Wait is over!

The arch is standing! Here is the evidence

Murthy, standing proudly under the Arch he helped build. Guna is getting busy to start on the next one. We actually use only mud and bricks, no cement at all. All construction in Puvidham uses very little cement. Mainly at the foundation level to prevent termites crawling up. Otherwise it is mostly mud. Here you can see Mani and Selva mixing mud with their feet..



Turning to more mundane facts, I spent two blissful hours yesterday evening programming! Yes, now I do programming as a relaxing aside from my stressful day job of teaching. I created a small relational schema to hold information about my students assessments. I can now prepare report card for each student and get them signed from their parents! I used Open Office for this with their HSQL and the forms and reports! Yeah, I can hear some mumble that this ain't no programming... I know I should have used RubyOnRails but with Reliance Wireless Connect as my connectivity to Internet I don't have the bandwidth to download it!

So far this school year i have conducted 9 tests for the 8th class students (poor things!). I showed them the grim outcome today. Only 2 have cleared (35%) all the tests. hmm.... reflects poorly on the teacher, doesn't it?

Now to the real stuff

The class 8th students of Puvidham are now building real arches in their hostel building. I did not know it was so goddamn difficult to build a wall straight. We had to bring down the walls 3 times before we got it right. It is really a lot of skilled work. In any case there was slow progress (5 days) and we now are at the stage of building arches. Thrilling, I must say. But wait till we remove the scaffolding! The process
- Build side walls
- Use bricks as scaffolding
- Use string with radius length like a compass and create scaffolding with mud
- Arrange bricks on top of this platform with mud filling the gaps
- Those who have faith pray and others like me just worry and wait....


Murthy admiring his handiwork....

Ravi and Mani finish their first arch... you can see the scaffolding for the second one next to Ravi..

Arch

Was thrilled with my class in particular and education in general! The class 8th students built an arch with just bricks and stones. No mortar, not even mud!

It was a wholesome educational experience. Meenaksi, our school principal wanted the children to participate in the construction work that is going on for the hostel building. We thought they can build an arch for one of the verandahs, since it is a structurally interesting concept. I downloaded some reading material from wikipedia so that they were aware of the concepts like compression, tension and keystone. Last Saturday we did the initial work in the hostel, laying the founding with rocks and mud. The placing of the rocks to form the basement is a skilled work and it was done by Sabari (who is in class XI now in a government school but is an ex-Puvidham student). We less skilled folks helped in mixing mud, shifting stones and bricks and providing him those materials. But our students also observed how he placed the rocks and jammed them together. We have finished the basement.

I thought may be we should experiment building a small arch before getting to the real thing. I do not know enough about structures and was not sure if we could build one with just bricks. Meenakshi, who is an architect by training, said of course! So we embarked on building an arch. Actually I had no role to play other than explaining the wikipedia article to the children (and also suggesting we could use cycle tires for initial support). Most of them are construction workers children, unlike me who is a child of a college professor and a central government employee! So they knew more about that stuff than me and so I quietly let them do the job.

This arch is such a counter intuitive thing that almost all of them were quite sure that this whole thing will come tumbling down. But voila it didn't! All the students were absolutely thrilled and so was I. I thought I will share this joy with you all...(sorry about the picture quality, it was taken with Nokia 2500 phone camera!)

The amazing piece of architecture.. (the school dome which in itself is cool is in the background)..
And below are the proud architects (left to right Selva, Murthy, Ramesh, Mani, Prashanth, Kalimuthu, sitting under the arch Ravi)

Tightening of screws

It has been more than a month since the new school year started and I am teaching 8th standard (the last class in our school). We in the school have decided this class is going to be the preparatory class for the children to get into 'mainstream' education and I have been given the hatchet job of executing it! This means more academic focus, homework and tests! Not so surprisingly it has been very unpopular at least with some kids (Though, strangely, several of them like competitive tests and are working distinctly harder to get better scores. Nothing so far has motivated them to work on their subjects as effectively as tests!). One kid though seems distinctly unhappy with this change. He was (almost) my star kid last year. His photo appears in an earlier post in my blog. Ravi, the smart(ass) one. He has not been coming since last Friday and I had really thought he was sick. Today I hear news floating around in the campus that he is actually quite ok. So I take my bike and head off to his village (around 3 kms from our school)....

Ravi was in the hostel last year. Both his mother and father were working in Bangalore. Before he was in the hostel, for one year, he used to cook for himself and his younger sister before coming to school. He was impressive last year. He is bright, no doubt and he used to put in reasonable effort. This year he insisted on staying back at home because he and his sister did not like the hostel food. So his mother is now forced to stay with him. Since then he has been very irreregular with his work. Last week at the beginning I had sat down with him to find out why this change. He said he was attending RSS shakas and that was taking up most of his time. I tried dissuading him from attending those shakas and enquired what transpired in them. Not surprisingly the kids were given some 'nippat and pori' (munchies) to eat and were also fed some anti-muslim rhetoric along with it. We had a discussion about how there are no differences between people as such and they are only good and bad (mostly bad :)) etc and he agreed he would not go to the shakas again. I was pleased then, but wondered when he vanished for few days...

I went to his house (a small but pucca house) in the village and the door was partially closed. I peeped inside and here was Ravi spread on a cot and watching TV (colour) at a distance of 2 feet. There was another old woman sitting on the floor watching it too. She was not his mother, who had gone off to work. He came out looking sheepish and when I asked him why he did not come to school, he said he had fallen down from the cycle on Thursday evening and so could not cycle on Friday (it is a tough 3 km ride with ups and downs). Since his friends had Saturdays off, he loafed around on Saturday and since he did not come for two days and could not get a leave letter he did not come on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. When I asked when he planned to actually come to the school, he had no answer.
His mother was back from work by then and she started bawling that how hard she is working so that he goes to school and here he was watching TV. She said that the only way he could get out of her situation is to continue his education. "I am in this state because I did not go to school" (how true this causal analysis is, is not clear). By this time there was a small crowd of old women outside the house (curious about the dapper looking outsider in jeans and t-shirt) and giving their bit to this hapless young fellow. Feeling sorry for him I took him away for a walk and asked him that if he is really interested in coming to school he should come, if not I will not trouble him like this again and let him be. He said he would come tomorrow.
I am hoping he would!

Constructivism

After several years of deliberation on whether Asha Bangalore should fund physical infrastructure in government schools, it was finally decided to go ahead and build a compound wall around Chandranagar school and also fund for drinking water supply and additional bathrooms.

The government funds were not sufficient to build the compound wall and further the money spent towards it was able to create only a half-constructed wall. The teachers and students felt that a compound wall was an absolute necessity for the school considering the hostile local environment.

• There had been repeated instances of local youth loitering in the school premises and pestering the students.
• Tourists cars were also frequently parked in the school campus and sometimes disturbed the classrooms by playing loud music.
• The school play ground was unusable since it was used as a public garbage dump and latrine

Considering the above factors and also a hope that a more formal school space would improve the sense of a school amongst the students, Asha Bangalore has decided to go ahead and construct the wall.

Asha Bangalore has also been trying to get the parents to be more actively involved in the school issues, but the response has been lukewarm. The last time when a meeting was organized to go and demand additional teachers from the BEO only 20 parents (for 340 students) turned up. It was felt that Asha’s involvement was not visibly felt in the community and if we contribute to a visible asset may be it would motivate the parents to participate more. This theory is yet to be tested!

The construction started on Oct 9^th, 2007 and here are some photographs of the work in progress

Sump for drinking water (15000 litres)

Wall (to the right of entrance)

Wall (to the left of entrance)

God of learning!

Yesterday I was so pissed off that I didn’t go to school!

The Chandranagar school (where I teach) is a public space that is utilized for everything, including tying up cows, parking tourist vehicles (sometimes with music blearing out of them) and such. For the last 3 years Asha Bangalore has been trying to get a compound wall around the school so that there would be a sense of a separate school space within the community. The hope was that it would bring a notion of sanctity to that school space. We could have easily raised funds to get that wall built. But, as you all probably know by now, we don’t do things the easy way. We do it in a way so that we can complain and gripe about it, may be just so that we can get another blog entry!

We wanted the local ‘community’ to make some contribution towards this compound wall. All the usual reasoning like ‘ownership’ and ‘empowerment’ has been thrown around quite liberally in this context. For three years we have been trying, trying and trying. Recently one of the parents who happened to be a construction person even made an estimate of the costs for the wall, plus additional toilets and drinking water facility. It came to about a lakh of rupees. This included around 15000 of labour charge. Since many parents are construction workers we were trying to see if they can contribute labour in kind along with Asha volunteers (our volunteers have no skill in the construction industry or for that matter....). No movement... “how can we work for two days without wages”?

Yesterday I go to the school and I see this huge Ganesh pandal. So many lights and decorations and I asked the guy working on it how much did that cost. He said it was around 10,000 rupees. The local folks are quite happy about the pandal. I don’t think they paid that out of their pockets, some local politico-goonda must have. Nevertheless, why couldn’t they channel that to improving the school infrastructure? What do they expect this pandal would do to them? Do they really believe that Ganesha, god of learning, is going to help the children learn better? This country, I tell you...

In any case all this fretting and fuming (and blogging) has helped me calm down. With tail between my legs I am back to school today. Out of the 43 kids I teach may be one of them might find reason not to invest in Ganesha pandals, may be not... It seems like any focus on the end-result is a route to disaster. Just focus on the process...just focus on the process..

Summer Camp

The schools are closed for the summer vacation. This year the Karnataka government has decided that they would provide the noon-meals even during the vacation time! So the teachers are expected to come during the summer vacation and keep the schools open. I have taken this opportunity to have a kind of summer camp for the children with more informal sessions. The government’s plan is, as usual, not very well thought. There are around 25 students (out of almost 300) who turn up. The meal provider has so far (it has been one week) not provided the noon meals.

I now handle 10 children and it is lot more enjoyable. There is direct interaction with each and every child and I am not playing any policing role at all. We still do English and Math. I bought these bi-lingual picture books from Tulika, which has both English and Kannada on the same page. The idea is that the children would read the Kannada and know the story and I would help them read the English bits and slowly they would be more comfortable reading and speaking English. I also work on Math using the decimal blocks and Cuisenaire rods.

Since the class strength is reasonable, we have lot of conversations outside and along with the teaching/learning. Here are some snippets:

Dogs

Out of the 10 students almost all of them have been chased or attacked by stray dogs. 3 of them have actually been bitten and had to get those horrible injections for rabies. Anyone in Bangalore or even outside of it would have heard of the recent happenings in this context. The dogs are a serious health problem and I really don’t understand these “animal lovers”. Do they let cockroaches roam in their houses and not kill them? Are dogs endangered? Would they upset the ecological balance? Just cull them. It is nice to sit in houses with security gates and travel in cars and wax eloquent about their concern for dogs. Let their children be chased every day by dogs and be bitten by them and then I would like to hear from them.

Mobile Phones

All their families have mobile phones. Some families have more than one. Most of the children remember the 10-digit number of the phones in their families.

Private Schools

There are 3 children who come to my summer class from private schools in that area. They belong to the same socio-economic background as the other children. Two go to “Blossom” school. They have better capability than the government school children but only marginally. A class 6 student, Annapurna, who has supposedly learnt English from class 1 can just about read a simple English book. But her attitude was amazing. She took the book back home, worked on it hard and the next day could fluently read it. This is very different from the government school kids. Though I have given them the books for a week, I doubt any of them even open the books at home. This drive to perform could definitely be seen in the private school children. Another kid, Hemanth, goes to “Orchid” private school. He is in the 1^st class and he is very good! He can already read simple English books. His brother Manjunath, who just finished 4^th class in the government school, can barely read English. Seeing the difference in performance from the same family but in different systems makes me wonder if I should re-calibrate my opinion on private schools, at least in the urban slum context. For "Blossom" the kids pay Rs.85 per month and a Rs.750 donation. I was not able to find out how much is the fees in "Orchid".

A Fine Balance

“It is a fine balance between despair and hope” - Rohinton Mistry. In my opinion, this pretty much sums up life in India.

Hope – There is now a sleeper bus to Bijapur. It costs 400 Rupees one way but I could stretch my legs and try to sleep during the twelve-hour overnight journey from Bangalore to Bijapur. Bijapur seems to be a happening enough place for people to go to in sleeper buses.

Despair – The bus turns up 3 hours late. I was supposed to leave Bangalore by 7.15 pm and I actually left around 10.30.

Hope (mini) – The bus reached Bijapur by the scheduled arrival time of 8 am in the morning. So those 3 hours was just a buffer in their planning. The VRL travels probably allows for more buffer in their schedules than any of the famed software companies. May be our software tycoons should travel more in VRL buses to understand the concept of planning and scheduling.

Hope – The Shikshana Vahini program run by SVYM and supported by Asha has an ambitious goal of enabling all the SDMCs in Bijapur district by 2010. The team (of 5 people) seems to be very dedicated and energetic. Rather than simply running a school for around 200 children, Mamatha of SVYM has immersed herself in the un-enviable task of enabling the local communities to take ownership of the performance of their neighborhood schools funded by the government.

Despair – This trip only reaffirmed my opinion that it is easy to spout “community involvement” as an inane mantra but in reality it is a back and soul breaking effort. The program has been operational for 18 months. We visited 3 schools and met the SDMC and the teachers. There seems to be no ownership from the SDMC. The strong message from them is that the teachers are paid and so everything, including getting the children to school, is the teacher’s job. It is strange to hear from parents that they would not spend any effort in sending their wards to school but the teachers would have to run around every day to round up the children in the village and get them into the school. The schools are badly understaffed. Pressure on the BEOs (block education officers) is not working. The schools are in a moribund shape.

Despair (untrammelled) – Child marriage is still very prevalent in Bijapur! In every class I visited there were at least 2 or 3 girls who were already married. We are talking about elementary school here, 3^rd and 4^th grades. I didn’t have the heart to ask if they were married to adults or children. Some continue to live with their parents after the “marriage” and others actually live with their in-laws. If the civil society has not been able to stop this pernicious practice after 50 long years, do we really have hope about quality education and such esoteric stuff?

Hope (am I trying hard here?) – The SVYM team fully understands the current status and its implications. There was a very open and involved discussion on how to change track and tactics to be more effective. I was absolutely amazed at the energy and verve shown by two Asha Silicon Valley volunteers, Padma and Kiran, with whom I was traveling. They have come for a few weeks vacation from the US and in spite of the pressures to meet and spend time with family they took considerable time off to travel to these “projects”. I can’t stop gushing about them. They are ultra marathon runners and they hold Indian records. They have raised phenomenal amount of money through their running for Asha. Even if we consider all this as to be expected, the mental effort they spent in understanding the situation (in such a short time) and working with the SVYM team to find solutions does give hope. Does it not?

Do we really have a choice otherwise?