Back in Providence
I’m back! After a long absence I’ve returned to my random writings.
In Calcutta I got a crazy fever and didn’t eat for a few days. When my appetite came back my stomach was in such a bad way it was painful to eat so I stayed off food for another few days, all the while popping ‘take after food’ tablets. That wasn’t fun. I staying in India just long enough to meet some volunteers from my college. I showed them the ATM and the pub, and headed home. Irish food sorted me out so I came back. Now I’m in Shillong, in the north east of India, where I spent the summers of 2005 and 2006, working in Providence School. I’m here with two of the volunteers I left in Calcutta, Andrea and Louise.
I won’t even attempt to describe the school. Here’s a link that can do it better.
Also, a chap from Tipperary is cycling from the west to east coast of the USA for the school. This is his blog.
In short, it caters for students who can’t afford to go to government schools, which are also free, but uniforms and books put them beyond the reach of a lot of people. There are 7 different classes, from kindergarten to the top class; in which they are studying for the National Open Schooling Exam. The school also teaches the students trades so they can be self employable when they’re older. Everything from knitting, cooking, carpentry, paper making, bag making hairdressing and candle making. There’s 20 altogether so I must be missing a few.
The class 1 teacher, who doubles as the confectionery teacher is abroad at a conference right now and I am attempting to replace her. Day1 in the confectionery class I noticed the cake mixture was an illuminous shade of green. Not being the best at baking I decided to whisper to one of the older kids (didn’t want to make a fuss if the cake was supposed to be this fun colour). Once she heard the word green she raced over to the offending child. My Khasi isn’t the best but I understood enough to know the cake was not supposed to be green. I manged to make out ‘No, not vanilla essence, food colouring!” After giving the girl an earful we later baked her crazy mixture and so ‘Alien Cake’ was born. Next St. Patrick’s Day everyone’s getting green Alien Cake from me.
A few minutes after that, we had another baking disaster. Just as the banana muffins were being slided into the oven a really small kid tugged on my jumper and said “Miss, I think the banana is still on the table”. And indeed it was. Cakes had to come out again, the banana had to be added to the until then flavourless muffins, and we had a very exciting race against time to get them back in the oven and baked before the school next door broke for lunch. We sell our masterpieces to them everyday to pay for our ingredients for the next day.
Shillong is definitely my favourite place in the world, after Ireland of course. It has a strange mixture of western and tribal culture. Very few young people wear typical Indian clothes, I know a few who count English as their first language and Christianity is by far the dominant religion. In fact, Hindus get a pretty rough time. But at the same time a man’s family are not permitted to be at the church for his wedding. This is changing a bit, brothers and sisters are turning up nowadays, but it’s still taboo for his mother to attend. When a woman gets married she takes her husbands name, but the children get her name, and all the inheritance goes to the youngest daughter. I’m going to a museum on Khasi culture soon, I’ll have loads of facts and figures after that (that’ll make an exciting blog entry…..)
But the best thing about this place is the people, and more specifically the students in our school! We went roaming around Shillong with one last Sunday. Bantei is a kid I’ve known since 2005 and he likes to call over to hang out on the weekends. We went to the golf course, a usual hang out for the young ones around here. We were annoyed that some special event was on and people were actually playing golf. In all my trips there I’ve never once seen someone play golf. It didn’t seem bother too many people, we still laid out on the fairway and some guys had a football game on one of the greens. We just covered our heads when we head “Fore” and went back to sunbathing soon after.
Afterwards we couldn’t get a taxi back into town. Luckily we met a nice couple who offered us a lift. Just your average journey really; 8 people in a micro sized car, dance music blaring, and I had to sit with one leg either side of the gear stick. The driver was very polite though and barely used his gears so I wouldn’t have to move. When we arrived back in town, swapped phone numbers and promised to meet for tea sometime, our 13 year old student turned on us. “What would you have done if they had brought us somewhere else, eh? They could have taken us anywhere!” He let us go when we promised never to get into a car with strangers again.
One last kid story before I must leave. Today in class 1 we were doing the ‘Stay safe on our Roads’ chapter. There are two of us dealing with the thirty five 6 year olds at the moment. My co-teacher, Andrea, was telling them how they can keep themselves safe on the roads. When she had gone through it all she said, “Right, if you stuck to the rules, what would you be?” Bright spark Metinga shouted “A traffic light!”.
Tags: India, Khasi, Meghalaya, Shillong, Volunteering
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