Debbie's Placement in India 2018

Well Saturday came around again quickly! Today is the science exam at school, but I decided to go to the exam today as I feel like I haven't spent enough time at the school recently. I stayed until school finished at midday, doing whatever I could to be useful and supervising the children. There was a gap between the children finishing school and our lunch being ready, so I went to my room to read a little. When I came out to go up and do some work at the house, I saw the hostel boys downstairs wrestling with a snake! I quickly went back for my camera. The snake was a Russell's viper, a very dangerous Indian snake, and this one was a relatively small example. Manil had been walking along and had almost stepped on it, but luckily the boys had a holiday from college and so had been called to deal with it. Using a special implement to secure the snake's head, they carefully picked it up and put it into a rice sack so that they could take it out to the uninhab...

We went to the school again today, but I had forgotten that they had their second unit tests at the moment. They seem to get a lot of tests for such young children, I hope they don't find it too stressful. Today's test was the English test, and as usual they began with a few hours of revision, which Alex and I helped with. When the children had their break before the tests began, Alex and I decided not to stay for the exam itself, as we are often a bit superfluous for that. Instead, I went to the office again to see if I could hear any more lectures. I had to give up when the next lecture was almost entirely inaudible too, with the only parts I could hear being the embedded videos and the guest speaker's explanations of some visuals which I couldn't see... Giving up on the lectures, I downloaded some more of the readings instead, and continued with some planning and notes for the next assignments. When I came back up to the farm house, I saw Anil - one of the h...

I woke up with a bad throat and unable to talk properly today. I think I have laryngitis, which is a bit rubbish as it's second Saturday today so there will be over 100 children to deal with... I went down to the school hall to help with second Saturday, and began again by organising the ID badges so that the chaos would be reduced and finding their badges would be quicker and easier for the children. I had to get get Balaji the head teacher to help me talk to the children as my voice was so bad! The ID badges laid out in groups, instead of in one big jumble... I knew that the program for the day was due to involve the children making Christmas cards ready to send back to the sponsorship donors in Australia, but this seemed to take a while to get started and for ages the children were sitting in the hall and entertaining themselves. One of the very sweet little boys from our school asked me to sit by him, but I said no as he was sitting near the entrance and I didn't...

The last couple of days have been a bit unusual. There is a strategy conference happening at SEDS this weekend, and a whole bunch of people are coming for it, some are board members and others will invited guests so that there are a range of ideas possible. This means that the women fieldworkers have all been at the house, slaving away with cleaning and cooking and other preparations for receiving the visitors and setting up for the conference. As a result, Alex and I haven't been out to the field again. I went to the school yesterday (30th) and helped out with some lessons yesterday, and today I mostly worked in the office, doing university course work, some assignment work, and some general reading about the role of social work in development. I also started to do a bit of job hunting, just thinking ahead... I arranged to go to the teachers meeting in the afternoon after lessons finished, and Alex tagged along too. I wasn't sure of the format that the meeting would tak...

Today was another school day. In terms of my presence at the school, I have done my best to make my time with my class a bit fun, but also fairly routine so that I'm helping with rather than disrupting their education. This doesn't give such interesting blog posts, but it makes me feel satisfied that I have the right approach. I worked a bit as a teaching assistant today in the maths class. I noticed that one of the boys was a bit slower to grasp the problems - they adding up numbers with decimal points. He is a lovely, funny, and helpful boy, but one who has a cheeky and lazy side to him... I noticed that as he was a bit slower to write down the problems, he would say that he was ready when he wasn't, and when the teacher went through the problems on the board he would simply copy down the answer. I felt that he wasn't learning anything from doing this, so I sat next to him to give him some one-to-one attention. At first, he wasn't confident enough to attempt ...

There has been no internet for a while now, which is kind of frustrating. I do like not doing uni work (come on graduation!) but having it still hanging over me is a bit stressful... After breakfast I went to spend the morning in school with my class. They were very excited for 'a.c.' - arts and crafts - which was after break, but I didn't have any ideas coming to mind. To be more precise, I had plenty of ideas, but not necessarily ones that I felt confident could be done with the resources available, or that I could communicate to these children with their different expectations and different ability at English language. But in a rare case of good luck, for the first time ever my phone got a data signal while at the school site! This meant that I could use the Pinterest app to search for children's craft activities, and then allow the children themselves to choose what to do. I really enjoy supporting the children here to come up with ideas and make some decisions o...

Tuesday 21st: Tuesdays are normally field days, but this week things got changed around a bit, and today was a school day. I didn't take my camera along today, just focussed on teaching. Wednesday 22nd: I had known that today was a Muslim holiday, but as it was written up as Bakrid on the calendar, I hadn't realised at first that it was Eid. That made me feel a bit bad, but at least I found out my mistake in the morning so I had time to wish 'Eid mubarak' to people before the evening came around. There were no festivities at the SEDS farm, but it was a public holiday. I used the time to try and do some uni work, and to do a lot of cleaning as a productive form of procrastination...  I found a big-ish centipede on our steps when I was washing them down too... Thursday 23rd: Thursday is also normally a field day, but this time around it was another school day. I particularly enjoyed teaching the science class today because the science topic had moved ...

I went and taught at school today. I was very tired but I did my best to be professional. I didn't take my camera in today though as I wanted a day where I could be more present and not think about photos or anything. Today was Trisham's last day, and so although all I felt like doing was going to bed early, when we remembered that we had been given a tip about where to spot bears I was definitely up for that! We agreed a time to leave so that we could go and look for the bears, but unfortunately when Rashna and Alex joined us, they weren't really too bothered about looking for bears and wouldn't try to find out where to go. As we were in Rashna's car and they were driving, this was a definite limiting factor in our bear-spotting success! Trisham and I got really quite frustrated, as we had both been very keen to see the bears, but eventually it became clear that would need to give up on this goal. The car stopped in a town along the way, and Rashna asked if ...

Respected teachers and staff, our dedicated children, and honoured guests. Thank you for giving me the privilege of talking to you today. Today, on 15 th August 2018, Indians celebrate the 71st anniversary of independence. India gained its independence from British rule on 15 August 1947. This day is celebrated to commemorate the brave and difficult work of those people who fought against British rule, sometimes even giving their lives, allowing India to become the largest democracy in the world. Freedom from the British was important to Indians, because the British Empire used Indian goods and labour to become richer and more powerful, without sharing these benefits with ordinary Indian people, and the laws of the British rulers kept the Indian people from achieving their potential or enjoying their full rights. Independence became possible because of sacrifices by men like Bhagat Singh, Kadi Ram Bos, and Chandrasekhar Azad; and the work of women such as Aruna Asaf Ali,...

The children's first unit exams at school finished yesterday, and today there was something new on the program. Next Wednesday is Independence Day for India, which is celebrated in Indian schools with cultural concerts. The children in our Ananda Vidyalayam School learn songs, dances, and dramas for their Independence Day concert, and practice began after the exams were finished. There wasn't much actual help we could give while the children were practicing, but we were able to keep up some English language work in between dances for the children, and they certainly seemed to enjoy having some extra audience to perform to and some more people to join in a bit with their practicing! The children also really wanted to take photos of each other, so once again I have ended up with a large collection of kids'-eye-view pictures which are mostly very blurry, but also very sweet :) As the children we practicing all day Thursday and Friday, Alex and I both alternated spending...