It had been a whole week off school, and it had been fun. We had only been teaching for a couple of weeks beforehand and already we were getting used to arbitrary days off. This time it had been because of the local elections that were held in my assigned village so our school had been closed for the whole week, more than any of the other schools in the area. Despite the relaxation and laziness that had characterised my previous week, I was quite excited to get back and see most of my students again (forgetting those that made teaching less pleasurable). With this in mind it was with good spirits I departed the bus and entered the school gates to be greeted, as usual, by a mob of eager young Indian boys and girls still marvelling at our white skin and cool accessories. However, my happy mood was not to last and I was to be presented with something that would change my perspective, motivation and effort towards teaching.
The reason that my school had been closed longer than the other schools was that, as the centre of the community, a celebration was held there in after the elections that had just taken place. No reason had been given to us by IDEX, the disorganised but well-meaning organisation that was co-ordinating our efforts in the region, but we had been informed by other volunteers working at the nearby day care centre that our school had been flooded with men from across the area. The celebration had been epic, the number of attendants reaching hundreds and the duration lengthy. By 10am, the school was full to the brim, and continued as such well into the evening. While the news of this struck me as unusual and excessive, I decided that feeling was down to my English sensibilities. I was now in a country where, if bored, the inhabitants would surround a drum and sing to each other for hours rather than surround a television set and ignore one another. These events were the signs of community spirit, I believed, and ways of being part of a family immeasurably bigger than the real ones. But after the weekend and the arrival of a new school week, this image was shattered. Any family, even a gigantic one, could not excuse the reckless way in which its children were treated and the state that the foundations of their education were left in.
After the standard mobbing we were escorted, as usual, into the bare room that acted as our own staff room and it was here that I laid eyes upon the devastation that had been left by Friday’s festivity. Strewn across the floor were bottles drained of beer, whisky and rum, some of which had been careless smashed on the floor and outside the windows out which they had been flung. It was the mark of how the winning party had acquired votes after being the officials that had distributed the largest amounts of alcohol to the senior members of the village. Here was where they had consumed the bribes, the teachers allowing the school to facilitate this careless activity and joining in with no thought to the aftermath. Wandering around the room in shock at the sight I had not expected in a region where alcohol was only really seen being sold to tourists (these drinks were only found in ‘English Wine and Beer’ shops and restaurants catering to, almost exclusively, tourists in the city of Jaisalmer). The image that they were trying to maintain of locals habits was rapidly eroding and after that day it became more and more obvious that alcohol consumption in the village could be considered a real problem, especially with regards to the children. However, one of the benefits of the free alcohol distribution was that for weeks afterwards, my students were in possession of brand new water bottles, made of glass and bearing the labels of Kingfisher and Hannibal to name a couple.
The excessive drinking was not the most shocking aspect of that day’s find. In England, it is widely reported that many teachers turn to alcoholism due to the stress of teaching so the association of alcohol and schools was not a peculiar one to me. Instead, it was the horrendous state left behind that left me disturbed. The worst aspect of which was what had happened to a lot of the school books that had been left at the mercy of the party goers in the room. In one corner, only blackened covers were left from a fire that had been started using precious educational resources that were rarely replenished. It was not clear whether this had been purely a recreational activity or whether the cold in a country I found sweltering had driven them to such desperate measures. In another corner, I followed a putrid smell to find a pile of books that had been urinated on. Not just textbooks, but half finished exercise books had been opened up in order to soak up the inevitable result of heavy drinking. It was a horrific sight accompanied by the thought of elected officials were being so reckless and disgusting with the property of children, the most vulnerable group that was in such dire need of assistance from them that they would never receive. Why should they care about such things when children cannot vote, and when the designated toilet is such an incredible distance away? It was all the way around the corner from the room after all.
Watching us standing there in shock and horror, finally the headmaster decided that something must be done, the room could not be left in such a mess with a smell lingering that was close to making our eyes water. He left, returning quickly with a broom in one hand, and the ear of a small child in the other, forcing him into the room to clear up the chaos that was scattered around us. Obediently, the child began to pick up broken bottles and destroyed books, sweeping shards of glass out of the door and into the playground. Silently setting about his task he cast a tragic picture of an insignificant youth whose education was considered so unimportant it became ridiculous. Suddenly all the beatings, abandoned classrooms, removal of children to make the teacher’s chai, the refusal to let girls learn computer skills and the rooms covered in bird (and now human) excrement painted an unbearable picture in my head and me and my fellow volunteers took up brooms ourselves to save this child the ugly task of the clean up. From that moment, despite battling sporadic attendance, uninterested students and teachers, a muddled and hidden curriculum, language barriers everywhere and the sudden and brutal violent discipline that was handed out by teachers and prefects we resolved to do something about the school. We had to do something to give our children a better chance in life so that they, in turn, could improve the whole system themselves.
What we saw that day was one facet of the vile and unacceptable face of rural Indian schools. We did what we could to combat it in the short time we spent there, but drastic change is needed to fulfil our responsibility as humans to avoid this continued abuse.
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