A lot happens in a month in India...

I actually wrote this post two days ago, but internet failed to let me post it... references to "today" therefore mean on Monday...

So I’m not doing so well at keeping my blog up to date! In order to bring my blog back to the present day, I’m going to blitz through what I’ve done over the last month… here goes!

Shortly after my last post I visited Amritsar with Gigi, Andy and Fini – good friends I’ve made volunteering. We visited the Golden Temple, which is absolutely beautiful and just has a really peaceful atmosphere, even though it’s quite busy during the day. It’s in the nature of Sikhism to be really generous, so when we arrived there at 11.30 at night we were able to sit down to a free meal of dal and roti.

We stayed at the home of Gigi’s sister’s in-laws – it was so kind of them to open up their home to us and, man, did they feed us well! I ate some of the best food I’ve had in India and I definitely ended up carrying food twins. I really enjoyed eating a traditional Indian breakfast of parotthas (a flat bread stuffed with spices and vegetables)… delicious! We also visited the Pakistan border, where there’s a crazy celebration every night as they lower the flags and close the gates. Everyone was dancing and the border agency staff do this mad drill to much applause. It was weird to look over to the other side and see that women and men were segregated in Pakistan, it did make me feel very lucky to have the freedom I’ve been born into. Overall, it was a really wonderful weekend!

On November 13^th we celebrated Diwali in Delhi. Diwali is the Festival of Light so Hindus celebrate by lighting candles, putting up street lights, setting off fireworks and deafening fire crackers. It sounded like a war zone outside a flat (it’s really nothing on fireworks night in the UK!), but we got in the spirit. We volunteers lit up our whole flat with candles, and then we joined our neighbours on the roof of our flat and lit mini fireworks and watched everyone else doing the same on their roofs too. It was a spectacular day!

A couple of days later I finished my volunteering. It was really sad to say goodbye to the teachers and students who are a kind, generous and inspirational group of people! I still miss them now, and I’m looking forward to seeing them again in February before I leave India. We enjoyed some nail painting (with the girls), dancing and games on my last day, and you can see that some of the boys pulled off some impressive moves!

I left Delhi and went to Varanasi, which is considered to be India’s holiest city. The holy River Ganges runs through it and it’s where Hindus come to wash and bring their dead. The dead are openly cremated on the ghats, and then their remains are put in the river. It’s incredible to witness such personal and meaningful events and I actually found it quite overwhelming – it’s a lot to take in and certainly gave me a lot to think about.

The ghats in Varanasi

Next, I headed to India’s most Southern state, Kerala, which is where I am now. I absolutely love it here! It’s a lot more chilled out than the North, which is noisy, congested and can feel a little oppressive. I spent my first week in a beach town called Varkala, probably the most relaxing place I could go! I spent the day on the beach sunbathing and swimming, and my evenings eating good food and staying up all night drinking and chatting with other travellers. I was also introduced to the fruit lady on the beach who sings as she sells her fruit, “Beautiful madam! Pineapple! Yum yum yum yum!” I’m pretty sure all Varkala visitors miss here when they leave.

I met some really cool people in Varkala, who I’ve been travelling with since then. After one last crazy night, at the Rock n Roll café (home to Varkala’s biggest dancefloor, ooooh) and an hour or two of sleep, we got the train to Allepey. From there, we explored the Keralan backwaters. We spent a day kayaking, which is a great way to explore, because you can fit down really narrow canals, and just feel totally lost in there (we had a guide of course, so there was no actual getting lost). The next day we stayed on a houseboat for 24 hours – it was great to float along playing music, chatting, drinking from coconuts and enjoying the beautiful nature surrounding us.

After that we spent a few days in arty Fort Cochin. We discovered a café called Teapot that does a decent cup of English style tea! I do enjoy the Indian chai but do sometimes crave a brew from home (sadly they didn’t offer Earl Grey at Teapot, my personal favourite).

Now we’re in a hill station called Munnar. Yesterday we went trekking through tea plantations and spice gardens. It was so beautiful and we didn’t see any other tourists, so it felt really special. This morning we visited the tea museum (despite all the aches and pains from yesterday) and learned how tea is made. I think these couple of days have been very important to me as a massive tea addict, it’s good to know my roots!

Being "Flo Ma'am"

I’ve been teaching in the slum in Okhla, South Delhi, for 10 weeks now, where all the children call me "Ma'am" or "Flo Ma'am". I teach the same children everyday, so I’ve really had the chance to get to know them and they’re a brilliant group of kids: smart, funny, cheeky, loveable, loving, kind, naughty, chatty….

Seema and Sapna made me this very sweet card

I’ve been teaching mainly maths and English. As you probably know, I’m a bit of a maths geek, and so accordingly, I’m really enjoying teaching maths (it’s also what I will be doing when I return to the UK, so I’m glad I like it so far!). The biggest challenges I’ve faced with this have been that some students are really far behind on some basic methods that they should know. At their state school, the children are taught in classes of around 70, so they don’t get individual attention. Most of their parents are uneducated too, so they can’t get help at home. I think this means that if a student doesn’t get their head round something quickly enough, or if they miss a lesson, they just slip behind. One of the girls, called Pooja, is clearly bright, but she can’t do division, which makes it difficult to progress in other topics. I’m working hard to get everyone up to scratch on the basics, so they can do really well on the harder topics (like fractions and decimals). Pooja’s division is much better now, and she likes maths more and more!

I find English harder to teach, because I just take it for granted that I can speak the language! Breaking down the grammar is quite new to me, but important to the students. One thing that does come naturally to me is chatting! I’m one of the few fluent English speakers in these children’s lives, so I really encourage them to speak to me in English more; whether it’s about our lives in either India or England or a book we’re reading. At the state schools, English is taught how I imagine Latin is badly taught in England. The students learn long, difficult passages by rote, and regurgitate them in exams. I’ve looked through their exercise books and the level of writing in there, is way beyond their actual ability. It’s such a shame that at school the teachers aren’t focusing on what the children really need help with, but it’s so good that Project Why exists to give these children a chance at being good English speakers.

English lesson with some of the boys

Lately, I’ve been trying to encourage the students to be more creative. It’s actually a concept that’s really alien to them, and it came as a real shock to me. I think that in England a group of students would be very happy to get out of maths and English, in order to spend an hour drawing instead, but my students here have been so reluctant. They’re so concerned about having the “right answer” that drawing for fun is confusing for them. Now, some students still produce hardly anything when I get them drawing or will only draw what they’re familiar with (flowers), but some are opening up more and I’ve seen some really imaginative creations. Our latest efforts have been to design book covers and my favourite was the “The Dancing Elephant”. A boy called Viney drew an amazing picture of an elephant pulling some moves, complete with a man on a DJ deck in the background and I didn’t have to help him at all. I’m not totally naïve, I don’t think the children I teach are in a position to grow up to be designers and artists (although their prospects are still much, much better than the previous generation) but I still think it’s important they get a chance to be creative. For a start, I think it can really help with English, because art and design can always spark discussion. You can also link it to something relevant, as we did with the book covers. The special thing about Project Why is that it’s one of the few places where the children can go and spend time being children. Their homes are so small, that they don’t “hang out” there and they have a lot of responsibilities. Their only other place is the street. So it’s important that their time at Project Why is special and fun too, which is why we don’t just cover the topics they learn at school, and I think it’s a great opportunity to have fun doing an activity they’ll never do anywhere else. I’ve only got two more weeks, so I think I might do some messy painting with them, which is certainly in the spirit of upcoming Diwali!

Mehtab reveals his creative side...

I’ve learnt a hell of a lot from teaching here, and I really hope the students have too! I won’t forget them and I expect there might be some tears in two weeks time…

Marble-lous weekend in Agra

I got up at 5.30am on Saturday for a weekend trip to Agra, home of the Taj Mahal! The whole trip was amazing – never have I seen so many spectacular buildings in such a short time and so much marble! (NB: click on photos to see them enlarged and more to come on facey b.)

First we visited Agra Fort, which really feels like a town within a town. You could definitely get lost in there. It’s cool enough on its own, but it’s also built on the banks of the Yamuna River, which means if you look down the river, from the fort, you can see the Taj Mahal.

We spent the rest of the day exploring the town and visiting markets and the mosque. In the evening, Sascha and I had a romantic meal on a rooftop restaurant looking out to the Taj Mahal (again) as the sun set. Unfortunately, we didn’t fall in love, but it was still an unforgettable evening.

Sunday morning – awake in even earlier, to catch sunrise and enter the Taj Mahal. It lives up to expectations. I got pretty damn excited, see below.

Bouncy

Lady Di

Bolt

Starfish

I had a good nap after all that exerting myself, then we had breakfast and headed to the Tomb of I’timad-ud-Daulah, also known as the Baby Taj. I didn’t know anything about it until we got there, so it was great to walk in and see yet another incredible building. Emily liked it so much, she said it outdid the Taj Mahal for her.

Project Why vols at Baby Taj with Indian man

We left Agra after that to visit neighbouring Fatehpur Sikri. The palaces there are the oldest I’ve seen so far, and some were in ruins. I really liked visiting the mosque. Some young Indian boys insisted on taking us round and they were good fun. The mosque was built by the emperor Akbar. Traditionally, childless Indian women visit the mosque to tie a thread to the marble lattice inside the white-marble tomb of the saint who Akbar visited, to wish for a son four centuries ago. I was given a thread to make my own wish (I didn’t wish for children, as that would be quite inconvenient at the moment).

Inside the Mosque

So I had a great time! But I’ll be doing some extreme sleeping this weekend to make up for the hideous early starts of the last. Ta-rah!

Aaah Tajjy

From street child to software engineer

On Saturday, Sascha, Emily (fellow vols) and I went on a walking tour of Delhi, ran by the fantastic charity, the Salaam Baalak Trust (do check out their website!). They work to get children off the streets and help them to be children again, by giving them a home and getting them into school, so that in the future they can be successful adults.

The tour was led by a former street child called Iqbal and he told us about how children live on the streets in Delhi as he showed us around. It was so interesting to learn more about this side of Delhi, because you see so many children on the streets, so it was good to understand a bit better their situation. The reasons that children end up on the streets tend to be abuse at home, loving someone of the wrong caste or religion, or feeling like a burden to their family (many girls think this, as they know their parents will have to cough up an unaffordable dowry so that they can get married). A lot of them believe that if they go to the capital, they’ll get a job or even become a Bollywood star. The reality is they make money from collecting rubbish to sell on, or they shine shoes, or steal. They still have their fun – a lot of them spend their earnings on going to the cinema, but unfortunately many street children spend their money on drugs – a scarily high proportion of them are drug addicts.

Our final stop was one of the charity’s shelters for boys – we met about 50 boys. I have to say, I found this part a little odd, because we were with them for 15 minutes and all the tourists on the tour were taking loads of photos with them, which they’ll inevitably show to their friends and family. It was as if the boys were some kind of attraction for our amusement. However, the boys absolutely loved having their photos taken and they were so happy and excitable, because we’d come to see them, and I did end up being dragged into photos too.

Afterwards, we sat down in the office, and Iqbal told us about the success stories of the Salaam Baalak Trust – those children who had gone onto university or into secure jobs (their photos are up on the wall). Then he told us his own story, which I found very moving. Iqbal started living on the streets when he was 5. His father used to beat him, and when his parents split up, his sister went with his mother and he and his brother went with his father. After a few days, his father left them at the market, where they waited and waited, but he never came back. Soon, a couple who claimed to be their auntie and uncle took Iqbal and his brother away. They worked for them and they were paid, but the “auntie and uncle” put chilli in Iqbal’s eyes to punish him, so he ran away. He got on a train and ended up in Delhi. It was very hard and he struggled to find food and shelter, but he started collecting rubbish for a hundred rupees a day (that’s approximately a pound), until he joined a gang, who took 80% of his earnings in return for their protection. He said it was very hard to survive on such a little amount of money. He sometimes went on the train, but couldn’t afford the fare so he needed to avoid the ticket collector. One day he saw him coming and to escape, he jumped off the train. Iqbal was seriously injured and stayed in hospital for 6 months at only 6 years old. At the end of this time, a woman helped him and he started going to school, and some years later he found the support of the Salaam Balaak Trust. He doesn’t know where he comes from and for a long time, he thought that he was 3 years younger than he actually is, and his birthday has been made up (December because he has a cool temperament). Now he’s studying, and he wants to be a software engineer! He was a world away from this as child - it is so good to see that there is hope for these lost children. Iqbal is a lovely, interesting person, and we are keeping in touch. If you are reading Iqbal, please let me know of any incorrect information!

Delhi Belly and Delhi By Cycle

I’ve been in Delhi for over 2 weeks now, which I think is the longest I’ve ever been outside of the UK before! After 10 days without getting sick here, I started to think I must be invincible, but then on Tuesday I got the horrid Delhi belly, which put me out of action for a couple of days. I did a lot of sleeping and read a lot of my Maeve Binchy novel to get through it. Unfortunately, I missed out on being at school on India’s Teachers’ Day. At our school, we picked one student from each class to be the teacher for the day. I chose the bright and very loud Parti, because I thought she’d do a good job of getting her class to listen and behave(!) and she’s good at explaining things to her fellow students. When I came back on Friday, her classmates said she was a very good teacher, which I was really pleased to hear.

Yesterday I got up at 5am with two fellow volunteers to go on an early morning bicycle tour of Old Delhi. It was brilliant! It was good to start early, before the roads got truly crazy – see below for what I mean.

View of the roads from Jama Masjid

I felt more at ease than I expected on the road, and I got really into the spirit of making an unnecessary amount of noise when driving/riding on the Delhi roads. I rang my bell whenever I overtook a rickshaw or pedestrian and I wasn’t unnerved by the constant honking from tuk tuks around me!

We cycled past Old Delhi’s most beautiful sites, like the Jama Masjid (biggest mosque in India) and the Red Fort (built by Shah Jahan – who also built the Taj Mahal). We cycled through the spice market, which smells incredibly intense – it’s a wonderful smell at first but then the chilli hits you (I could see chilli seeds all over the ground) and it has you sneezing. We finished the tour with a Mughal breakfast at the highly regarded Karim’s restaurant, which has received fantastic reviews from the BBC, Time Out and The Lonely Planet to name a few. The restaurant was packed out at 9.30am with people there to eat their incredibly spicy goat curry. It was very tasty but I had to drink a lot of mango juice to stop my mouth from combusting.

Cycling pros outside the Red Fort

Cycling is definitely an amazing way to experience Delhi and I hope to do it again soon.

My first week in India

I’m spending the next 9 months travelling around Asia, before I start Teach First next year. I’ve already had my first week in Delhi, where I’m volunteering as a teacher for Project Why for 3 months. After that I’m going to head south to travel round other parts of India, then I’ll jet off to Hong Kong to see my family and then move on to Thailand to meet the lovely Emily Huntingford, where we’ll be exploring Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. Back to St Albans at the end of May! Hopefully I'll post my thoughts and pictures here on a weekly basis.

After a week in Delhi, I’m gradually adjusting! Delhi is really like no other place. The roads are insanely busy and there is a constant sound of honking, which hit me as soon as I stepped out of the airport at half 4 in the morning. I’m staying in a flat in south Delhi, in a place called Govind Puri, where Project Why is based. It’s a very conservative area, so I can’t dress how I usually would, and so far the only white people I’ve seen here are the other volunteers, so we stand out quite a bit! I had a surreal moment a few days ago, when I walked up the stairs to the flat to be stopped by two huge monkeys blocking my way. The monkeys in Delhi are quite aggressive at the moment, so I crept backwards and had to wait until they moved on before I could get back inside. Fortunately, they love their Chai in India, so a lot of tea drinking has made me feel more and more at home!

Project Why is a non-profit organisation that supports slum children and their families, through education and life skills enhancement. On my first day, I started teaching Maths and English to 10-13 year olds at a school based in the slum in Okhla. It’s a supplementary school to the state school they also attend in the morning (for girls) or afternoon (for boys). I was pretty awful to begin with, but over the last week, I’ve started to get the hang of it. The kids are brilliant. They can actually be rather cheeky to me and demanding, as they all want individual attention right away; I often hear shouts of “Ma’am, ma’am” from 10 directions, or have five books or more thrust on my lap at once, to mark immediately. But they do make me laugh and they’re (usually) very kind and helpful towards each other and the teachers in the school. We had a party last week to say goodbye to two volunteers and one of the games we played was limbo. We put the boys in two lines and got them to go under the limbo stick in pairs, and as they went underneath they held hands even though they’re a group of boys who were as old as 16. I love the way they’re not embarrassed to be affectionate.

The kids also love handshakes, and at the end of both the morning and afternoon session I usually shake hands with most of the students there! These are very special handshakes, and can be quite tiring, particularly as they love the handshake that involves arm wrestling at the end. Some of those children are quite strong… at least I’ll probably be a pretty good arm wrestler by the end of my time here.

I’ve also been getting to know the other volunteers here. Last week there was a lovely group of girls from Nottingham Trent University, who I made semi-adopt me for the last week of their stay. I went to some great places with them, and I was introduced to how to barter properly with the market stall holders at the fantastically colourful market Dilli Haat. Turns out I’m a bit too nice to them, but Harriet showed me how to get a good deal and I bought a gorgeous salwar kameez top for good price.

Yesterday I visited Humayan’s Tomb with a new volunteer called Emily, who’s from Maine, USA. The tomb pre-dates the Taj Mahal and you can really see how it inspired it. It was absolutely stunning!

One of the odd things about visiting sights in Delhi, is that some of the Indian tourists want to be in photos with me and other white people. I don’t know how many photos I’ve featured in so far, but it’s a lot! I’m going to start charging soon...

I'm looking forward to another exciting week in Delhi. Any feedback and comments on my blog would be greatly appreciated!