Namaste, friends and strangers!

Well, it has been a pleasant (if increasingly chilly!) week. I feel a little ridiculous complaining about the cold in India, but without the luxury of indoor heating it can get positively frosty inside the marble-floored Ganga Mahal. Although everyone here expects us to Canadians to laugh in the face of Indian winter, I delight in joining the camaraderie of complaining about the cold, offering my, “Bahot tanda he, na?” to which my colleagues heartily agree (while attempting to stifle their laughter at my Hindi).

This Wednesday, I ventured with Neetu (one of the SEP staff) to Katesar, the community across the Ganga in which WLC runs many of its programs. The purpose of my visit was to conduct more sewing machine loan interviews, but while there I also took the opportunity to sit in on a Balwadi (children’s literacy class), an ALC (adult literacy class), and an SHG (Self Help Group) meeting. I always enjoy these types of trips to WLC project areas, because they afford me the opportunity to observe a variety of different WLC programs all at once. In this way, I’m able to gain a holistic understanding of how the organization operates in any given community (and to top it all off, I can scarcely enter any community without being invited into countless homes to be served biscuits and chai).

Indeed, many WLC programs are interconnected—often when one family member gets involved with one aspect of the organization, other family members will become interested in joining other programs. Today, for instance, I had the pleasure of encountering the mother of Pooja, one of my English students, at the Beauty Parlour in Tulsi Kunj. Maduri, Pooja’s mother, initially connected herself and her family to WLC by joining an ALC. Her three children are now all on WLC scholarships, and all three attend the Tulsi Kunj Tutorial Program daily. Now, Maduri is a student at Tulsi Kunj’s Beauty Parlour Program.

The Beauty Parlour Program is one of SEP’s income generation initiatives for graduates of ALC’s. There, students learn how to perform manicures, pedicures, massages, and all manner of other beautifying and pampering procedures, in the hopes that they will eventually be employed by beauty parlours, thus placing them in a position of financial independence. Lately, I have been spending lots of time at the beauty parlour in order to create an easy-to-use handbook of all the Beauty Parlour’s procedures. Hanging out at the Beauty Parlour is always great fun, as the girls there (most of whom are in their late teens and early twenties) are always eager to chat with me (in a mixture of broken Hindi and broken English), place bindis on my forehead, and repeatedly ask me whether I am married.

All in all, a good week. I look forward to seeing how the Banarasi winter unfolds.

English Grammar and Apple Pie

One the most amusing tasks of this internship thus far has been tutoring some grade 10 high school students in English after work each day. We were asked to provide some intensive instruction in English so that the students who are on our scholarship program could improve their grades and be competitive with their school peers. It is very common in India for students to do much of their learning outside of school through paid tutors. Our scholarship students, for who WLC provides everything from school books to uniforms, come from very poor families and cannot afford expensive private tutors.

The tutoring process has been a big learning experience for me in many ways. I have developed a great relationship with the children and have been given the unique opportunity to see into their world. I also have had to adapt to a new kind of English curriculum, one that is heavily grammar rules based. It is hard to imagine learning a language through grammar rules but this is what is tested on the board exams and therefore we are teaching a lot of grammar. Having learned English through immersion and never having been taught pure grammar, I have had to give myself a crash course in it. Trying to wrap my head around and then teach how to convert direct speech into indirect speech, when it is in present perfect continuous form, from an English grammar book, that has all its instructions in Hindi, to my Hindi speaking students, who understand about 50 percent of what I say most of the time, reminds me that learning is a life long experience (speaking of grammar I probably have used too many or too few commas in this run on sentence).

After sloughing through horrid English grammar we do get around to having some fun with our students. One incident to note is our not so successful apple pie afternoon. The kids had been working very hard and we thought it would be a great idea to take them to the café next door for apple pie and chai. The idea was great in theory. The kids were excited to spend time with their tutors and go to a western style café. We arrived and were seated. The apple pie arrived and we looked at the kids with great pride as they started eating. Manjari, one of the students, made a strange face, her mouth stuffed with apple pie, and then so did Ranjana. They clearly did not like the taste of it. I asked her if she disliked it and in response she hid her face behind her hand and laughed unable to bring herself to tell me that she in fact did not like the taste of it. Fearing to offend their teachers, all the students cleaned their plates.

To this day I still can’t tell how many of the students actually enjoyed the apple pie and how many of them hated it. It was definitely an interesting lesson on the cultural value associated with finishing all the food on one’s plate in order to not offend people. This became even more obvious when I got food poisoning on my trip to Kerala. I had to explain to the concerned and slightly offended waiter that it was not his food but the fact that I had been vomiting in the bathroom for the last ten minutes that I had not eaten anything on my plate.

Our second outing was an evening boat ride and was far more successful. The girls sang songs and we floated candles in the water and watched the arti ceremony on the main ghat. There was no strange food involved and therefore we were a very merry party.

नमस्ते

Hello everybody!

Although there's lots to tell, I think I'll begin by showing you around a little bit.

Welcome to beautiful Banaras!

Namaste Reader,

I am this year’s Child and Adult Literacy Intern. I am an elementary school teacher from Toronto, who happened to come upon this great opportunity to expand my horizons in the field of education with World Literacy of Canada. After learning that I had been selected for this internship I handed in my leave of absence form to my principal in the TDSB, got on a plane to India and now here I am three months into my internship in Varanasi.

And what an incredible three months it has been. It is hard to encapsulate into words what one sees, feels and experiences upon arriving in Varanasi; furthermore, it is even more challenging to convey what it is to live and work in Varanasi and call it one’s home for six months. This blog is an attempt to do these very things reader so please bear with me as I attempt to do justice to this incredible experience.

Daily life in “cultural capital of India”, "the holy city of India", "the religious capital of India", "the city of lights", "the city of learning" etc.

All these great titles suggest that one encounters the profound and experiences the sublime at every corner and turn of the narrow gullies that snake throughout Varanasi. This is hardly true for my self. E.M. Forester wrote in A Passage to India, “Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about, and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence”. (I hope this is not the case with my blog) Yes, daily life in Varanasi is an assault on the senses in a multitude of ways: the good, the bad and everything in between and beyond BUT one’s day to day activities are no more monumental or life changing here then they would be anywhere else. However, looking back on my three months there has been a change. It is indescribable, one can’t put a one’s finger on the exact thing nor can one string together the right combination of words to describe it but it has taken place. It is this subtle transformation that is to ME Varanasi. Its ability to change one’s perspective, pace and outlook on the world, a subtle process that happens so slowly that many casual visitors often turn into long term residents, is what makes Varanasi profound for me.

My favorite activity every morning before starting my yoga practice and the rest of my day is to spend a couple of minutes looking out on the Ganga River from the balcony to watch the sunrise and the city awaken.

Work, work and more work…

One of the most challenging aspects of living in India for me has been adapting to the work culture here. In Toronto I worked at an intense pace seven days a week meeting insane deadlines and lived by the code of punctuality and efficiency. In my first week here I realized that things don’t quite work the same way. Things get done but they do so in a very different manner and at a very different pace, meetings are set but they often don’t happen right away and sometimes not at all. Deadlines exist but they are often theoretical in nature. Three months into the internship I feel like I finally have a good grasp of navigating the work culture here and in fact this change has been a healthy one for me.

As the Child and Adult Literacy Intern a large portion of my time is dedicated to the scholarship programs run for children and high school graduates who come from low income families in Varanasi and the surrounding villages. I have the great privilege of visiting all these children in their homes to interview and create am accurate database for the program which is constantly growing. Some of my most memorable experiences and meetings with extraordinary people have occurred while working in the field. The families of the recipients of these scholarships are so humble and grateful for what we are doing for them that it is almost uncomfortable to bear their reverence. On one visit I had an older woman touch my feet (a sign of extreme respect often reserved for older members of society or one’s own parents). It left me stunned and speechless and contemplating how so little given from our end could mean so much for these families who view the opportunity for a good education for their children as the ultimate gift.

Many of the mothers, grandmothers, aunts and older sisters of these children have decided to become literate themselves and have joined WLC’s Adult Literacy Program. It was incredible to see young and old women gathered together with children hanging off them learning to read and write. Not only were they learning the basics of reading and writing they had a place to come together and empower each other through stories, songs and dance, something the women love to do.

Welcome, readers! Three months into our internship at World Literacy of Canada's office in Varanasi, we, the fourth generation of WLC CIDA interns, are starting to blog. We hope that this blog will serve to apprise friends and supporters of our lives and daily work here at the BBO (Banaras Branch Office).

I am this year's SEP (Social Enterprise Program) Intern. While in the final stages of my MA in English literature at the University of Toronto, I became increasingly interested in the idea of abandoning my books, seeing another corner of the world, and gaining some life and work experience. I applied for the internship without ever really allowing myself to believe that I would be chosen for it, and when I was, I felt that I had no choice but to accept this obviously invaluable opportunity.

English literature, you may have observed, has little connection to Social Enterprise. World Literacy of Canada’s wonderful Social Enterprise Program aims to provide women with the training and resources to increase their financial independence through various kinds of business ventures. Though fascinated by and entirely supportive of the Social Enterprise Program, I was initially a little unsure of how I would be able to contribute to SEP with virtually no background in business. In practice, I have been visiting communities and meeting with beneficiaries in order to learn more about how the program operates. Recently, I have started conducting interviews with the recipients of loans which have enabled them to buy their own sewing machines. Meeting these women and observing their pride and eagerness at the prospect of earning more money for themselves and their families has been both humbling and enlightening. I am excited to conduct more such interviews (which will ultimately be converted into success stories to be read by WLC sponsors and supporters), and I feel really good about the way in which my SEP role has been molded to suit my interests and background.

In addition to my role with SEP, I have been working on various other writing projects, most of which are also aimed at supporters who want to learn more about the organization’s goings-on. Shortly after I arrived in Varanasi, I began work on a pamphlet of Emergency Fund success stories. WLC’s Emergency Fund is constituted by the donations of visitors to the India office. The BBO’s legal status precludes fundraising in India, so the only direct monetary donations that we give out are made possible by the generosity of our visitors. My role in this project has been to meet with recipients of emergency fund donations (mostly children, often victims of medical emergencies), and then write up short success stories about them for the pamphlet, which can then be given to visitors in order to show them the direct impact of their donations. As with those of the sewing machine loan recipients, these interviews have been tremendously eye-opening and educational, and I feel privileged to be conducting them.

Most recently, I have been working on a set of interviews that will eventually be included in the upcoming issue of Akshar, WLC’s annual magazine. These interviews were conducted at CDNVS, an NGO partner of WLC in Gorakhpur. All three interviews took the issue of women’s empowerment as their subject, and I was truly impressed by the insights of the interviewees. Listening to these women describe the ways in which their work and educational opportunities have afforded them a previously unimagined degree of confidence really brought home to me the connection between literacy and empowerment. There have been so many such moments in India when I have learned some fundamental truth in a way that would never be possible in the comfort of a Canadian classroom, and I am immensely grateful for each of them.

So that is more or less what I have been up to in the past three months. Here’s to another three months of delectable food, death-defying traffic, unforgettable sunrises, and new experiences.