Visages Villages

On getting mobbed every time I turn around

On my first day at the school, the kids stared and stared and stared, eyes wide and mouth agape. I can't imagine they would have stared harder if I'd sported horns and purple stripes on my face.

I seem to be the first white person most of them have seen.

Now they have graduated to mobbing me, the Fascinating Creature Who Smiles At Children and Speaks Weird-Sounding Words.

Life here is very simple. The kids don't use technology of any kind, toys, or books other than their slim textbooks. So it doesn't take much to become the center of attention!

Girls' hostel

In the evening I went over to the girls' hostel. There are 44 girls who live together in the hostel next to the school.

For their safety, they are locked inside during after-school hours.

So while the kids from the boys' hostel get to play out in the village...

the girls are behind their gate.

From 6 to 8 pm is study hall. This is what I found when I went over at 6. They don't move from this position for two hours! The little ones write the letters of the alphabet and numbers, then recite it to themselves over and over.

The bigger girls mostly copy from their books into their notebooks; that's what students here spend much of their study time doing (at school too). They also memorize. They desperately want to learn how to read English, but most of them can't yet. They move their fingers from word to word on the page and just say something.

In an effort to improve the school's status, Little Flower switched from a "Hindi medium" school to an "English medium" two years ago. But the kids don't know English. The teachers can mostly read enough English to explain the meaning from the textbooks (which are now in English) to the students. But they don't speak much English, so classes are still held entirely in Hindi.

There's a lot of work to be done, but the kids are eager for knowledge.

This is the girls' housemother.

The bigger girls go over to the main building (where the school is, and the kitchen) to fetch dinner.

The boys are there too, with their own pots.

Today's scenes

Winnowing rice

The Little Flower school

The school is only for students from leprosy colonies, which means they are the children or grandchildren of someone who's had leprosy.


The entrance to the school

Preschool

I'll need to find out more about this, but apparently many of the parents aren't enrolling the kids until they're older. So there are children in preschool and kindergarten who look like they are 8 or 10. 

"First class"

"Second class"

"Third class"

I'm still learning about who paid for the new section of the school, but I think an Austrian charity constructed it. The 4th through 8th classes meet in the new classrooms. They are very basic, just concrete shells with openings in the walls. No electricity. The floors are dirt or dirt and brick.

And the floor, which they try hard to keep swept...

Back in India!

I am thrilled to be back in India! I previously spent over two years in the state of Tamil Nadu. That's in the south, they speak Tamil there, and it's relatively well developed. Now I'm in the state of Bihar, in the northeast, and it's perhaps the poorest part of India. The language here is Hindi. 

This is Madenpatel. He's a leprosy patient who lives in the Little Flower leprosy colony. That's where I am. He saw me with my camera and gestured for me to take his picture. 

The big hero around here is Baba Christdas (baba means "father"). He founded Little Flower in the 1980s and dedicated thirty years to improving the lives of the leprosy affected.

I will be spending a lot of time assessing the Little Flower school and the state of the children's education. Around 200 kids are in preschool through 8th grade. Some of them live right here in the Little Flower village with their parents. But most of them have come from any one of twenty different leprosy colonies, and they live in the hostels adjacent to the school.

I went over to the boys' hostel after lunch and found this...

This is their courageous housemother. She is in sole charge of 77 boys. Maybe she gave them a sleeping potion?

And then I went over to the girls' hostel.

Namaste from Lal Baba and Rajendran!