So Much Stuff

From the very first day arriving in India I have felt the heaviness of my material self. It all started with persistent men trying to take the weight of four bags from me. As they hosted a fifty pound suit case onto their head and on top of the little, now weighed down, rickshaw. I thought of how ridiculous this looks. No family, just me carrying this infinite weight around all of India. I literally felt like passing out running with my bags to catch the train. Lyndi and I together had 8 bags, which weighed around fifty pounds each. We didn’t even know where we were going to find room for the bags on the train. We were desperately searching for someone to take our bags for a reasonable price, but the official bag carriers that Cat told us about were no where in sight. All of this stress was because of this unnecessary weight I decided that I needed to bring to India.

Now how ridiculous I feel coming into a country where everything is half the price. The tailors and farmers can live on a couple of dollars a day, where I am used to spending more on just a single cup of coffee.

I am now literally floating in stuff. My “necessary” items are under my bed around my bed and overflowing out of my two shelves. I load up my America size back pack for class and find that I am even carrying more and more outside of my bag. The teachers don’t have large classrooms full of materials and resources. They sit at the staff table with a drawer and one small locker space. The large oversize teachers’ bags of the states are laughable here. The teachers sit around the table laughing at the size of my bag as they hold up their own tiny purses that seems to meet all their needs. They pass around the container of markers I have with over fifty colors. They cannot understand why these items are necessary for my classes, as they carry pieces of chalk and a duster to class. The text books here are small and paperback, weighing a third as much as the huge hard cover text books of America. I can’t begin to imagine the price difference.

The bottom line is that I question the value of all the American crap set out to better student achievement. The school I left in North Carolina had less than half of the students passing end of grade level tests, where here the students are passing at much higher rates. These kids come to school with no shoes sometimes and you can be sure that they are not getting free breakfast or lunch from school. They simply come to school, maybe walking and hour to try and succeed. The students see the importance of success because they are able to see people struggling all around them.