Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas,
from
Clive in India

Chalk and blackboards

I dunno why the temples seem extra noisy this morning but they certainly are. Can't say the wind is in the wrong direction as there isn't any! It's not the full-blast, speakers-in-a-tree volume but it was loud enough to wake me early. Perhaps it's a competition between temples - I took a walk down that way a few weeks ago and found that there were no less than four temples, perhaps two or three hundred metres apart, all along the same little road, and each with its own particular aural pollution.

For the last week we've had no computers at the school. The supplier's technicians turned up with one hour's notice apparently, but the first I knew of it was when they'd arrived! And I didn't know we'd actually decided to wipe all the hard disks, reinstall Windows XP, and buy and install Kaspersky AV. No one tells me nuffing! So, I had to rush around, pulling off vital students' work onto my USB stick, while the technicians got to work. By the end of the day they'd wiped the disks and reinstalled XP. By the end of the next day Kaspersky was in place but we couldn't use the machines because the latest updates and virus definitions were needed from the Internet. And the next day the technicians didn't turn up. Nor the next day, nor the next. If I ask anyone, they shrug their shoulders (or give an Indian head wobble) and say "This is India!"

Yeah, what else should I expect!

It's going to be another chalk and blackboards day...

From Kovalam Beach

I was down on Kovalam's Lighthouse Beach this morning, visiting a friend. The fishermen were pulling in the nets and that always makes for a good photo. The nets are vast, and it takes more than an hour to haul them in. I didn't stay to see the catch but no doubt it will be filling a few stomachs in the many beach-side restaurants this evening.

What always strikes me when I see this scene is not how romantic or evocative it is but that it would surely be more efficient if the rope didn't turn a corner.  If the last few guys were really doing any work then those just in front of them would be struggling to stand upright!

This giant hedgehog must be a good metre and a half in length. I think it's just what's left of the stump of a palm tree after being tossed about in the sea for a while. It would look great with some eyes and nostrils painted on it!

Monday grumps

It's Monday, and we're having a bit of a re-shuffle. Following the exams in November, in the four lower groups one or two of the most able children have moved up a class, one has moved down, but the majority have stayed where they were. There have been some more significant changes at the top. B-Group has become the students who hope to achieve the public "7th Standard" exams, and A-Group has become those hoping to achieve "10th Standard" (I'm guessing that that is approximately equivalent to GCSE ('O' Level) standard in the UK). Five students formerly in A-Group have been moved to B-Group leaving only five at the top. And then there are six students, mostly ex-B-Group, who are older but who won't achieve either exam. I call them the "A-minus" students. So now we have an additional group but no extra teachers. The Head's idea is that we teach both A groups simultaneously, but with the A- group doing simplified worksheets. This will be a big burden on the teachers, me included. We have to produce extra lesson plans/worksheets, and manage two vastly different ability groups in the same classroom simultaneously. I can't see how this can work out well. Trouble is, the school can't afford extra teachers.

Personally I'd just kick the A- students out. Two of them are disruptive and lazy, and the other four are somewhat slow and backward. They must all be 16 and older, and despite investing a lot in them already, they've achieved very little. I can't see the point in spending any more of our limited resources on them which is certain to be to the detriment of the teaching quality for the A+ students. Putting it kindly, the A- students are not academically inclined. Ideally SISP would be able to offer them vocational training but it's proved impossible - we don't have the money or the time. As it is, these kids are doing negligible work in the classrooms in the mornings. In the afternoons some do "work" in the craft workshops - only they chat and disrupt rather than work, despite the best attempts of the coordinators. As I say, I'd kick them out. In my opinion we're doing no favours keeping them at SISP, other than keeping them from sitting around at home doing nothing. However, the management team are more caring than I am and take a softer approach. I lack compassion.

Right... my day starts at 9am with an hour's computer tuition for one of the craft workshop coordinators.  She's my age and is entering November's production figures into a spreadsheet.  She's done this every month for the last nine months but still struggles. I suppose that she's lived without technology for so long that this is all a bit abstract for her.

Then there should be a welcome cuppa and a sandwich at 10am. The cook has been in the kitchen since 9am so you'd expect it to be ready on time, wouldn't you? It rarely is. There are twenty minutes before the classes start and ten minutes have already passed. So we have 60 or so noisy, hungry kids, running around, creating merry hell. I go to find out why it's so late. The cook is just sitting there, ostensibly preparing lunch. The tea and bread are ready but she tells me that none of the students has been to collect them, and the woman just shrugs her shoulders and can't be bothered to take any initiative. Fortunately, before I blow my top, some older students arrive and carry the tea and food up to the hall. The kids now have less than 10 minutes in which to queue up, drink and eat before the bell goes.

Up in the hall there are still the decorations from Sacrifice Day two weeks ago. It's the same old story - if someone thinks to put them up, no one thinks to take them down. Meanwhile they get destroyed. I remove a string of tatty flags, screw it up and put it in the bin.  Within minutes it's out and being pulled over a table-full of tea and sandwiches... somehow again I manage to not go berserk.

The computer lab is really an area at the far end of the dining/assembly hall, which has been sectioned off by some movable wooden screens.  Then there is an area for A-Group classes with three blackboards separating it from the main hall. At lunchtime the heavy/awkward blackboards have to be moved, and the chairs have to be taken out of the computer lab and classroom for sitting at the lunch tables. The chairs and tables already in the hall have to be rearranged too. I cannot recall a single day when anyone has moved the chairs or blackboards of his own volition. Not one. They always have to be told. And this is a task that needs doing every single day. Then at the beginning of classes, as now, the boards and chairs have to be moved back again, usually achieved by dragging them screetching across the tiled floors.

There is no sound-deadening between A-Group, the hall, and my computer lab, and the dividers are only half-height. Consequently we suffer from noise pollution. And it's self-perpetuating - if outside is noisy then my students have to shout to be heard, causing the outside students to shout even louder....

My timetable shows that I have one lesson in the morning, but two teachers haven't turned up today and I have to teach in the periods I'd hoped to use to prepare lessons. Consequently, nothing is prepared, and I have to improvise. This happens often, but somehow or other I've managed to never come unstuck, or at least not badly. At worst I might forget that the youngest kids have the attention spans of gnats (hmm ... perhaps gnats actually have good attention spans, but you know what I mean!) and I might try to teach them for 60mins rather than 30mins of computer and 30mins drawing or reading. Normally I take a register and record the activities for every class and that helps my aging memory in continuing tasks already in progress or avoiding duplicating stuff.

Three mornings every week I have free first periods.  On paper, at least.

OK, so that's Monday morning out of the way.  Now lunch.  Guess what?  It's EFFING late EFFING AGAIN!  The kids are champing at the bit, fighting and running around like half-crazed lunatics.  And have the blackboards been moved?  Guess!

 But be happy for me - feeling grumpy is good for me!  I'm not entirely convinced - perhaps I need to relax a bit more and be a bit more Indian.  These problems are my problems, not theirs!

Games and Fun in Kerala

As I sit here writing this, my Internet cable connection has failed and there's no mains power. A couple of hours ago we had a bit of rain so the outages are not unexpected, at least not by me in my corner of India.  What is unexpected is the rain. The months following the monsoon are usually dry, as they were last year and the year before, but this year the monsoon didn't really happen and we've been having occasional unseasonal downpours instead. Other than the loss of connection I don't mind too much but the rain must come as a nasty surprise to the tourists who've now started to arrive in significant numbers.

I'm pleased to say that no more water has been coming out of the power sockets!

It's my afternoon off and I've actually just returned from a meeting with a couple of tourists down on Kovalam Beach. They are supporters of SISP, the organisation I work for, and I wanted to ask them if they'd mind if the money they'd recently donated was spent on something other than what they had requested.  They didn't mind at all and, in fact, added another £200 to their £150 donation. Nice folk!

We've now come to the end of two weeks of exams and team games. Thank God it's over - it was exhausting! But not as bad as last year, I'm pleased to say, and at least the chaos felt a little more organised this time.

As an incentive to do well in their exams, the marks the children achieved were added into their team's results. I'm not convinced the ploy worked. Anyway, I was in the 'Hunters' team and, like last year, it's teams like mine which generously allow others to come first, second and third ;) Despite my protestations, I was roped into doing three of the team games: chess, tug-of-war, and relay sponge. Surprisingly I won the first game of chess but I think my opponent's non-appearance may have had something to do with it. In the follow-up game I was annihilated! My team came second in the tug-of-war and I didn't fall over or get dragged along the ground like last year, so that was some kind of success. And in the sponge relay, where you fill a bottle with the water from a sponge, my team triumphed, but only after a false start because my bottle had holes in it. Subterfuge has not been ruled out! All in all it was good clean fun and kids of all sizes enjoyed it, including this one!

We have fifteen PCs at SISP. Eight are used by students, two by social workers, two for accounts, two by management and one by teachers.  They all run MS Windows XP (unlicenced), MS Office (unlicenced) and Photoshop (you guessed it), and other software. At least thirteen of them have viruses. Because the MS software is cracked the Help features don't work. Because XP doesn't have the latest service packs applied it is (presumably) more fault prone.  And because the Antivirus software (AVG) is free it gets blamed by the system retailers for all the crashes and breakdowns that we have. Or it's the extra-noisy mains power in Kovalam, the dust, the salt-air, powering-off before properly shutting down... whatever.  Rarely does a day go by when we don't have at least one PC out of action, and we have no spares. One of the problems is that volunteers here use USB pen drives to work in Internet cafés and to carry their work (plus viruses) to SISP.  Or students use memory cards from mobiles to transfer music files (plus infections) via USB adaptors via our PCs, while others sometimes pop dodgy MP3 disks into the disk drives. It's a nightmare! And we can't repair or reinstall because we don't have any of the 'original' cracked software disks ourselves, so we have to wait several days for the technicians to arrive, then often several days more for a fix.

I would like to move to a Linux distribution (like Mint), OpenOffice and Gimp etc. At least then we'd be legal, more virus resistant, and have the disks ourselves. I use OpenOffice on Vista on my personal laptop and find it's excellent.  But no one else has confidence in the move, and finding someone to support it after I eventually leave SISP might be tricky...

Backwaters and Hills

Fellow SISP volunteer Antje and I decided to take off for four days to see some of the south India countryside. Friday was the Muslim Sacrifice Day so, with Saturday and Sunday, I just had to take one extra day off work. It's the first proper holiday I've had since coming here if you don't count the trips back to the UK for visa renewals so I think I was due a break! We headed north to Alleppey by bus, took a ferry to Kottayam, bus to Munnar, taxi to Thekkady, bus back to Kottayam, train to Trivandrum, then bus and rickshaw home.

The first leg of the journey was hellish - of the four-hour bus journey to Alleppey, 3 hours was spent standing. Personal space got smaller and smaller so that in the end we were all standing arse to arse and hip to hip in the aisle. If you moved your foot the vacated space was immediately occupied by someone else's foot. What with the jolting, being unable to move, heat, humidity, lack of forward visibility and limited sideways visibility, the journey was far from enjoyable. At one point I was on the verge of getting off, wherever we were, because it was so claustrophobic and I was so close to throwing up. Somehow I survived, the numbers thinned and miraculously a seat appeared beside me so I grabbed it!

Alleppey is the hub for Kerala's backwaters. The majority of houseboat journeys start and end here, and if you do the touristy thing of hiring a houseboat and staff for one night or more you'll part with tens of thousands of rupees (hundreds of pounds). However, you can do the journey from Alleppey to Kottayam by public ferry. Admittedly it's not quite as scenic but we found it was a quiet route, the boat wasn't crowded and you get to see some genuine backwater life as you glide along. Best of all, the two-and-a-half hour journey costs just ten rupees! That's about 13 pence! Bargain!

Kottayam doesn't have much of interest so we went straight to the bus stand. Buses were constantly coming and going and the place was heaving. We were worried that we might not be able to identify the correct bus so we couldn't really relax there. We also wanted to make absolutely certain we had seats this time and when the bus eventually turned up we jumped on in front of a couple of nuns! But we needn't have worried - we all got seated OK. The road to Munnar climbs slowly up into the hills with constant twists and turns. It's narrow and patches are badly surfaced. You're forever trying to overtake slow vehicles or being overtaken by faster ones, all the time trying to dodge traffic from the opposite direction doing exactly the same thing. The grinding of the gears and engine are accompanied by constant horn-blowing which, amusing at first, soon got very tedious. Anyway, the views were quite good although we couldn't stop to admire them, of course.

Munnar is centre of the area's tea plantations and and much business is carried out there. It's also where a lot of scenic tours into the Western Ghat hills start from. The hotels are mostly boring, grubby, smelly and expensive so it took us a while to settle on something suitable. After we'd exhausted all the places mentioned in Lonely Planet we resorted to using a rickshaw driver to take us from place to place. You're really at their mercy - they probably take you to hotels that they know will be full, expensive or pay baksheesh. Our guy seemed fair so, once we did find something, we agreed that he would take us by car to Thekkady the next day. He told us we'd visit a tea plantation, spice garden, see waterfalls and stop at a lake. His fee was slightly more than what we'd seen advertised but he was a nice guy so we didn't mind. The rest of the evening was spent in the town, around the bustling market area. Relative to the coast the temperature was fabulously cool and the air fresh - a huge relief! Antje said felt the cold and bought some fleece ear-muffs which all the local trendies seemed to be wearing, along with fleece jackets and hats! I was OK and didn't feel the need for any extra layers.

Next day the taxi turned up early, only it wasn't the original driver and this one could barely speak English! The warning bells were loud enough but we crossed our fingers. He took us on the route and it was very pretty as we'd expected. We stopped at various viewpoints and got photos but found that you could only see the local tea plantations from a distance - they didn't accept visitors! The only spice garden on the route was an overcrowded tourist trap so we didn't stop, the waterfall fell right by the road and was surrounded by cars and fences, and we were told the lake was closed as it was Sunday! When we complained, our driver said we had actually seen all the things his brother had promised - we had seen them or visited them, but not actually experienced them! We were some way down the road before we realised what was happening and couldn't realistically go back. We couldn't contact the original guy because he had no phone, and we had no agreed itinerary in writing. When we finally got to Thekkady I cut his charges by Rs.100 which is what it would cost to get a taxi to local tea and spice gardens. Not a huge amount but it made me feel better! Going by bus would have been a lot cheaper but we wouldn't have been able to stop to admire the views - at least we'd achieved that much!

We stayed the final night at the Coffee Inn - a very quirky little hotel in Kumily. We'd arrived early and quickly found a room. In the evening we watched a Kathakali show which is a traditional dance/theatre performance. On the way down the road we'd been tailed by someone who wanted us to buy tickets through her, and wanted us to see 'her' shop too, so the omens didn't bode well but the show was actually better than I'd anticipated.

The journey home was quite thrilling, with the bus racing downhill, round blind bends and overtaking everything in sight at breakneck speeds! And finally we experienced our first Indian rail journey. We travelled in a sleeper class carriage which sounded like it might be a comfortable way to travel. It was OK-ish but a little cramped, and it's only called sleeper-class because the seats could be folded flat at night time. It being daytime, all the seats were upright, somewhat grubby plastic-covered, and a bit crowded. Worst was that the windows were very small which limited the view and the ventilation so I spent a while hanging out of the open door. We survived though and overall it was a fun experience which I wouldn't have wanted to miss.

More photos here:

Backwater and Hills

Humid Mould

It's been raining a lot in the last week - very heavily at times. Water has even been coming out of a power socket on the wall! I've put a bucket underneath and have collected at least 8 litres. The soil is banked up on that side of the house and the puddling water somehow finds the power conduit. The owner promised to lower the level "tomorrow" several days ago but hasn't. Meanwhile, everywhere is very damp and the humidity is very high. A towel I washed a week ago and hung outside is still damp, and smelly again. Everything takes ages to dry and many things are going mouldy within a day or two. My heated cupboard is being put to good use and seems to be keeping some things mould-free. Night-time temperatures are actually lower - I haven't measured them but I feel cold in bed and have woken up early several times because of it. I have the ceiling fan on quite high so that it drowns out the outside noises (esp the temple at 5am) but obviously it cools me even more. I can see myself resorting to earplugs!

At SISP we're very busy getting ready for the exams and the Muslim "Sacrifice Day" festivities. So far I've avoided the group games but I'm told it would send the wrong message to the children if I opt out completely - damn! The exam papers should be in by today but I've only written two of the six required. I'll get them done before they're needed but they take time, and I have the constant distraction of normal classes, fixing broken computers, computer viruses etc. It ain't easy!