"Teacher pleeaasse!"

In the last month, amidst so many new sights and smells, I have been learning to live with some new roles as well. First, I am a foreigner living in a very small village and second, I am a new faculty member of Madhi High School. Both of these have been an interesting and exciting adjustment.

The population of Bajipura hovers around 5,000 and there is not a move I make that goes unnoticed. By now, the community knows that I like to run early in the morning, I like buying saris at the Sunday market, and that I need ice cream or chocolate at least twice a week. Even one of my students who lives in a different village knew that I bought bananas last week! It can be a strange feeling to know that people take note of everything I do but I don’t let that stop my day to day life. Often, our attempts to blend in by wearing salwar kameez or saris can actually set us more apart. Slowly, we are becoming a fixture, not just an attraction, here in Bajipura. I was happy when I was asked to join two important cultural events that sent me door to door with the other women in the village asking for blessings. Even though we could not communicate sufficiently, there was an understanding that went beyond words.



Madhi High School is about 10k from where we live in Bajipura and every morning we are picked up and taken to school in a van. The commute to school is something that I enjoy because every day I see something new. The road to school is lined with fields of sugar cane and rice patties and is shared by cars, freight trucks, motorcycles, bicycles, goats, cows, pedestrians, and tractors. Many times we have to stop for cattle and even once for two goats butting heads in the middle of the road. The river is also a shared place; it is where people wash cars, wash clothes, bathe and even where cattle find respite from the heat. It is astonishing to see what an economic divide there is here. On the same road to school there is a fantastic mansion flanked on either side by utter poverty where people use pumps to gather water and electricity does not exist. It is exactly these people that we are hoping to help; rural people thirsting for opportunities.

The students at Madhi impress me. Many come from tiny villages and despite such a lack of resources (and sometimes even a lack of electricity in the classroom) they are still dedicated to learning, at times with overwhelming eagerness. My first two weeks of teaching started slow as the students adjusted to me and I learned how to interact with them. After they became comfortable with me they showed me just what they are capable of. My questions almost never go unanswered and the difficult part is picking just one student to answer. Their hands go up with impressive speed and if they feel that perhaps I didn’t see it they start to wave with an urgency reserved for life and death situations. Just in case I still didn’t see them, they start to call out “Teacher! Teacher! Teacher pleeeaassse!” When I pick one student to answer the others let their hands fall with a disappointed sighing sound, until the next question that is, when their hands once again fly up with speed.