no real title

These past few weeks have without doubt been cracking.

So I didn’t mention in my previous blog something else which happened at the competition last weekend. Some of the boys and girls came to watch the match. When it was going on I felt someone flick my hair, I momentarily ignored it thinking it as just someone being nosy, I then turned around and saw it was a chap from my English class. I waved at him, and then all of a sudden one of the ‘crowd controllers’ grabbed him by the collar and dragged him to the side. I was unsure what had happened to him so tried to go find him. I wasn’t able to, and one of the girls assured me that he was OK. The next day during English he told me that he had been kicked in the head a number of times because he had touched a westerners hair. I felt awful however everyone else found it hilarious.

During one of our regular power cuts the other night during English class, one of the girls was suffering from itchy eyes and tried to grab some eye drops. When she put the eye drops in her eye, she all of a sudden realised that she had put super glue in them instead. It sounds obscene, however this mistake happens quite a lot in India as the packaging and pretty much identical. We rushed her to hospital and she was ‘treated’ but a nurse who had to rip her fingers open that day because she had glued them together. After half an hour of attempting to get the eye open and after receiving very little help from the medical staff the eye eventually opened, but the glue was still on her eyeball. After around 4 hours of keeping her eyes closed and loading it up with eye drops, the glue came off her eye ball taking a layer of ‘skin’ with it and exposing new skin. We took her to see a specialist the next day, and she was given one of those old school eye patches, the large white ones which cover people’s faces. All of her eyelashes were also cut off. However 4 days later and after feeling a bit silly and sorry for herself she was back to good health

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I have noticed that the people here are not very tactful and they definitely don’t beat around the bush. If they want a sweet they say ‘Give me Sweet’. If they want a pen, they say ‘Give me pen’. They also use this rather straight forward approach when making observations. ‘Sophie, your nose is big’. ‘I know’ I say. ‘No no Sophie, your nose is very big, and you are also very fat girl’. For some reason they are obsessed with my calfs and whenever I sit down they insist that I ‘shake them’. As long as that is all they get me to shake I am happy.  It’s a bloody good job I don’t have a complex about my weight otherwise I would have turned anorexic. With regards to my nose, god guys I never knew I had a big nose? You could have told me....

I have been blessed with experiencing yet another festival, a Muslim one this time which we were invited to the land lords house for lunch. I was extremely excited about the idea of eating beef. Men and Women do not eat in the same room so when I arrived I was taken to the younger girls bedroom. The girl had already eaten, so I had prepared myself for a pretty awkward hour with her looking at me eat. The food was amazing and I’m pretty sure I ate more meat there than I had the whole time I have been in India. Half way through the meal she asked me to put on a ‘wedding shawl’, basically a head dress which her aunt wore for her wedding. I went along with the whole fancy dress idea, and she put a tonne of make up on me as well. At this point her older brother, who is obsessed with Enrique Iglesias came in and starting reciting songs to me. All in all I had 27 pictures taken of me. Twenty seven taken in 45 minutes, and not with anyone else just me. I was even told to hold the plate of beef next to me so they could get a picture of that. It was all very odd. However I was very grateful for the invitation and also very relieved when we had to leave.  

On Tuesday, people celebrated ‘Children’s day’ at school. As expected, the emphasis was on children so myself and Franz’s friend who was visiting went to go and see some of the girls at school. There was a ‘sports day’ going on which had some pretty interesting takes on what we consider ‘sports day’ races. The first event we saw was one called a frog race. A line of around 25 young boys lined up, they adopted the squatting position and when the whistle went they starting jumping to the finish line. The race itself was around 30m, however once they got to the end, they had to jump all the way back as well. As you can imagine, a majority of people decided to drop out, but a few tough cookies kept going. It was without doubt one of the most bizarre yet wonderful things I have ever seen. The next race was called ‘The clothes race’ where the boys had to get undressed to their shorts and lay their clothes out in front of them. Once they had done that the race could start and they had to put everything back on, including belt, tie, sock and shoes before they could run the length of the court yard and back on again. There was also a game of musical chairs, which started off with 30 girls and 29 chairs. They began by taking one chair away every time the music stopped but realised that this would take up the best half of the afternoon, so at one stage they took away 10.  When we were leaving, a boy came up to me and asked for my autograph. I asked him why and his simple answer was, ‘Because you are white’. I was pretty satisfied with that so I gave it to him along with a fat kiss on the cheek. I think he went from being a boy to being a man in that moment. 

The little puppies are doing well, and will without doubt be the healthiest puppies in the whole of Jharkhand. I don’t know much about puppies but I know that they can’t see for a few weeks. A majority of the kids know this as well, but there is always one who doesn’t. I found this out when I saw someone trying to prize open one of the puppies eyes using their fingers.

After my morning English class the other day I walked around the village and saw where a number of the girls live. Unlike previously where I was made to sit down in every house I only visited two. The Indians really are fantastic hosts and from my experience will go out of their way to make sure you are pretty comfortable. At one of the girls houses, I was given half a litre of water and 4 home made sweets. Unfortunately I had to leave after 5 minutes because I was already running late for my next class so I put the sweets in my pocket and left. However before I left they insisted that I finished my water. One of the boys also had a full glass he wanted to finish as well so we started drinking it at the same time. It is sad to say that all that practice put into boat races at University hasn’t paid off as I was beaten by a 6 years old boy at finishing my class of water. I was somewhat disheartened by the experience whilst he remained completely oblivious to my thoughts.

There are definitely a number of challenges which come with teaching English. Each of the 4 classes I do every day is different. In the morning I have on average around 28 kids varying from 4 to 14 years old crammed into a small room in one of the girl’s houses in the village. The good thing is that the mornings are pretty cold here so the body heat really benefits those kids with no jumpers etc. There is so much energy in that room that as you can imagine, it is sometime hard to control. There are no ‘cliques’ as such but there are a few who stick out as trouble makers. I had to kick someone out of class the other day, a chap who comes in wearing pretty nice clothes and plays pretty awful Hindi music loudly on his phone. He kept chatting and just was generally pissing me off; he also intimidates a number of the girls. I didn’t particularly like kicking him out, but it had to be done really and he now turns up on time and listens. I’m not sure if he is being serious or taking the piss, so I’m just going to go with the first one. There have been countless occasions when I have asked the kids to write a word such as lunch. I repeated it over and over and they all look at my blankly. One kid then plucks up the courage, and asks, ‘Lunch?’ and I respond with, ‘Yes, Lunch’ . ‘Ooooo, you mean lunch Sophie? OK, Lunch’. This is not as funny written down. But basically I repeat the same word over and over again at a slower rate every time, and when the ball drops they end up saying the word in EXACTLY the same manner as I did. Still after 2 months I don’t see how I say lunch is any differently to how they say lunch, it makes absolutely no sense.

There have been a number of football matches over the past 2 weeks. At one, the second half was put on hold, whilst the ‘political big wigs’ turned up in their truck loads came onto the field to shake hands with the players. It was around an hour and a half away from where I am staying. The road going there was beautiful and the scenery was amazing with extremely uneven roads along side high cliffs overlooking tea plantations and hills. The road had signs such as, ‘Better to be late in this life than early in the next’, which I think is a pretty powerful sign however totally useless to the drivers who are illiterate in Hindi yet alone English. We ate that dinner in a road side ‘hotel/restaurant’ where we had roti and dall. It was one of the best meals I have had since being here despite having a peak at the kitchen on my way out.  

There has been a change in my plan. I am no longer going to be able to travel for a month after I finish here. Because of my ankle I need to get to a place where I can start intense physiotherapy so I am therefore going to see mum and dad in Cambodia next week. I am going to try and reapply for a tourist visa once I am in Cambodia, however it may be unlikely as you have to have been out of India for a certain amount of time before you reapply for a visa. Its sods law really. Oh well though, as is life.

I will report back before I leave on my ‘final days’

PS – I was lying early. I was the one who put super glue in my eye. I bet you aren’t feeling sorry for that girl any more, and am instead laughing at the thought on me being on crutches with an eye patch looking like a character from a children’s story book. I went to a conference during those few ‘special days’ and someone apparently said  ‘Wow, that lady is really committed, I would have never gotten out of bed looking like that’.

India – 2, Sophie - 0