontaneity and penchant for the unexpected made the trip fun in many ways. 

She insisted on taking a bazillion of what she called her cheesy teenager snapshots. But I'm glad for the memory: the face of supreme relaxation!