Field Work south of Amritsar

I recently took a two hour bus ride south to the city of Jalandir (spelling could be incorrect). Thankfully we managed to board one of the few air conditioned buses which made the journey very comfortable. There was a large tv screen at the front of the bus that screened a very popular bollywood film that everyone on board enjoyed. This was the first such film I had watched and found what I could follow to be entertaining. This included a surprise music video during the closing credits starring, of all people, Snoop Dogg. I am fairly confident that this song was never released outside of India and hearing the famous south central LA former gangster rap along to Indian beats with traditonal Indian backround singers made my day.

When I arrived at the bus teerminus at my destination was waited for other pratham team members. Once they arrived we began to make out way torwards the exit when a new member on the team named Curran received an angry call from a governent education official. He insisted that we wait for him to arrive so he could personally drive us around to the schools. What he failed to mention was that he would take an hour to arrive. Valuable time was being wasted and the rising temperatures made everyone edgy. Once he arrived we set off in his car (the AC was predictably broken) towards our first school. About halfway there he informed us that we would be making a quick detour to visit a teacher training class. We tried in vain to convince him that it would be more valuable for us to go directly to the school as planned but he ignored these pleas. Before I go any further want to defend this official. His heart was clearly in the right place but he had clearly not understood the nature of my job. The training was interesting enough, but when he asked me in front of the entire group to say a few words I was taken aback. I nervously approached the podium and stammered out some cliched sentances about the value of education and children being the future. While both these things are very true, it would have nice to have actually prepared a short speech. Luckily I was told that most of the people assembled there could not understand me anyway. After this we left and I began the process of interviewing, which was far more successfull than my speech.

At one school I was told that for 250 children there were only 2 teachers, and the number of students were set to rise due to the success of the Parrho punjab english program. This program had convinced parents to allow their children to attend school regularly so as to learn English. They recognize that knowledge of this language is a powerful skill that these children will require if they want to move out of thier village and become successful in the wider world. The official even explained that some kids were leaving private schools and returning to the government schools in their area because of Parrho Punjab. If this is true then the volunteers recruited through Pratham become even more important to teach the children and help out at the school. Many of the volunteers I have spoken with all express a desire to teach (some even worked at the school before volunteernig for Parrho Punjab). Many want to study for a Bachelors degree so that they can apply of a government paid teaching job. At present they get no money and everyone who I have spoken to has stressed that this is the major point that stops many from volunteering. It would be impossible to pay even a small stipend for travel to these volunteers and there are just too many. The punjab state itself has over 10,000 schools each with a few volunteers. The costs would quickly become untenable. Despite these drawbacks, it is clear that the methods introduced by Pratham and Parrho Punjab work amazingly well. That has been the one constant (despite the money issue) between all of the interviews I have conducted. The amount of children in schools is slowly increasing and they are learning well, very well in fact.
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