Emma Sandwith (L 98-05)

recalls an illuminating trip to India earlier this year:

 

Last summer I was fortunate enough to be chosen to travel to India in order to develop the English language programme of a charitable school in Bangalore, called Christel House.

The first Christel House School was established in Cape Town, South Africa by a wealthy American businesswoman for the purpose of educating the poorest children and attempting to break the cycle of poverty. There are now six schools across the world, all funded originally by Christel DeHaan and maintained by charitable donations.

I was approached by the head teacher of the Perse School in Cambridge, where I currently teach Classics, and asked if I would be interested in this project, having completed a qualification in teaching English as a Foreign Language. I was thrilled to be asked and spent the next six months gathering schemes of work and resources prior to my visit. I read as much as possible about educational development, teaching in India, government issues, poverty and the culture of this fascinating country.
However, no amount of reading or preparation could have prepared me for the two weeks I spent at Christel House or the following six weeks I spent travelling the Indian sub-continent.

My first day was spent observing a wide range of lessons taught to students between the ages of 3 and 18. The classrooms were unbearably hot. There were between 40 and 50 students in a class.  Each teacher was trying to teach English using textbooks from the 1950s, full of content that children from the slums were entirely unfamiliar with: penguins, snow, swimming lessons, even mountains! The most striking thing about that first day was the eagerness and enthusiasm of every student towards their education. They were all so happy and proud to be in school. After my visit to the urban slum communities from where the students are chosen, I realised why the students felt so privileged to be receiving an education.

Every child at Christel House India lives in an urban slum. The school chooses the 70 poorest students each year based on a wide range of economic measures, but there are thousands of children living an equally impoverished existence in the same area. The conditions I saw in these communities were indescribably moving. The mothers of the children Christel House have taken in are immensely grateful and therefore were more than happy to show me around their homes.

The first house I entered was no bigger than 8ft x 8ft. There was a single wooden bed and a small cooking stove; seven people lived and slept there. Remarkably, this family had a television. When I asked the social worker where they had acquired this from, he told me that the government gives televisions to every family in the slums to win votes. The families then connect their sets to the railway lines and siphon off the electricity illegally!

The second family I was taken to meet had a slightly bigger plot, around 10ft x 10ft. In this area there were seventeen people living! An old lady with cataracts and leprosy, an alcoholic and abusive father, a heavily pregnant young woman and two children dying from cholera. Their goats, their chickens and their dog also slept inside with them. The tin roofs mean that the buildings are incomprehensibly hot in summer; the whole community floods in monsoon season and both disease and fire spread uncontrollably quickly. It was therefore surreal to see the students of Christel House in their accustomed surroundings, dressed smartly in a uniform with combed hair and wearing shoes.

The school not only provides an education in maths, sciences, history, geography, religion, art, music and ICT (all instructed in English), but they also give every student a uniform, shoes, three meals a day, books, bags and a pencil case. To see a group of 14 year old boys carrying pink, glittery backpacks with pride was a world away from the self-conscious, style-savvy teenagers of Cambridge and showed how very grateful those students were to have something to call their own.  Doctors, dentists and opticians visit the school regularly to check and treat students, issuing medication and glasses to those who need them at no cost.

Another eye-opening experience was the afternoon I spent in a nearby government school. The children who are not selected for Christel House and who cannot afford to attend private schools have no choice but to attend the government schools or drop out and look for work. It is worth stressing at this point that there are no jobs available to you in India if you do not pass a particular exam, aged 16, comparable to obtaining GCSEs in the UK. Even to drive a rickshaw, considered one of the lowest-status occupations, you require a licence (legally) and to obtain that licence you need to pass these exams. It is therefore incredibly upsetting to have seen the conditions endured by some students in the state-maintained sector. In one small classroom there were 76 students, squashed onto wooden benches. There was one teacher patrolling four classrooms and the outdoor corridor, where the overspill of students were working on chalk slabs in the floor. That particular teacher spoke no English, had no teeth, had one wooden leg and carried a cane. I will never forget the look in the eyes of one beautiful young girl sitting on the floor as she smiled at me and then felt the cane on her hands and lowered her head to work again.

In the rest of my time in school I observed and taught lessons, led workshops for the teaching staff, held a meeting with the English department and presented my research to the senior management team, the CEO of the charity and Christel DeHaan herself. I am in regular contact with the school and I meet with a team of keen volunteers at my school in Cambridge to write letters, make videos, send their favourite reading books and organise fundraising events. As a school, we are hoping to develop links further with this fantastically worthwhile cause. The proceeds of our Christmas Fair were sent directly to Christel House; twelve members of staff recently ran the Cambridge half marathon to raise money and the 1st XI hockey team are teaching English at the Cape Town branch of the school during their annual hockey tour to South Africa.

In the weeks that followed, I travelled from southern India, with its oppressive heat and fresh coconuts, to monsoon-drenched Nepal. I trekked in the Annapurna region and stayed with Himalayan families en route. I slept under a corrugated iron roof as the rain poured in, had no electricity and was therefore plunged into darkness at around 7pm each night.  I was warned in Hindi that the electricity was unavailable because rats had chewed through the basic wires running from the open doorway to the loose light bulb above my head.  I showered in a barn and turned to find seven Nepalese children laughing as I tried to wash my hair with a bucket and a tiny milking stool! After a week of fresh air, mountain views, leeches and lake-swimming, I re-entered India via a dubious customs check and made my way to Varanasi. I sailed along the Ganges and witnessed the immense daily religious celebrations on the riverbank. I worked in a factory run by women, producing paper from rubbish found around the city and raising money for women's rights in India with the profits.  I was given cookery lessons in the home of one of the workers and learned Hindi with her children while she painted henna on my arm. I was driven across Delhi by a drunken man in a rickshaw with no lights and no wipers (it was the middle of the monsoon and the middle of the night), before being attacked by monkeys in a train station! I travelled to Rajasthan on a 24 hour train journey (an experience in itself) and camped out in the Thar Desert on the Pakistan border, playing in the dunes.  When I arrived in Bundi I sat in Rudyard Kipling's garden and then travelled to the incredible fort at Jodhpur before experiencing the city of Jaipur on a motorbike and watching a Bollywood film in a cinema of thousands with people shouting at the screen and dancing along to the music.

This summer I am journeying to Africa to teach in a rural Kenyan school. To raise money for the school, and the eye hospital to which it is attached, I will be attempting to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro, Africa's highest peak.  I have begun my training for the climb in earnest and am very much looking forward to observing education in another entirely different culture.

Please click here to see photographs of the trip

 

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