Happiness in a nutshell!

Over the last week Jade and I have been celebrating 'World Happiness Week' with our classes to mark the Global Citizenship Day of International Day of Happiness on March 20th.

With classrooms of bustling busy excited children I kickstarted happiness week off with some spoken English activities. To my surprise the kids loved stepping away from the pens and paper for the lesson and were overly excited at the prospect of standing up in front of the class. I put the fourth standards into pairs to perform a role play of 'What makes you happy?'. 'Gran and granddads village makes me happy' was a popular one, 'because they give chocolates and cake'. It made me smile to hear that grandparents everywhere seem to give the same treatment! Stickers were rewarded for good pronunciation and all in all we had a good sticker-full morning.

Boosting the children's confidence in speaking is most rewarding, however ever so often drawing and being creative has played a key role in our lessons. Stepping away from text book phrases encourage the children to ask 'Miss shall I write?', 'Can I have...', 'Excuse me Miss', and common everyday English phrases that before were only expressed with hand gestures. With my second standards brainstorming things that made them happy lit up their faces. Nouns such as sweets, villages, friends, family, pets, pizza (which we don't have!) and ice cream were thrown all over the place. As a class we then collectively whittled them down and wrote them out onto coloured make believe tree trunks and tree tops. Which made a very nice happiness tree collage!

Moving up two age groups again to my larger classes of up to 46 pupils 'World Happiness Week' celebrating took a turn when the children were much more interested in learning about the 'Jaint Wheel', otherwise known as the 'London Eye'. After spotting a card from my Granny Betty and Grandad Ted that I had taken to class to show my 6Bs during the break I infact ended up spending the first half of each lesson perfecting the pronounciation and spelling of 'giant'. The English Dictionary also made an appearance in attempt to show that 'Jaint' was not an actual word, followed by a re-explaination that Big Ben was not a person but a clock, that Guy Fawkes and Bonfire Night were related to the Houses of Parliament and that London wasn't always sunny, we carried on with some Mahatama Gandhi words of wisdom! To my suprise one boy, who is a quieter pupil in class, told Jadey two days later with a huge smile on his face that, 'Abbie Miss took a card to class and showed Big Ben, and there was lots of writing inside'. It's small comments like these that make you feel like you really are doing something worthwhile.

Happiness themed classes also ran into our afternoons. As Jadey and I share our nursery and kindergarden sessions we decided to get a little creative and attempt to add some colour to the empty walls. My Granny Emmie had previously sent some animal stickers and Jade received dozens of pens, pencils and bits and bobs from her family - so as a team of tiny ones and the two of us we got to work creating rainbow bunting. The following afternoon we covered the triangles in lions, zebras, giraffes, rhinos, parrots and elephants and were later told for the first time by our host that the kids work was 'beautiful!'. This left us feeling rather chuffed!

By Friday the 20th we finally reached 'International Happiness Day'. After spreading the word all week children ran to us in classes, 'Happy Happiness Day Miss'! One pupil also found an additional happiness quote to add to our collection, following our lesson earlier in the week - and Jade and I took the oppotunity to introduce Pharrell Williams, 'Happy' to seventh standard!

Moving through March

Written on 13/3/15

Recently we were invited to attend an engagement ceremony. The function felt like a meaningful event for us to attend on an almost personal level. We've known Parimala since January and she didn't pause once in considering taking us under her wing when we first arrived. In January she told us she soon had to get married. Being the youngest sister of five means that all of her sisters had already married. When we asked, 'Who will you marry?', the reply was, 'I don't know, my mother will choose'. The concept of arranged marriages seems to run throughout The community in which we are staying, and more than likely a lot of India also. It seems uncommon to be in a 'love marriage' even coming from a Christian family like Parimalas. Luckily the man in which her mother had chosen for her to marry was smiley and young, just one month older than her. The ceremony was full with neighbours, teachers, children, friends and family and the playground of which the engagement took place in the school grounds was quickly swarmed with hungry guests - hundreds of people tucking into rice and curries. The experience was spectacularly colourful, and to my surprise very happy.

Another eye opener which still replays vividly in my mind was a visit to a teachers home. Kalyanni has looked out for us as if we were one of her own. When we arrived at Kalyannis house she told us 'this is the slum area actually'. Those words have ticked in my head ever since. Though the area was not evidently poor in terms of looking any different to the rest of the littered rivers and dusty streets, roam pigs and chickens - her house was clearly much smaller than the others we'd visited. With only two rooms; one room holding a kitchen stove, pots and pans, shelves for clothes, an outside hole in the ground toilet. The other room posed as a bedroom, living room, dining room and the body of the house itself. One bed between four, boxed into four grey walls.

When I imagine children coming back home from a day of school in the UK I look back to my brother and I. We would scooter home from primary with rumbling tummies, tea and toast waiting, sponge bob cartoons on the tele and a sofa to sit on. However returning home from school at 7.45pm throws up a completely different scenario for the children here. For many school must feel like a haven. Be that in front of a blackboard and text book it is somewhere they can study on a desk. The forty hostel boys and three hostel girls (Subashni, Supreeya and Joythi) however all seem perfectly happy and at home just the way it is - and that's what makes India so much easier to accept.

In this coming week the Global Citizenship Day of International Happiness falls, so Jadey and I have planned a week full of activities to do with the children.

Freedom has been granted!

When I told people about Project Trust and my months overseas I found myself saying, 'I'm going to teach for eight months, in a school in Ongole, in South India'. Infact until a couple months before all I knew was 'I'm going to India'. I never imagined India to be the place it is. I'd seen photos, videos, the odd top gear special but really I didn't know what I was in for. The only thing I knew about India was that it was very far away.

I'd never flown that far, never been to Dubai airport, never imagined seeing a tuk tuk in person. It's one thing seeing it on tele, and it's another going full throttle over every bump and cranny in one! If anything it doesn't compare to a four wheeled taxi, especially when it's okay to jump on the drivers seat and ride along side the steering bar. March has marked the month we have been able to walk to the supermarket, bus station, and down the road alone. This may sound a bit strange to comprehend, but being able to walk 'two members' from a new project down a busy Indian street has taken its time to earn. We may have set a project trust record, but we were aware we'd be protected, sheltered, worried about and loved like one of their own.

At home it's common to wake up to the sound of rain, a grey sky and seagulls on the roof next door, stretch out in bed under a princess and the pea style mountain of duvets and toddle on down the stairs to switch the flick on the kettle, take the milk out the fridge, the cereal out the cupboard and start the mammoth task of getting ready. It's easy to take for granted a warm shower, an extractor fan, a flushing toilet with magically appearing toilet paper, and drinking water straight out of the tap. It's strange and hard to explain the little life we have here. And I can openly say, I took the life we have at home for granted. Though it really does feel like a little life of our own we're living here - half Indian, half western. It super busy, crazy, in your face, yet frustratingly laid back and unorganised but it's not at all stressful, just tiring. It's only when you go to sweep the dust up off the slate floor with a large brush made out of reeds rather than hoovering the fluff off the carpet you remember it's so unlike home and it's five thousand miles away! The distance doesn't seem real, but the experience does. You only realise how far away you really are and how different things are when you think about it. It feels normal now to crawl out of my sleeping bag liner (on top of a blanket rather than underneath one), unbolt the bathroom door and turn off the fan, take a cold tap shower, collect our flask of coffee, and be bought a rice flour pancake, a ring of rice (idly), or vada for breakfast, accompanied by chutneys. 

The school and the children have become such a big part of our every day lives that school no longer feels like another day of work, but instead another morning with kids that love to learn and be with us too. I sometimes take for granted that English isn't everyone's first language and it's hard to get my head around that these children are able to have such good broken English conversations because they've put so much effort into learning a language other than their own. Language can be a barrier but it's one that can be so easily broken with a thumbs up, smile or Indian head bobble. I'd never imagined being stood infront of a class of fourty six being asked a question I had no idea how to answer, unable to understand the mix of Telugu and English. Though it's something that I haven't found myself feeling embarrassed or intimidated by at any point. A 'come-see, come-sa' hand gesture is understood by all and cracks a smile across the room, whilst ten others try to explain, 'Miss, Miss', jumbling English words around in a bid to complete the sentence.

Our everyday company has become the children. Before they were just students, small pupils, an array of unfamiliar names and faces. Now these are the children we think of as friends, neighbours and school kids that are just as smiley, just as happy. The only difference, they are less fortunate. If these children were in the UK they'd have a better chance of thriving, fulfilling their ambitions as teachers, lawyers and doctors. In our structured, privileged society theres such an abundance of opportunity. Here it's easy to get lost in such a competitive, overcrowded environment with class sizes over forty. I guess it's making the most of what you've got. If that's a blackboard, slates and chalk there's still open space they can look to and rooftops to run along. These children are lucky enough to turn up to school in uniform. Thats their opportunity, and I hope we can leave these children with good memories and motivation to succeeded, to take time out and enjoy themselves too.