In the back of a bouncy car with questionable suspension winding through the streets of Varanasi. Dennis and I are in teh way back, he's clutching the headrest in front of him. Wendy and Catherine are talking about the cultural forms of negotiation...how a high (or low) starting number isn't meant to be insulting it's a starting point for the elaborate dance that is bargaining here. And Gene is up front with the driver, wearing a seatbelt for the first time in India. He's no dummy.
We need to stop fir sweets to take to the girls. This venture is happening because of a conversation Catherine had last night with a woman at the sitar concert. In a nutshell, she helps run a residential facility for abandoned children outside Varanasi. Her husband has been a Fulbright fellow and is a good friend of Adam Grotsky, the country director for USIEF. She and her kids were fun to talk to, and when she issued the invitation to come out and meet the girls at the center, we jumped at the chance.
As we drive, we can't help but comment more on the traffic here. What I keep coming back to is the men on bike carts, with one tire in front and two in back supporting a flat panel that extends 4-6 feet out behind. A guy just rode by with at least 10 mattresses piled on the back. We regularly see guys with 8-9 propane tanks on the back, 15 sacks of grain (and we're talking big sacks), or stacks of 5-meter PVC piping in tow. The bummer is when you see these guys have to put the brakes on for some yahoo traffic move by a bigger vehicle. Then they have to start the momentum drive all over again. I have seen just one facial expression on these men: resignation. It's strange: it both fortifies and hurts the heart to see. I wish I could cut these guys--universally--a break. I just don't know what that would look like.
Back to Little Stars. We had a meeting with founder Asha, her sister Dolly and Rishi, Asha's daughter. They started the school with 7 kids in Dolly's house. Now teaching 850 kids, from playgroup to Grade 2 is in this building, from 3-10 is in another building. Wants classes 30-35, parents beg for more space, so they keep increasing class size, because if they don't take the kids, the kids spend day on street. At least they can get some study, some small work. So many classes have 60 students ("please, just one more" is a constant parent refrain).
Rishi is 22, looks much younger. Helps out teaching younger classes, doing masters in linguistics at BHU, helps with office work. She's the one Dennis targeted to show the structure, purpose and strategy of www.globalgiving.org. He believes she'll use it, but he says she might need help. Fortunately, and wonderfully, I think he'll actually follow up and advise her.
The schools has 35-40 teachers, more for younger kids. We walked through the first room on the ground floor where a group of girls was working at a table, focused on their copybooks even though it was Sunday morning. These are the girls who live here, orphans or children of single parents, they live here because their parents cannot take care of them. The building is concrete slab, very squarish construction, high ceilings, brightly painted walls. In fact, the mural on the ground floor in the opening room (where the girls were working around a rectangular wooden table) was beautiful in its pastel depiction of Lord Krishna and his entourage.
The school has only private funds; its financial future is uncertain. There is not a designated director of fundraising, and toward the end of our visit Dennis spent some time showing Rishi about www.GlobalGiving.org. He also asked if their school/organization was connected to a legal entity in the States. In addition to teaching full-time, Dennis provides a wealth of legal services to the kids (and families) in his school. He knows the landscape well of what foreign NGOs need to operate (or at least receive donations) from individuals and organizations in the US. We learned that Little Stars gets donations where they can. The new school, a gorgeous 3-story cement building, was funded by a Dutch donor who apparently ran out of money 80% through construction. Serendipitously, another tourist came by soon after, saw the school, heard about its financial troubles, and the next day contributed the remainder to finish the new building (500,000 rupees, about $10,000). Amazing. Currently, costs run about 6000 rupees per year for each student to provide all materials and uniforms. Teachers get 4000 rupees for month. Some donors sponsor a child, a teacher, etc. To run an organization, you need good staff, well-trained, well-educated, must provide salary for them so they can sustain their families.
We saw their facility, the classrooms, including a really nice (for a neighborhood like this, with peeling paint and intermittent basic services) computer lab. It had 20 computers, most of which function in a way teachers can count on. Folks who aren't teachers might not get the gravity of that--it is often the case that a computer lab with 24 machines will have 80% functional use when you're scheduled for a lesson/research. This means you constantly have to troubleshoot for some students. It's not an educational calamity, but it keeps you on your toes.
The girls sleep in bright blue metal bunks on the second level, beds which are pushed aside each morning so the room can be swept. Next to their bedroom is the kitchen, a galley-type with a big bowl of brown potatoes, sacks of lentils, and pots that are (mostly) very clean. The girls do the cooking and the cleaning up, supervised by a neighborhood woman. Similarly, the new school building is maintained by a local family who gets to live below it rent-free in exchange for their maintenance. The upper school does not provide lunch ("too much to take on") but it has clean, new classrooms, though they hardly look big enough to accommodate the 60 kids squeezed in to each room. Asha said initially she taught kids for just 1 hour a day, but quickly realized that the kids needed and wanted more. Over time, parents saw the benefit of having literate children who also knew math and even some English. Remember, parents were weighing this against the money their kids brought in through work. Over the past 13 years, the neighborhood has embraced her. Theirs is one of the groups ChildLine (remember them from New Light and Kolkata?) calls when little children are deposited at the train station.
Thanks to Catherine's foresight, we brought candy to share with the girls and with the family who runs the place. The girls showed off their hairstyling skills (future metier for some) by giving Catherine and Wendy S. new "dos" and by trimming Gene's moustache. This was on the 3rd floor of their 4 story building. Over 2 dozen girls live in this space, and the school is unable to house the number of girls who need its services. We heard heart-rending tales today where the director had to say no to people who really, really need the services, simply because there's no more space to responsibly take another child. At least not right now. The building is basic. It's concrete, airy, spare. It functions precisely because, as Dolly said, we ask the girls to take responsibility. They take care of themselves, of each other, in ways that facilitate day-to-day management: cooking, laundry, helping the younger or the less intellectually able get ready for the day, etc. We spoke to a few girls who've been there since they were 2. The sense of responsibility, the air of kindness and ownership...was beautiful to behold. The school is English medium through 5th grade, then Hindi medium through 10th (can't afford English medium for all). Students who wish to study beyond 10th are sponsored individually, some even in English medium schools. These add to the difficulty of financial decisions for the group.
I gave them $40, and I'm looking forward to sharing their story with my students in the fall.
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Wendy and I laid low in the early afternoon. Then we went to Fab India and I spent a bunch of money on awesome clothes and gifts. Like, completely awesome. It's wrong to brag, so I won't go into details. I also won't talk too much about the stinking VAT (value added tax, whatever that means). It is so freaking high in this country, probably because very few people a) participate in the formal economy, and b) pay their taxes (if in doubt, see "a"). Then we had a really funny autorickshaw ride...getting a "cab" here is a deeply psychological affair for a foreigner, as you have to receive the onslaught of offers from various transport purveyors. "Madam, I can take you", "Madam, come with me", "Madam, where you go?", "Madam, this way". It goes on and on. "Only hundred rupees" (for a 30 rupee ride, typically). "Madam, come with me right now". It takes energy to enter the fray, but our vigilance was worth it, or maybe it was just the luck of the draw. Our young, paan-spitting driver saw that we were taking videos of the ride, and he made the most of it. The traffic was about 50% of what we'd seen the previous day (why am I always missing the best filming times?), and it seemed like every time I turned off the camera I immediately saw something worth filming: another near-accident (we had two en route to the theater), men urinating against walls, pigs in the street, hordes of orange-clad Shiva worshippers carrying their precious loads of Ganga water slung over their shoulders on poles decorated with silver, orange and green tinsel. But then we hit the cow slalom course, and it was all worth it.
So we arrived at the mall for the show, and met everyone at McDonald's. That's right. You have it: 4 August 2013, I went to McDonald's. I even ordered and ate something, a Diet Coke, a small fries and a McVeggie Burger (peas, green beans, and a masala-y lentil mash). I ditched the mayo-laden bun and ate half the veggie pattie. It was...okay. Wendy and I hit the Nike store for her to buy an official India cricket jersey (a little jealous there) and then killed an hour by walking through the unairconditioned 4 floors, peeking in shops, having a coffee, and then waiting a stifling 15 minutes in the 4th floor cinema lobby for the theater to open. We had "gold seating", the back row. My seat was in the far left corner, the last one. Row Q, seat 25. Truth be told, the seat looked 100% skeevy, slicked down with sweat and general wear. The movie was Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, Run Michael Run, about the famed Indian sprinter Milkha Singh in the 1950s and 60s. I really enjoyed the film despite the fact that it was 3+ hours long and had an intermission. Oh, and about 30 cell phones went off during the film. And it was entirely in Hindi...with a little Punjabi thrown in, but I don't speak that either. Having said that, I only missed about 5-10% of the plot because the film (and most Bollywood films, so I hear) are so obvious that you don't need language at all to get the story. Like, at all. I look forward to watching it in English, though it's got a few graphically violent scenes so I don't think it will be good for Liv and Ruby. And Chris will find it too predictable, too facile to hold his interest, especially for 3 hours. But I'd like to see it again.
I walked home with Sanjeev and Gene. Everyone else took a bike rickshaw. I was tired at first, kind of envied that, but the walk ended up being just the ticket to clear my mind and mood. I was really grateful, although I walked up on the sidewalk (uneven and dog-ridden) while the guys walked in the street, facing oncoming traffic: no thanks.
Almost 1:00 a.m. and tomorrow we fly to Delhi.
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