The attack of the 11th-graders!

This past week I had the pleasure of spending eight days with a gang of eleven 16-18 year olds, most of whom were coming to rural India (and for some, rural anywhere) for the first time.
And no, the word “pleasure” is not used sarcastically. Sure, I’d forgotten this particular age group’s ability to entertain themselves with fart noises and terrible renditions of Jay-Z hits, but overall I was impressed with their inquisitiveness, willingness to try new things, and the many small signs that they may one day becoming functional adults in the strange and high-pressure environment they’re growing up in.
The “kids” are students at Mahindra United World College of India, Mahindra being the name of the auto manufacturer that funded the school. There are United World Colleges in several nations, and their mission is to bring together small but diverse groups of students for 11th and 12th grades. Their standards tend to be high but they incorporate innovative teaching strategies and try to give students a sense of social responsibility with their educations. Every term, they go on a “project week”, visiting an NGO in another part of the country for a little outside-the-classroom learning (the only useful kind, in my opinion). The 200 students split up into groups based on which location they choose, and the NGO is given free reign over the program for the entire week.
This is the third project week that Vanastree has hosted. Still, Sunita and I were more than a bit nervous as we waited for the van full of expectant students and one teacher to arrive last Saturday. MUWCI (which they pronounce “mew-key”) is located near Pune, a big city with all the amenities. Here in Karkolli village, where Sunita’s farm and many of the Vanastree women live, there are no bags of Lay’s, no cold bottles of Coke, no showers, and, on that particular morning and for several hours at a time in the last few days, no electricity (although there are several hydroelectric dams in Karnataka, most of the power goes off to Bangalore and when there are shortages, the utilities know it’s the rural people they can cut off without fear of retribution). We weren’t sure what to expect and had no idea what they were expecting, either. Last year, the students had been confused as to the purpose of their visit and seemed in constant need of junk-food fixes. The week ahead was packed with activities and it seemed everyone would either have to sink or swim.
The van finally came, and 11 tired teens, fresh off the overnight train from school, trudged up the stairs to the terrace above the guest room. We served them fresh lemonade and snacks and made our introductions, then heard theirs: All first-years (11th grade) save one second-year. Two were from Malaysia, two from Germany, four from India, one each from Nepal, Mongolia and Hong Kong. If you boiled down the entire University of Oregon student body, it probably still wouldn’t be as diverse as this group. Suddenly, it became clear to me that while they might be here to learn from me (well, mostly from Sunita), I would probably learn more from them.
In the week that followed, we removed invasive weeds from a nearby temple, talked to Manorama and a couple other Vanastree women about their livelihoods, went on hikes and saw snakes, a scorpion and a million birds. Then we moved to Mathigatta, where I did my first homestay in September, on the way stopping at Yana, a beautiful natural rock formation. More treks and a little agroforestry lesson for the students. On the way, I got too many tick bites to count, gained an appreciation for wildlife watching, and had some good conversations with students.
Like most high-achieving 11th graders, many of the MUWCI students were preoccupied with college and getting the right education to “succeed” in the world. In anticipation of this, our program included a little talk by me about my internship, how I got it, what I’ve been doing for three months, etc. At the end, most of the questions focused on the facts that I am earning credit for this and that my degree actually requires me to get some hands-on experience outside the classroom. For some, it's a new concept.
Answering the questions, I started to get some sort of grasp on the background most of these students have. In most countries in the East (India, China, Malaysia, etc.), learning is extremely textbook-based and competitive. While I hesitate to praise the United States’ education system in any way, I now can appreciate that we do give some priority to critical thinking, discussion, and learning by doing. I never thought I’d see the benefit in writing all those boring essays in English or dissecting formaldehyde-soaked frogs in biology, but when compared with memorizing facts out of a book to regurgitate them on a test later on, it almost sounds like fun. The level of competition these students have to face is also unimaginable to me. Because there are so many students, most vying for coveted scholarships to schools in the West, a difference of one percentage point could leave you “stuck” in your home country, facing the same painful type of education if you think you can stomach going on for a Bachelor’s. At least at the higher levels, one can assume that the rules will be relaxed a bit - many of the students gave battle stories of being hit with rulers or sticks and even kicked for misbehaving. My worst memory of punishment is being made to sit "on the wall" during recess for singing "99 bottles of beer on the wall" on the bus and being the only one brave enough to admit it.
While watching birds one early evening toward the end of the week, I found myself talking to the “Malaysians” (perhaps on diversity overload, the students have a perhaps insensitive but cute way of referring to each other by nationality), Daniel and Roshan. They described a problem that, in my mind, the final nail in the coffin of formalized education: standardized tests in Malaysia. According to my sources, who should know, the government contorts the test results to hide schools that are underperforming. If you do well on a test in a school that is already doing well, you might actually end up with a score lower than that of a student who didn’t to so well but happened to attend a school that needed a “boost”. According to the Malaysians, this is not a problem unique to their country, as many developing nations are vying to make themselves look better. Luckily, MUWCI ignores standardized test results, probably for this very reason, and instead interviews applicants personally and asks them to debate each other on various subjects.
But coming to a school like MUWCI doesn’t end the treadmill of competition for motivated students like Daniel and Roshan. The light at the end of the tunnel is just becoming visible: a western university, preferably Oxford or Ivy League. While countries at the forefront of the industrialization race, like India, tend to have fairly good schools, there’s an extra bit of incentive for students to head to the US or Europe: liberal arts. I have to admit that I suddenly understand their drive. In comparison to the Eastern system, schools like mine offer unlimited sets of opportunities, socially and academically. Students are given the opportunity not just to gain an education but also to discover new things about themselves. And in their own quests for diversity, the west’s universities offer thousands of scholarships, many full-ride, to students from far-flung places. Their countries of origin, then, lose all their smartest students, leaving them with a massive brain drain that is expected to soon have real economic impacts. Think of all the engineers and doctors you know that are Indian, and imagine if the top 5% of students in every high school in the US left the country, never to return (or even send remittances), and you’ll get some idea of the problem.

Faced with all this information, I had no basis upon which to either encourage the students to seek a higher education (not that they needed encouragement) or convince them to try to give their home countries a second chance by studying or working there. The global system requires a degree, earning a degree worth anything requires heading west.
However, I don’t think there's much to justify paying top dollar for reputedly "good" schools, so I explained the state university system to them as an alternative. I think that fact that I don’t come from Harvard and yet seem fairly intelligent helped my argument – most seemed to assume that state universities are only for those who don’t know or can’t afford better. It seems that Princeton, Oxford, Cornell and the rest have a death grip on the world’s degree market, one built entirely on reputation and not much else. I don’t plan on letting a location on my diploma influence what I can and can’t do in the future, and I don’t see much reason for anyone else to, either. So perhaps through my conversations with eleven brave and open-minded students, I put one small hatchet-mark in the coffin of higher education.

How is India?

I get asked this question a lot, usually by people back home, but sometimes by people who I talk to on the bus or other random places. I’ve worked up a series of answers, none of which are useful in conversation, at which time I usually answer “great”, trying not to be sarcastic and add something like “How is it for you?”

How is India?
India is like having a considerate but awkward boyfriend who refills your water glass before leaving the cafeteria table and always saves a seat for you on the bus, then takes half an hour to work up the nerve to start a conversation.

India is wildly entertaining, especially when being introduced to children. The best story is when I met one little boy, who, upon hearing my name, looked up at me carefully, the wheels in his head turning rapidly. The first thing everyone wants to know is where I’m from, and he thought he could figure this out on his own, even though he’d never met a “foreign” before.
“China?” He asked.
I think his thought process was something like “Ok, blonde hair, blue eyes, tall – oh, what the hell, they all look the same to me.”

India is a devoted friend you met five minutes earlier, the young Muslim woman who stands in the rain on the side of a busy road waving goodbye as the bus pulls away, a flashy sliver of pink showing under her black burqa.

India is the 19th century American west – seemingly lawless, incredibly entrepreneurial, where women are treated as ladies in public and servants at home. Only here there’s no opportunity to start afresh. Where you’re from, what your parents do, and what religion you follow are the main criteria by which you are always assessed and categorized.

India is completely fearless. While in Bangalore, I walked to a mall “up the street” from where we were staying. Turns out it was up the street, through a construction site (unbarricaded, of course), and down a busy overpass. No sidewalks. While I was walking on the overpass, cars whizzing by my elbow at top speed, a little girl ran up next to me and started doing cartwheels to earn a few rupees. I paid her off to avoid what seemed likely to be a grisly accident, although she acted as if she might as well be doing tricks on my front lawn.

India is a 24-hour soundtrack. In the city, there’s the constant background of horns from the nearest road – the rickshaw’s low buzz, short blasts from trucks, high-pitched honks from motorcycles, musical tones from tricked-out cars, feeble dings from bikes – over which crows call out, kids shout, telephones ring, clothes are scrubbed and, invariably, someone is drilling concrete or hammering. On the farm, cicadas, songbirds, owls, crickets and frogs replace the horns, with monkey calls and shouts from the neighbors occasionally chiming in.

India is paparazzi with camera phones. Apparently, the sight of a foreign is so thrilling to some people (mostly 15-20 year old boys) that they must take a photo. Somewhere, five or six Indian guys now have a picture of an angry white woman flipping them off to show all their friends.

India is dirty. Not just in a trash sense, although you can find it just about everywhere in layers of various thicknesses, but in a dusty, grimy sense. At first I thought Sunita was just obsessed with baths and sweeping the floor but then I realized every time you step onto a road or open a window you’re being assaulted by the dirt that seems to fly everywhere. Although Sirsi has plenty of paved roads there always seem to be strips of bare ground in between, constantly stirred up by the flow of human, auto and animal traffic. There are no emissions standards for vehicles, which creates another dirt factor when you think about all the exhaust going into your lungs and onto your clothes (which must be washed after one wearing).

India is a good review of economics 101. For example, this morning I laid in bed, unwilling to go out into the damp, chilly air, and calculated how much I would pay for a hot, fresh cup of Sumatran roast from my favorite Eugene coffee shop. The result came out somewhere between $15-$20, which I then converted into an opportunity cost of four pints of good Oregon microbrew or 3.7 calzones from the Dough co.

Tick Season: My war with the wildlife continues

I never thought I’d say this, but I miss the leeches. Now that the monsoons have passed, the weather has dried out, and a new pest is ruining my walks around the farm. Unlike leeches, however, these menaces attack without notice, only inflicting real pain approximately twelve hours later.
I liked the leeches because they’re so blatant, like a tank rolling through your village. With a little practice, you can feel their cold, slimy approach on your feet and become an expert at flicking them away before they do any real harm. If they do bite, you get an unreasonable amount of blood that is sure to elicit sympathy from anyone with you. Within a few days, the wound simply heals over with a bit of itching.
Ticks are like secret agents. They’re the jungle’s contract killers, moving without detection. You can happily frolic in the grass without consequence for hours, and only know you’ve been attacked when you find the red bumps on your stomach and thighs (for some reason, this area of the body is like veal to a tick). Even then, it’s easy to mistake the bite for that of the mosquito (nighttime air raiders). Only when you spot the pinprick-sized culprit just under your skin do you know you’ve been hit, and then there’s nothing you can do but claw at it like a junkie and wait for the itch to start.
A quick Wikipedia search proves my position: “According to Pliny the Elder, ticks are ‘the foulest and nastiest creatures that be.’” Although, like the other creatures that attack in the jungle, all they want is a little blood, some ticks can hang around for days on your skin, happily growing fat. Some people have allergic reactions and form welts around a bite. Luckily I just have the normal reaction of intense itching that lasts weeks.
I miss the leeches. They have personality, inching along frantically, feeling blindly with their little heads for a warm place to attach. When they do manage to bite and fill up with blood, they drop off after about twenty minutes. Then they’re even more comical, barely able to move, engorged and happy. Jungle kids play with them like other kids play with earthworms. And of course there are the medicinal applications; medieval as they may be, ticks have no such usefulness.
Ticks are just hateful. And there’s no time when this fact becomes more apparent than at three in the morning when the itch comes. You wake up scratching, and continue until your now fully-alert brain says it’s probably best to stop, although the bites demand otherwise. So you quit, throwing your hands above the covers, telling yourself it will pass.
It doesn’t pass. The itching turns to burning. The ticks demand your attention. And so you give it to them, turning on the light, removing all your clothes, and slowly picking at each bite until the culprit is gone. By then, you’re wide awake and angry as heck, without a leech to burn or a mosquito to satisfyingly squash against the wall.
I now declare jihad on ticks.

A random cultural note: Kanglish

“Kanglish” is what I’ve been calling the interesting Kannada (local language of Karnataka) version of English that many have been using to communicate with me. It’s similar to “Hinglish”, the popular term for Hindi English. The following is a short glossary, which I’ll hopefully be adding to as I hear more.


Kanglish (and some Hinglish)

tank (n.) – A lake. “Behind the trees is a large tank. Many fishes.”

tanks (intj.) – Thanks. (“Tanks for coming.”)

homely (adj.) – Comfortable, at home. “Please make yourself homely.”

foreign (n) – A non-Indian person. (“Foreign! Foreign!”; used as a rallying cry to bring forth a hoard of schoolchildren to watch me walk down the street.)

adjust (v) – What you do when 13 people and two kids need to be transported in an 8-person car, when the scheduled power cuts are extended from 7 am to 2 pm and 7 pm to midnight every day, when there are two cups of rice and ten people, or when you’re holding a meeting in which only half the participants share a common language. (“We’ll adjust”; a common saying.)

suiting shirting (n, v) – Dressy western clothes, or the act of putting them on. (“Silks, saris, suitings shirtings sold here!”)

snap (n) – Photo. (“May we have a snap with you?”; Usually coming from a bold mother of six who will then herd the entire family, including cousins and passers-by into the shot and make her husband take the photo.)

Britisher (n) – Person from the United Kingdom, usually in the historical (colonial) sense. (“The Britishers built a huge fort on that hill.”) However, there are also the upper-class Indians who are more British than the Britishers, speaking with English accents that are simply, well, top-drawer. When they open their mouths, I expect them to excuse themselves for afternoon tea with the Queen before heading off for a jolly hunt.

tube light (n) – Somebody who is a bit slow to catch on, like a fluorescent bulb. (“That George W is a bit of a tube light, isn’t he?”)