Arrival at Pardada Pardadi School in Annupshur, India

Arriving anywhere for the first time in India is always a body and mind boggling experience, filled with disbelief and incomprehension, even after a month in this country. After a typical 6 hour drive from Delhi to Annuphshur, where the roads go from bad to non-existent, complete with a stop out in the middle of nowhere at a brick kiln for the driver to deliver 6 cases of clandestine Bagpiper whiskey and collect his fee, we arrive at Pardada Pardada where we plan to live for the next 2-3 months.

Upper School Girls

The school has the highest passing grade in the UP state, but is appalling by Western standards. As expected, everyone, without exception, is welcoming and friendly. We go about settling in to our apartment at the teacher’s colony and getting to know our way around the school. I (Mike) have a small note pad, purchased along with school supplies in at a Delhi market, and ask everyone to write their name down so I can try and recall it the next time I see them. The children are just incredible, so open and friendly and curious and lively. The look in their eyes is penetrating. They arrive by bike, by bus, by oxcart, by tractor, and on foot. From our balcony we can see the small ones arrive early and play on the swings and slides starting at 7:30. Mary and I go out to give them jump ropes to play with, which is met with great excitement

These children are the first in their families to ever go to school. They are from the poorest families in the region. They first have to be taught how to stand in line, how to wash their hands and how to eat with a spoon. Even though there are toilets in the main school (not the grade school), most prefer to go in the sugar cane field that surrounds the building.

Morning Assembly at Sayta Bharti Grade School

After 3 days of cleaning and sprucing up our apartment it is now pretty comfortable. It's almost a takoff of college days. Today we took a bicycle rickshaw taxi to town though the market street to the end and walked down to the Ganges River. Even this far North, the river is huge, milky brown and moving fast still from the monsoon rain. Trash is freely thrown into it. A man offers to take us on a ride in his wood carved canoe. We politely decline waiting for the waters to recede further. We walk back through the market with hundreds of vendors selling fresh produce, bright fabrics, grains, snacks, rope, chairs, shoes, clothes, bike wheels, haircuts, medicines and who knows what else. The street is narrow and utter chaos with huge bulls, bicyclists, speeding motorcycles, ox drawn carts, women stacking bricks, barefooted young ones, piles of trash and gravel and wood, pigs and goats running loose….and too much more to remember. People stare at us and gather wherever we go. After making a purchase we turn around and are surrounded by a group of boys and men. We are the only white people in the village, so they are mesmerized by us.

The view from our room is the school, a sugar cane field, the outskirts of the town, trees and a field that is being plowed. In the distance I can make out an ox and two women walking both carrying huge bundles of green vegetation on their heads. The music and sounds come from loudspeakers into the wee hours of the morning. We're learning to ignore it.

Everyday is at least 90 F as we try and stay cool, looking forward to the arrival of fall in Nov or Dec. On our first night here we were invited to a Naming Ceremony at a local family’s home. The baby was 1 week old and we were welcomed as honored guests receiving the only chairs in the home. The dwelling can only be described as an old garage from say the 1930’s and we ate food on the roof that was cooked out back. We were served first, and after we finished the men and boys ate. We did not see the women eat but were told they ate after we left. They always eat after the men finish.

Sunday, our day off, Mary and I take a walk on a side road away from town. We encounter many families riding on flat wooden carts pulled by ox. Where they are going we do not know. An old man is lying on a hemp bed by the side of the road talking on a cell in front of a shit-shack, built from sun dried cow pies for walls and grass for the roof. Because of the monsoons, the huts are leaning.  Some families are living on rope beds under a thatched roof on poles with no walls at all right beside the road.

Last night we were invited to go to Sam’s(started the school) house for dinner. Its was about 20 minutes out of town and is a large compound and an impressive manor house built by Sam’s grandfather. Behind the house is a small structure where the women and children lived when Sam was growing up. Women were not allowed in the main house.

Before the 9 pm dinner we watch the first half of the Indian movie “Water”. Sam’s explanation of the cultural context and what was going on in the move was fascinating. You should watch it. This is still going on in India today. At dinner we learn that a 12 year old girl who was is a student at the school was recently wed to a 45 year old man. This was with the blessing of her mother, who was dying, as apparently the man offer a tidy sum of money to her to obtain there daughter. Shortly thereafter the school learned she was being abused by her “husband”. The school stepped in and paid off the abusive man in the same amount he had paid the parents to get rid of him. Now that the girl is a “widow” she is an outcast for life. When a women becomes a widow here she has only 3 options; to throw herself on her husband’s funeral pyre, shave her head and go live as an untouchable with other widows, or with the consent of her husband’s family marry his younger brother.