field trip in delhi

Last week, our grade-level team went on field trips throughout Delhi to help the students gather research for their major end-of-year project on population and development issues. We had a trip to visit the terribly polluted Yamuna river, one to an AIDS care home, another to a women's centre, one to a health centre, another to a shelter for children who live at the railway station, and the one I helped organize went to visit a school in a slum area set up by an international NGO called the HOPE foundation which is run by two parents of kids at our school. (We found out that the school, which serves about 300 children who would otherwise not be in school, is run on a budget of about 2000$ per year, which pays for their small space - one large room, three small rooms, and a small kitchen - supplies, lunches, and teachers' salaries).

The trip was really interesting. In the morning, we went to the school and our kids (pockets filled with ipods and phones of course!) played with the other students and led games and singing with them. Then they watched a normal lesson at the school. At lunch, they helped serve the free mid-day meal of rice and daal. Then, after lunch, small groups of our students were partnered up with small groups of the kids who then took them to visit their homes.

Now, I said the area is called a slum, and it is slum-like in some ways (no trees, most families live in one or two small rooms, there are semi-open drains along the streets), but it is a development of two-to-three-level buildings, not lean-to type homes. It is also quite a new development, so the buildings are fairly reasonable-looking. What was incredible, though, was that just behind some of the more regular-looking streets were massive byways filled with small-scale industrial work going on, like plastic recycling centres. We stepped into the first side-street like this and it was like, woah, we had hit the post-apocalypse. Just huge mountains of carefully sorted and stacked plastic everywhere, people processing it, random dogs, chickens, kids, moms, cows, goats, bullock-pulled carts, workers, walking to and fro.

One of the girls who was leading the tour then took us to her house, which was right off this crazy side street. The area in front of her house was just dirt with planks, shared outhouses at the side, and drying papdams laying in the sun. Her Mom lifted up a tarp that covered their small (like, one metre by two metres maybe) dirt yard, and then invited us into her home. What was amazing was how beautifully kept and tidy her extraordinarily minute 'house' was. Just one rented room, but everything was set up just-so. All the shelves were decorated with hand-cut newspapers in fancy patterns, all the cups were stacked in pyramids...it was so jarring to walk from what seemed like complete chaos into her home. Of course, there weren't any windows, it must be absolutely unbearable in the summer, and she looked like she worked incredibly hard. She was very open and talked to our students about how she had gotten married before she was 15, and how she thought it was really important for her daughters to go to school and get an education so they could have better lives than her. I think Dad was an ironing-man (here, the ironing folks iron at the side of the street - me, for one, I LOVE my ironing man).

Just made me think, a lot, about how everyone tries to carve some order out of what they have.

We visited six other families, and of course at each stop all the neighbours came out to say hello. Who knows what the moms thought of these strange kids trooping up to check out their homes and ask them really personal questions ("Are you going to have more kids?" "Will you have to give a dowry when your daughter gets married?" "What job do you want your son to have in the future?") but they were very kind and open in hosting us. Imagine living on about a hundred dollars a month for a whole family. Imagine the effort it would take to keep your kids in school and not working.

I had one of our students, who is in the class that creates our website, take photos of each family we visited. This week, I got all the photos developed and framed and gave them to the woman who runs the NGO that supports the school. Two of the photos that were taken at the school were amazing - like, I opened the folder and was literally blown away by how great they were. I still haven't figured out which of our kids snapped the photos, but here they are. Wish I could take credit for them:

Look at these beautiful girls - in school! Wearing uniforms! And hairbows!

[Delhi-6-March-2010]