Wordless Wednesday

Fire! A small forest fire came within 20 feet of our volunteer hostel. I started composing a mental list of what to grab for an evacuation...

This week in pictures

I traded in my inheritance, not for a mess of pottage, but for a camera. The children, the housemothers, the teachers, the landscape, all were crying out to be documented and to be shown off in much greater vivacity.

Capturing all the colors and scenes that are photo-worthy is both a challenge and a thrill. In any case, I hope to do it all a little more justice.

Gopinath, in third standard, is always eager to have his picture taken. He'll be happy to see that he's featured here this week.

Our neighbors, down the street in Thottanaval village.

Guys seated on top of a truck. Thought the white woman with the camera was hilarious.

Murugan and Mariammal, a married couple who work at Rising Star. It's 5 pm, and they're headed home. The entourage usually includes at least two children, but it's Saturday and the kids are at home.

Construction work on the Green House, next to the volunteer hostel where I live. We're adding a second storey.

Pondian, who brings us our milk. He has four boys who attend Rising Star: Ashok, P. Vijay, Moorthy, and Karthik.

Kindergarten at dance class (Promethean Spark).

I never did find out where one of our drivers, Velu, was headed with a duck tucked under each arm.

Wordless Wednesday

Kishore, Gopinath, Archana, Devapriya, Nisha

The bad with the good

This dear boy returned to us from his holiday with third-degree burns on his hand and leg. He told me that his mother had burned him, and I assumed it was an accident. Cooking generally takes place over open fires in the home or just outside the front door. But then he explained to me that it was a punishment for stealing 10 rupees (20 cents) from the neighbors. She wanted to brand him as a thief.

When he saw that this news was making me emotional, he widened his big brown eyes and said, "it's OK, Ma'am." As long as I didn't shed any tears over it!

The farcical thing about the situation is that I had spoken with his mother about violence a month ago, when she came to take him home. Out of all the parents at the school, she was the only one I had asked to guard her child from exposure to violence. But I had mainly been concerned that he was seeing it, not receiving it. He's a highly intelligent and sensitive boy who internalizes and has particularly adverse reactions to this sort of thing. But who wouldn't?  

Sur la tete

Mango season

"All pass"

"All pass" is Indiaspeak for "everyone passed" the board exams!!!

All six of our students passed with above-average scores. We are thrilled, although some of the kids had hoped to perform even better. The main point is that they can now continue on to eleventh and twelfth grade. We were initially hoping to keep them at Rising Star next year, but we would need at least fifteen students to start a new grade. The children's hostel is also running out of space.

So it looks like they'll be beginning eleventh standard at a school near Chengelput, forty-five minutes away. We'll miss them.

It's a distinction in India when all the students in a school pass the tenth standard board exams. They call it "100% results." We were fortunately able to allot our few students much-needed personal attention and care, because this outcome was far from certain and at times even seemed improbable.

Here are five of the six, but I'll take what I can get: boys Rajesh and Shankar, and girls Buelah, Sujatha, and Gracy. Mahalakshmi, who scored the highest, will have to await my next photo shoot. Unlike the younger kids, these students don't relish sitting on the receiving end of the lens. Adolescent whining and groaning prevail! This must have been take twenty, where finally they aren't rolling their eyes at me or poking each other.

Wordless Wednesday

On y va

Here's one way to take a nap! More times than I can count, I have seen limp sleeping babies precariously (to my Western eyes, anyway) extended lazily across the handlebars of a motorcyle. Yes, a moving motorcycle. Or draped over their mother's arm, sleepy head bobbing a few feet from the whirling concrete below. Still, it makes my heart skip a beat.

And yet I love the immediacy of life on the road, unencumbered by doors and glass. In India, it's always a communal enterprise, not an exhibition, not to see and to be seen, but just to live. This is how we get around.