chartandwaters

This was at a primary school. We went in and the teachers immediately stopped whatever they had been doing to talk with us about the project. This unnerved me but it was to happen again and again. The kids just went crazy...they seem trained to love and trust foreigners, and cameras are their FAVorite. They all know how to shake hands, which isn't done in Tamil Nadu, and like to show it off. Very satisfying to them when you shake back. For some reason--Bill Clinton's visit?--they also know how to salute but I wasn't as fond of that gesture. It took mere seconds to get them to arrange for a group photo. Later, some of them spontaneously took a yoga pose they may have learned from a local NGO, the Art of Living, that's been giving yoga and meditation classes since the tsunami.

This visit was interesting for me because the kids were being so crazy and excited (oooo, they looove foreigners) I didn't have to do much to keep them interested. I also felt horribly guilty because they kept abandoning the classroom to play and pose for photos. But the teachers seemed touched and one said, "You like kids", which made me realize I was doing something.

In India there often--I don't mean this derogatorily--"extra" people just around, not part of the activities and not separate from them. They don't seem to bother. For instance, the man shooing the kids did not appear to have any official role. He sat next to the entrance, shirtless, in a lunghi, with a sadhu bag though he didn't appear to be practicing. When he wanted to shoo the kids--whether justified or not--he moved at them with a switch. There is a lot of this feigned violence as a form of discipline here. Sometimes it seems completely unjustified.

Several times, when we visited children at a school or shelter, we were far from traffic, so our auto rickshaw driver sat and wait for us to finish. I soon began to enjoy watching the changes in the drivers' faces as they waited. They would pull over and wait, stoic-faced, with nothing to do. We would go in and speak with the teachers. During that time the kids would get crazy and happy and pour outside and whip up a lot of energy with their movement and laughing. By the end the drivers would look relaxed and pleasantly surprised. It was like they had been at a spa.

In each of the schools we visited there were many children who lived in the relief shelter where we later gave workshops. We were interviewing the teachers to find out the effect of the tsunami on the kids, how much art the children had already had, whether the teachers thought the workshop was a good idea and any suggestions they had for how to conduct it (what ages, where, etc.). At all the schools the teachers were extremely accommodating, giving us a lot of their time and respect. They also said they would help us select children who would benefit most from the workshop, and when we went back the next day they had made a careful long handwritten list.