Puvidham Photos

Here are some photos of the place where I have been spending time the last few months..

This is the house where I live

This is the school where I work

Settling into a rural rhythm

It has been extremely difficult to do any kind of writing. I have fallen way behind my assignment schedules for my M.A. course and you all know that I have done no blogging. Something to this rural phenomenon that I feel knocked out by 8:30 at night. To keep at least an arms distance from the zillion bugs that have made my home their home too I sleep inside a tent inside my bedroom! It actually makes sense. Mosquito nets are too cumbersome to put on and take off. The tent has netting and it is very easy to handle. Getting back to the sleeping early situation, yes I do wake up early in the morning at around 5. I look around and I see no sun in all its full glory and I pull the sheet tightly over my eyes and sleep for another hour and a half. My beauty sleep is now 10 hours and the effects are showing. Bollywood beckons.

I made some soap with the 7^th standard boys. It is rather simple. You can 200 ml of sodium bicarbonate and mix it with 100 ml of Aloe/Neem extract (grind the neem leaves into a juice and filter it). Soak this mixture for a day and the next day you add 100 gms of gram flour and some fragrance and mix it well into a paste and then shape it into soap bars and let it dry. After a month the soap is ready to use. This would give you around 10 soaps. The children have made almost 70 soaps and they are eager to sell it in the school’s annual fair at 5 Rs per soap. Ready to buy?

What do you do with students who go far beyond the teacher? There is this Ravi (hmm.. I can hear some in the audience sniggering that it is all in the name) who solves puzzles in 10 minutes that took me more than 12 hours and I still could not solve. All teachers except Meenakshi, who has excellent visual sense (she is a trained architect after all), could not solve the puzzles. Ravi is in 7^th and is good in almost all subjects except English. Even English, in a single year he has picked up the entire decoding aspect (making the correct sounds out of the print) but cannot comprehend. He did no schooling for couple of years moving with his family in Bangalore on construction work. He is now in the hostel. We have around 10 to 12 puzzles that we are planning to display as a challenge in our fair. The customers pay Re. 1 for trying it and get back 2 if they solve it. For the difficult ones they get Rs. 20 if they solve in 30 minutes! Ravi is manning that booth.

Ravi - Yes, this is how they come to school everyday!