So, what am I doing in India?

I am definetly not on holiday, not at all. I have just finished my preparation for tomorrow's English class and the time is 10 pm. The last hour I have been drawing pictures of fruits. We are going to show them to the pupils when we teach them the names of banana, mango, coconut, orange, pineapple, apple, lime and watermelon. (OK, it's not only fruits.) Yesterday I was doing preparation until 9:30 pm, finding a text for the adolesent girls to read. This volunteer thing is not just travelling, fun and nice experiences, we are actually the only teachers the kids have in English. This is hard work.

We arrived our work area on Sunday the 5th, just to discover that we are living in a kind of a hotel building with nice rooms and a beautiful view. The town Palampur is located in the foothills of the Himalayas, where we are surrounded by green forest and in the North the scenery ends in steep mountains. The weather is hot and humid now in the rain season, even here on 1200 meters above sea level. Today was the first day we could see the peaks of the mountains since they have been hidden in clouds and mist for the last 2-3 months. But now the rain season is comming to an end, and the sun has been shining the whole day.

It is only now in the evening that the rain has started to pour down again, followed by thunder and lightening, which has resulted in power black out. I had to draw my fruits in the light of a head torch. So even if we live in a hotel where we are served hot meals three times a day we don't feel spoiled. For the next 5 months I am going to do my laundry by hand and shower in water from a bucket on the floor. But we do have hot water from a tap in the end of the corridor. There are four volunteers sharing each room, but every room has it's own bathroom, with western style toilets, a sink, a tap with cold water, and two buckets on the floor for showering and laundry. Our group consists of 20 volunteers living here at the moment, with young adults from Germany, UK, Switzerland, Austria, Spain, USA and Norway.

The IDEX staff is only made up of Indians and consists of project executives, intepretators, the camp manager, house keepers, and drivers. I am not sure how many they are, but if our work as volunteers is failing, we are at least employing a bunch of people. So something good will come out of these projects anyway. They are making our life here as comfortable as possible, herding us around like sheeps, and do their best to make our volunteering useful. The kitchen is provideing us with healthy, nutritious and tasty food. So far I am not bored by Indian food, I actually like it very much. And my stomach is not giving me any trouble, as many others have had. There have also been some girls fainting, some with fever, eye infections, urine infections and head aches these first three days. So we are taking care to wash our hands properly.

On monday the 6th we chose our work placements. First we visited all the different places, and then we decided where we wanted to work. As I wrote earlier I had planned to teach adolecent girls in English and computing, but these classes are both in the afternoon so I had to choose another one in the morning. All the morning projects involved working with kids, so now I am teaching English in first and second class (5-6 years old) in Bindrabad public school in the morning. In the afternoon am I teaching adolesent girls in English. Well, maybe not only adolesent; the girls are from 6 years to 18 years. That makes quite a big gap in English skills. Because of the difference in skills we have to prepare at least two different programs for each lesson, and each lesson last for 2 hours. That is why I have spent the last evening preparing.

In the morning class there are 17 kids, and in the evening we have 12 girls joining the class and it is not as if we only are assistants for the teacher. There are no other teachers in these classes. Indian governmental schools are underfunded and there are too few teachers for all the classes, at least in this school. I don't know if they would manage to give the pupils a teacher if we were not there but we are anyway holding the classes in groups of three or four volunteers. The only help is an interpretator from IDEX, because the children of course do not speak English, and an executive, also form IDEX who go through our plans every morning. My expectations of how much we could be of help was very low before I got here, and now I also have to wonder if even my best might not be good enough. Well, the first day was better than I feared, and today was better then the first day. So I hope I will get to grips with this when I get some more experience. I will be doing this for the next ten weeks, so hopefully I will survive and it will be easier after a while. At least I think that our efforts are better than nothing for these kids.

And, ok, I have to admit that the kids are adorable.