This week has been very colorful indeed! So Me, Tara and Sólveig were sent to Kumbakonam where we slept at Velanganni´s home. He is a retired school teacher and headmaster who is very nice and spent most of our stay there with us. Our project was to work at a school fpr the poor during the day teaching the kids English or just what ever we wanted to then in the evening we went to a village that had been hit by a cyclone. The villagers build their houses out of mud and the roofs are made of palm tree leaves so when the cyclone hit it completely destroyed their hoses and we could even see 5-10 meter high trees on their sides that have blown over, roots and all. It was quite incredible.
So these village people have managed to rebuild their houses (if you can call them houses) but because they are so poor the men in the village have a tendency to get drunk a lot of the time. There is one girl in the village that is 19 and she has offered to have what they call a tuition center where the kids can go after school and study so they don't have to be at home. This is where we went every day after we had been teaching at the school.
The tuition center is just the ground out side this girls house and they didn't even have mats to sit on or a board to write on or any thing. So we bought bamboo mats for the kids to sit on and a board for the teacher.
So the first day at the school, to be considered a teacher and have to stand in front of 50 staring faces is easier said then done. But I think we did pretty good. We also taught them hokey poky which they found a blast!
When I was working at the school there where 7 teacher trainees there that didn't hesitate to use a stick to beat the children with. We were so shocked at this that we asked them why on earth they would do that, but they just went all shy and pretended not to understand us. We ended up talking to the headmaster about it and he took one of the sticks and threw it over the fence that surrounded the school yard. This, I´m afraid, did not stop the teachers from finding another stick to beat the children with.
I soon found out here that Indians don't really like making a fool of them selves! That is something I don't seem to have a problem with. I was teaching the children hokey pokey and shaking my but all over the place and generally dancing like an idiot. The kids really loved this and in the end felt comfortable enough to join in. That was fantastic! Seeing all these kids shaking and dancing and laughing was so incredible. It looked like they had never felt so free in their life. We gave all the kids at the school pens to write with which they were very happy with.
After the second day we were all three feeling a little weird in the stomach then I got a really high fever. From there on it deteriorated and I set up camp on the hole which Indians prefer to call a toilet. Sleeping on the floor and doing your business in a hole when you have food poisoning is something I do not recommend putting on your list to do before you die. After 2 days of this business we decided to go to Pondicherry so we could get to a bed and a western toilet! We hired a taxi for the 2 hour drive to Pondicherry and it cost us 1800 rupees which is 4500 kr! 2 hours! I pay that for taking a taxi from Reykjavík to Hafnafjörður sometimes.
When we arrived in Pondicherry my cramps were getting worse and I ended up having to go to hospital. There I got injections and medicines. I put up a bit of a fuss when it came to the injections saying I wanted clean needles. They kept on going on at me ,,Madam, madam! needles clean okey I wipe them with paper'' Yeah right! It was not very convincing. I just said to them. ,,If you want to use your needles you are going to have to consult my grandmother. She is a very respected nurse in Iceland who studied in Denmark. You are going to have to go threw her first or buy me new needles!'' In the end they didn't seem up to the challenge to talk to Amma so they ran down in to the basement where there was a pharmacy and bought me new needles and let me watch while they opened the packed.
After the injections I felt a lot better. Now I am still at Pondicherry and tomorrow everyone is going for their next project but I think I am being sent to Chennai to recover properly before heading off to Kenya.
Besides the food poisoning it's been a great week! I hope it will be easier to get to an internet cafe in kenya so I can blog more often! :)
-C
No comments:
Post a Comment