While staying with Teri in Jodhpur, I was hoping to be able to accompany her to work one day, to see the villages and how she teaches English to the girls there. There is a rather strange and surly "Retired Major Singh" at the Veerni project office, who is in charge only of coordination, but decided to flex his authoritarian muscles and tell her not to bring anyone along. Luckily, he changed his tune before I left town, and I was invited to spend the day following Teri on her rounds.

When we showed up at the office in the morning, we were suprised to find three other American visitors waiting accompany us. One of them knew the person who started the project, and had arranged to "help out" in the villages for a few days, as part of their whirlwind World Tour (EVERYWHERE in 3 months!) to celebrate their graduation from college. Teri rose to the occasion, never acknowledging the added pressure of being watched by four new people during only her second week of teaching!

We were driven in a minibus, out into the desert about 30km, to a little village with a school consisting of two tiny rooms smaller than the size of an average western child's bedroom. Each classroom had about 15 girls in it View image(and there were 8 new girls outside sitting eagerly in the courtyard, hoping to be admitted soon) View image.

This school is funded by Veerni Project -- for girls only, who would not receive any education whatsoever. As yet there are only a few villages around Jodhpur with Veerni support. The boys go to a state-run school, which has around 150 students and two teachers. Apparently one of the teachers has an opium habit, and has only been seen a couple of times in 2 years. So their situation is also far from ideal.

It was really wonderful to see how interested and willing to learn the girls were, and to see how much Teri obviously enjoyed her work. View image , View image , View image , View image , View image, View image.

The girls LOVE going to school, especially the English classes once a week (Teri visits several villages on different days). They were even more excited than usual to see FIVE westerners show up. I was hoping to just observe and take pictures, but with their extraordinary exhuberance, of course that was impossible! We were all drawn into name-games, songs and dances View image , View image. And every time I took pictures, they all insisted on having their portraits taken! Luckily, they were all so beautiful, it was my pleasure to oblige! View image , View image , View image , View image.

These girls are aged between 12 and 15, and nearly all of them are married! One of them even has greying hair!!!!

As we left to return to Jodhpur, we were invited to watch the girls sports class out on the dusty desert "field."
We tried to understand how the game worked -- it had chasing and taunting -- but could not grasp the objective or the rules. But it looked really violent!! View image.