Food! Glorious Food!

I love eating. I love reveling in comfort food as well as trying new and unknown dishes. Eating in Kerala has been amazing. The food here is delicious, and now that I’ve adjusted to the cuisine, I think food is one of the biggest things I will miss about Kerala. So I dedicate this post to food, so that you will better understand what, when, and how I eat in Kerala.

First: We eat with our hands here. To be more specific, we eat with our right hand, neatly scooping fingerfuls of rice into our mouths, without making a mess of our plates or ourselves. This is surprisingly efficient and means fewer dishes to wash after meals.

Meal Times and Dishes:

Breakfast – Around 8am. This is the most interesting meal of the day in my opinion. Here are some common Kerala breakfasts:
• Dosai (pronounced doe-sha) with sambar and/or coconut chutney. Dosai is a soft somewhat sour bread (shaped like a tortilla) made from rice flour, which you dip into sambar, a spicy vegetable curry. (Curries are can range in consistency from soup to thick stew. Sambar is more soup-like.) Alternatively you can dip the dosai in chutney, which is usually a thicker consistency and made with coconut and red or green chilies. The dosai dough can also be shaped into palm-sized ovals, which are called Idli. Idli is also eaten with sambar and chutney for breakfast
• Appaam. Appaam is shaped just like dosai, but the dough is sweeter and contains coconut. It can be eaten with a variety of curries, such as kathala (chickpea) curry – this is one of my favorites! – chicken curry, and egg curry (hardboiled eggs served with an onion, garlic, chili combination).
• Ooppumav. This is another of my favorite dishes. It is basically a cream of wheat dish with onions, chilies, and black pepper. You can eat it with the same curries you eat with appaam, but I think it is best when you mash a banana into it with your fingers. This gives it better consistency and makes it sweeter!
•Pootu. This is basically steamed rice flour with coconut. It’s usually molded in the shape of a log, and then you can break of sections to mix with your breakfast curries. Again I think it’s particularly delicious when eaten with a mashed up banana. Did I mention that I’ve really come to like bananas since I started living in this tropical region that has more banana varieties than I can count?
•Sweet Bread with curry. This is classic Sunday morning fare in Kerala. It’s regular bread, just very sweet. Usually bread is eaten with potato curry or some other vegetable curry.

Lunch - Around noon. Lunch is always rice. Rice forms the center of almost every meal in Kerala. (All the breakfast foods mentioned above are made with rice flour.) So lunch is a heaping plate of rice, with several curries. We have sambar as the main lunch curry almost every day. Side dishes can include:
•Fish curry. Probably my favorite curry in Kerala. Fish pieces are cooked and served in a thin red sauce. It’s made with lots of red chilies and garlic, so it’s very spicy, which is what makes it so good. It is also one of the most prominent Kerala dishes.
•Thoren. This amazing dish can be made with almost any vegetable. The vegetable is cut into small pieces and sautéed with coconut and chilies. It’s fabulous, and as a dry dish it adds great texture to the meal.
•Papadam. Small, salty, chip-like bread. You crush it into your rice and curry mixture, but beware: only crush one bite at a time otherwise it will get soggy sitting in the rice.
•Pickle. This is nothing like what we in the West call a pickle. In Kerala, pickle is a very spicy fruit preparation. Limes, lemons, mangos, etc can all be cut into tiny pieces and pickled with lots of chilies, salt, and vinegar. This is jarred and stored for some time. Then a jar will be opened up, and we’ll be eating lemon pickle with lunch for weeks. When you mix pickle with your rice it will generally overpower any other curry taste on your plate. After getting used to the taste, I’ve discovered that his can actually be a good thing.


[Picture of a Kerala Feast for lunch. Yes, it really is served on a banana leaf. the rice is surrounded by many different curries, banana cips, papadam,pickle etc. My first lunch in Kerala looked like this because we arrived on the day of the biggest festival in the state, Onam. We had lunch at a Hindu temple, where they served this meal to us and to the several thousand other guests at the temple for the festival.]

Tea - 4pm. Tea, or “chaia,” in Kerala means tea with lots of milk and sugar. I think it tastes like sweet milk with a little bit of tea flavor. Although I still prefer black tea, I’ve come to appreciate chaia more and more. With tea we usually eat a snack of some kind. This snack can be biscuits (something very much like Nilla Wafers) or bakery items like sweet buns or samosas or wada (a doughnut shaped bread with onions and chilies). I think the most common snack is banana fry, that is, bananas halved and dipped in appaam batter, then fried. It’s tasty but very oily.

Dinner - Around 8pm. Dinner is often also rice and curry, like at lunch, but it can also have some variation. Here are some other dinner foods:
•Chapatti. These are basically wheat flour tortillas that you tear and eat with different curries.
•Porotta. This rich flat bread is cooked with more oil than a chapatti. It tears in round pieces, and this bread is especially great for soaking up extra curry sauces. However, porotta is more of a special occasion food, whereas chapatti can be an everyday bread.


Although it took me some time to grow accustomed to Kerala’s cuisine, I have now fully embraced the food here. I have already bought a cookbook and am determined to learn to cook at least a few of these dishes before I leave. Because, even though I’ll be happy to eat less rice next year, I’m not sure if I’ll survive the year if I can’t eat fish curry every now and then.

My Searing Bones Light the Way

“In African language we say ‘a person is a person through other persons.’ I would not know how to be a human being at all except that I learned this from other human beings.”

-Archbishop Desmond Tutu

I think I have been falling in love. And I didn’t even realize it fully. Sometime in the last six months I fell in love with the obnoxious way the fifth graders at Nicholson School would always ask me where I was going; the way they dug through my waste basket and left papers and wrappers scattered on the floor. I fell in love with listening to the teachers in the staff room talk to each other in Malayalam on hot afternoons: incomprehensible, yet comforting. Without knowing it I came to love the hanging lines of school uniforms drying in the sunlight and the broken step near the kitchen where I sometimes trip.

Last week, I had to say a lot of goodbyes. (A foretaste of the grief to come.) The school year in Kerala ends in March, and by last Friday all the students who are not taking government exams (i.e. everyone except grades 10-12) went home. And because classes are over now, most of the teachers who usually stay at the school also went home. Even though the older girls are still here studying for their exams, the school is much quieter, and I miss everyone. The dormitory where I live, which used to be full of laughing children, crumpled paper, and forts made from bed sheets and string, is empty now. It echoes when I walk to my room at night.

I was glad to have the opportunity to see everyone and say goodbye last week. I spent the first week of March in Sri Lanka with the other volunteers getting our visas renewed. We had a fantastic ten-day vacation there. Some of highlights included: swimming in the Indian Ocean where we met two giant sea turtles (see above) visiting some ancient Buddhist temples, and drinking lots of fresh mango juice. But just as good as this brief holiday was my return to Kerala. Coming back to Kerala and to my site at Nicholson School felt like coming home. The way some of the teachers and students faces lit up with smiles when they greeted me filled me with indescribable happiness.

We are people only through other people.

I hadn’t realized how much I loved everyone here until I had to say goodbye to them for the summer. I will see most of them again in June when next year’s school year begins, but seeing them leave was still very sad.




Love Like the Wild Geese

This week I recalled a poem by Temple Cone that is helping me remember how to plunge into my relationships with other people. To fall in love with everyone and everything without hesitation, regardless of the pain it may cause later.

If you do nothing else with your life
you can do this, you can love like the wild geese.
Because they are simple,
they do not even know what calls them
from the snow-clotted fields in spring,
only that their searing bones
light the way. Because they believe
they are immortal,
they rush over mountains, foothills, meadows
in waves of frightening speed,
since no one wants to live alone forever.

Last week I said goodbye to many people who have taught me how to be a person here in this completely different culture, but now I am starting to seek out and create new friendships that will hopefully grow with me during the summer months:

• Last Monday I visited a nearby boy’s orphanage for the first time. Though I was overwhelmed with meeting almost 50 children all at once, I spent a wonderful afternoon just hanging out with the boys. We went up to the roof where they taught me to play cricket. Using a stick for a bat and large plastic caps for balls, we played until evening fell.

• On Wednesday I sang a Malayalam song with a group of old women at an old age home, which specifically caters to the poor and to elderly people abandoned by their impoverished families. I didn’t know all the words to the song, and we sang in six different keys; but through these women, who were strangers a minute before, I am learning more about what it means to be a human being.

No one wants to live alone forever, and we are only human through our relationships with each another. After the sadness of saying goodbye to everyone for the summer, I am trying once again to plunge into new love and friendship. To rush over mountains and meadows. To let my searing bones lead me. To love deeply and all the time. To learn and relearn what it means to be a person through other persons. To try to love like the wild geese.

Searching for Newness in the Old: Lessons From Tolstoy

Over the last month as I’ve neared the halfway point of my time in Kerala, I’ve struggled to find newness in my old routine of work and teaching. This was my greatest challenge for the long month of January. After coming back to Nicholson School after the Christmas holidays, it quickly began clear to me that my life at the school had become old news to me and similarly that I had become old news to the school. The novelty of living in a new environment and completely foreign culture had mostly worn off, and I was left with the routine of preparing classes, teaching, and going about my daily activities. I felt like I had lost the freshness.

Some particular examples of how my routine began to feel stale during the last month:
• Some things that used to give me deep delight no longer spark me in the same way. For instance, I no longer get absurdly happy every time I have a moderately successful conversation in Malayalam. But this is because I now regularly have successful conversations; so what used to be an intermittent source of deep delight, is now a daily routine. (Don’t misunderstand me: it’s wonderful that my Malayalam has improved enough that I can have communicate some, but I’ve lost the delight that used to accompany these small successes in language.)
• The fun of teaching classes has faded some as it has become routine both for me and for the students. As I result I feel like my classes have begun to lack the energy and innovation that I used to consciously put into them.
• Some social and cultural differences that I used to be able to tolerate fairly gracefully, really began to irritate me during the last month. In particular I’ve been frustrated with the pressure that the Indian education system places on the 10th, 11th, and 12th grade students. They are constantly pressured to study so that they will have good grades. As a result, they have practically no free time in which to play or rest or relax. And usually they aren’t getting enough sleep because they feel so pressured to study early in the morning and late at night. My frustration with this system came out in helpful and unhelpful ways over the past month. It’s probably good that I’ve told the other teachers that I think the students should sleep more and have more free time. But when I’m so irritated that I can’t properly listen to the students’ personal and academic struggles, my frustration with the system is actually harmful.

I have been working hard during the last month to find newness in my old routine and to overcome my frustrations with the Kerala education system. I did this by adding a few new activities to my routine in January. One of the most rewarding additions has been the yoga class that I teach once a week for 11th and 12th grade students. At first I felt very strange as an American teaching a yoga class in India, the country where yoga originated. But the girls at the school have no one else to teach them, and they want to learn. More than that, I think they need the time to relax their minds and stretch their bodies since they have to spend so much time in the classroom studying. Teaching yoga has become a joy for me, and it is also a constructive way through which I can combat the demanding educational system by giving the girls some much needed time away from their studies.

In my attempt to add new activities to my schedule in January, I also took on a project that turned out to be larger than I anticipated. I directed a play.



Drama at Nicholson

I had never directed a play before this year. Nor had I ever been in charge of auditions or costumes or writing the script. This January, I did all of these things. I adapted Leo Tolstoy’s short story “The Three Questions” into a drama, and in less than two weeks, we put on a play. The nine Middle School students in the cast were wonderful. They worked hard to memorize their lines in a short amount of time, and they were always willing to practice, even at somewhat inconvenient times. But I had no idea how much work it would be to single-handedly organize a play. Even if it was only a one-act school play.

The two weeks that I spent directing and organizing “The Three Questions” were incredibly stressful for me. And as the stress built I caught myself getting easily frustrated with those around me, teachers and students and cast members alike. I had to consciously push my stress and frustration away. After all, Tolstoy’s story – and thus our play – hinges on the lesson of living in the present. A King asks three questions: Who is the most important person? What is the most important time? And what is the most important thing to do? The answers he finally receives constitute the lesson that I was desperately trying to relearn this past month:

- The most important time is now, because it’s the only time in which we have any power.
- The most important person is the one whom you are with.
- The most important this is to do good for that person.

And as I struggled to relearn Tolstoy’s old truth, the students managed to perform a play that included humor, pantomime, a sword fight, tomato-sauce-blood, and a serious moral. When it was all over, I was relieved that it had gone relatively smoothly, that the audience seemed to enjoy it, and that the girls had fun with this chance to perform.




Directing “The Three Questions” was one of my attempts to add “new things” to my old routine, but because of its subject matter, it also fueled a different approach to my attempt at overcome my feelings of frustration and staleness.

Finally, all good things lose their novelty, but I think this loss is mostly due to our inability to see old things with new eyes. I realized that I do not need to find new things to add to my routine in order to make it fresh; instead I need to open my eyes wider. I need to stop and breathe and really look at everything around me. I need to reorient myself to the present moment and to the people whom I am with. And by doing this, I am beginning once again to find new beauty in the everyday: I see it in the excited faces of a group of eighth grade students when they get to go on a field trip to see a waterfall. I feel it in the nervous energy of nine girls waiting offstage before they perform a play. I hear it in voices of fourth graders singing hauntingly in Malayalam.

And slowly the beauty of the present seeps into me again, filling me with newfound joy and love.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

Thank you to everyone who has donated to my fundraising account with PC(USA). I truly appreciate your generosity, which enables me to live out this year of service in Kerala. I am still $3,500 short of my $9000 fundraising goal. If you are interested and able to support me financially this year, you can make a tax-deductible gift by following this link to my account page with PC(USA): http://www.pcusa.org/give/online/projectSelectAction.do?numberString=E210401

A-Hunting We Will Go: The Great Spider Hunt

I have been terrified of spiders since I was very young. In fact when I was little, if I found a spider I would run from the room and find someone else to kill it before I would venture into that room again. Gradually my fear lessened, and by the time I was in college I could kill some small spiders myself – but only after staring at them in frozen terror for some time with a shoe in my hand poised for the kill. So I’m happy to say that in the last five months I have (mostly) faced and overcome my fear of spiders. Here’s how it happened:

With its beautiful tropical climate, Kerala is home to the Huntsman Spider, a variety of large, though relatively harmless, spiders. (I couldn’t bring myself to post a picture of one here, but you can see it by going to this web address: http://www.westaust.net/wildlife/huntsman_spider.jpg) These beasties are usually about the size of a closed fist . I know that there are bigger, scarier, and more dangerous spiders in the world, tarantulas and black widows for example. However, having grown up in a place where the freezing winters keep anything larger than a wolf spider away, I viewed these spiders as both huge and terrifying. The first time I saw one in my room here I went into a frozen oh-my-God-that’s-a-giant-spider panic and simply stared at it from the other side of my room. It took me about half an hour to work up the courage to get near it and finally chase it out the window with a broom. Since that first sighting though, I’ve become less frightened. I think my fear has abated somewhat because I know that no one else will kill these spiders for me, and I don’t want to go to sleep at night knowing that the spider I couldn’t kill is hanging out in my room with me. So I learned to kill the giant spiders, thereby keeping my room safe from mysterious giant web-weavers.

During the last week of January one of these giant spiders evaded me. It moved into my bathroom, and refused to be killed. I chased it maybe half a dozen times, but it always escaped into a crevice or pipe where I couldn’t reach it. But I knew it hadn’t moved out of my bathroom because it would turn up in the most unfortunate places. Once I caught it hiding behind the bucket I use to shower, and another time (horror of horrors) it was sitting inside the toilet bowl after I had flushed, fulfilling every child’s fear that there is a monster living in the toilet.

On the afternoon of February 1st this persistent spider finally crossed the line. As I flushed the toilet in my bathroom the giant spider leaped out of the toilet bowl at me, and despite my recently lessened fear of spiders, I screamed. In all fairness, I can’t blame it for trying to avoid death by drowning by leaping out of the flushing toilet. If I were the spider, I would have done the same. But it was the last straw. The Great Spider Hunt had begun. For the rest of the day I stalked this spider. I came back to my room at random moments trying to catch it in a vulnerable position on the floor or walls of the bathroom. I finally did catch it that evening, and I’m happy to say that it will not be haunting my bathroom or jumping out of my toilet anymore.

There are many different (and sometimes uncomfortable) things about my life in India that I have accepted fairly easily: Washing my clothes by hand in the sink; showering with a bucket of cold water; having very little control over my diet; substituting water for toilet paper; living with lizards. I needed time at first to adjust to these changes in my lifestyle, but after a short time I easily grew accustom to them. However, I refuse to share my room with giant spiders. Certainly, I will not share my toilet with them.


(More January updates coming soon!)

Carols, Cake, and Coconuts: Christmas in Kerala

It began with a song.

“Vishwaasikalhe vaa! Thushta-maanasar
Aai vanneeduka, vaa, ningal Bethlahemil.”

“O Come All Ye Faithful” is one of the most popular Christmas carols in Kerala, and so the Tiruvalla Ecumenical Choir began their carol service on December 6^th with this song. I sang alto. We sang the traditional hymn in Malayalam, and I read from an English transliterated version that began, “Vishwaasikalhe vaa…” That first carol service set the stage for a month of Advent and Christmas celebrations that finally left me hoarse from singing, stuffed with a ridiculous amount of cake, and extremely happy.

After that first evening of carols, I sang constantly throughout the month of December. I love Christmas songs, and so it was a joy to teach English Christmas carols to the students at Nicholson School every morning. Equally wonderful for me was learning the Malayalam Christmas songs that the students and other teachers taught me. The school put on two carol programs, and for one of these programs the tenth grade students went caroling. They wore white saris and carried candles down the street singing Malayalam carols to the beat of two drummers. Caroling in 85 degree humid weather was a little surreal for me, but it was also amazingly fun.

Although I attended many carol services in December my favorite was the small gathering I coordinated

with an old-age home located near Nicholson School. A week before Christmas I brought a group of fourteen 11^th grade girls to sing carols for the elderly residents of the home. The girls had practiced several Malayalam songs and had prepared some Bible readings and a skit, but even better than the program they put on (which did go very well), was the way the girls interacted with the residents. The two groups of young and old seemed so at ease with each other and so happy in each other’s company. When it came time for me to leave with the girls, I couldn’t separate the students from their new grandmothers and grandfathers. One woman was showing two girls a picture of her long-deceased husband, while another group talked and laughed over their pieces of Christmas fruit cake. On leaving, the girls exchanged hugs and kisses with the grandfathers and grandmothers. Walking back to the school, I was overflowing with happiness at seeing how this group of young and old had so easily come to love each other.

"Dreaming of a Coconut Christmas…”

In addition to the Malayalam songs and bilingual carol programs that filled the Advent season for me, my Christmas this year also included many new experiences that, as someone who grew up in Northern Minnesota, I would never have associated with the holiday season:

• On Christmas Eve I relaxed with the other volunteers on paddleboats in some beautiful backwaters, and I hung out (literally) in a hammock strung between two coconut trees.

• Instead of eating Christmas cookies, I filled my stomach with Kerala’s traditional Christmas food: plum cake. This is basically a regular cake with some raisins, dates, and nuts thrown in. Delicious, but over the course of the month I probably ate one or two entire cakes, and now I think I’d run away if someone offered me another piece.

• In Kerala everyone decorates their homes with multi-colored paper stars. They place light bulbs inside the stars so they glow at night. They’re beautiful, and I loved seeing homes and stores brightly decorated with them this Christmas season.

• While I was traveling with the other volunteers a few days before Christmas, we randomly stopped and grabbed some coconuts from a street vendor. We drank the coconut water with straws, and then the vendor cut the coconuts in half so we could eat the sweet, white meat.

• On Christmas morning I awoke at 5am to the chanting of the call to prayer from a nearby mosque.

• At the carol service at Tyler’s site, the four volunteers were asked to participate in a four-part harmony singing of “Silent Night.” Only eight people were singing the song, and although Sarah, Tyler, Cameron and I can usually hold a melody (and sometimes a harmony) we’re not spectacular singers. Somehow the eight of us managed to butcher “Silent Night” by singing in eight different keys. Luckily our audience, made up mostly of the elderly residents at Tyler’s site, didn’t seem to notice. But that night we welcomed Christmas by making a joyful noise.

It ended with a song.

After spending my Christmas holiday with Thomas John Achen, his family, and the other volunteers, I returned to my site. I got off the crowded train at the Tiruvalla station on December 27th, heading back to Nicholson School where we would begin class the following day. As I walked the 2 km back to the school, I listened to the now-familiar sounds around me: The birds and crickets, the traffic on the road, the intermittent music from a church or temple, a radio playing from the back of a fruit stand, the crunch of gravel under my feet, the bus conductors calling out their destinations at each stop: the joyful music of life and creation that surrounded me this Christmas.

Joy to the world!
The Savior reigns;
Let all their songs employ.
While fields and floods,
Rocks, hills, and plains
Repeat the sounding joy,
Repeat the sounding joy
Repeat, Repeat, the sounding joy!

The Ways I Forget Geography and Then Remember Again

I have been living in Kerala long enough that I now sometimes forget where I am. Let me explain: My life has normalized into daily and weekly routines. I eat the same foods and sleep in the same bed and see the same coconut trees every day. So sometimes I forget that I’m living my life on the opposite side of the world from where I grew up. And then I remember. Sometimes I will simply look at the trees with fresh eyes, or maybe I’ll eat some new, previously unknown, and delicious fruit. And in re-sensing the world that surrounds me here, I remember: “Oh yeah! I’m in India!”

So in this post, I felt the need to re-document my geography. To remind myself (and maybe you too) of where I am in the world. So here is a map of India with Kerala highlighted. The capital of the state is Thiruvananthapuram (or Trivandrum for short), but I live in Pathanamthitta District (see second map), and the other three YAV volunteers live in Kottayam District.


The language here, as I’ve already mentioned, is Malayalam. I am surrounded by this language and am still struggling to learn it. The letters are especially beautiful when written, curving and arching in some confusing, graceful dance. Click here to see what Malayalam script looks like.

So yes: I am in India! Although I forget my geography sometimes, little things help me remember:

- When the lights go out, I love it. The electricity fails here pretty often, but in the evenings when the power goes out, I can’t stop smiling. In the dark, the students and teachers laugh more, are more free with each other. There must be something about being in the dark that makes people more open. In the dark we can’t stop laughing and smiling because, when we can’t see each other’s faces everything is somehow funny, wonderful, and shared.

- When I walk outside of my room I’m immediately surrounded by some 15 or 20 11- and 12-year-old girls who live in the dormitory where my room is. They all run up to me, happy to talk with me in their broken English, which they’re still learning. This happens at least three times every day.

- I have eaten several fruits here in whose existence I still do not believe. The most recent example is a custard apple. The texture is a little like custard, but it has nothing to do with an apple. Opening the grenade shaped (and textured) fruit, exposes a bunch of fleshy white pieces, each with a large seed inside the white fleshy fruit. This white flesh has a sort of custardy consistency. It’s sweet and good, but it tastes like nothing I’ve ever experienced before, so I can’t even draw an appropriate comparison. I’m sure this fruit cannot exist. But I’ve eaten it. Twice.

- Last week I almost died crossing the street. Traffic here is insane, and being a pedestrian sometimes feel suicidal. In most places in Tiruvalla there is just one wide-laned road with traffic speeding along in both directions and cars illegally passing, weaving in and out of fast, oncoming traffic. It’s pretty frightening. What is maybe more frightening, is that I’m now almost completely desensitized to this way of driving. But I forgot for a moment that I was in India, and last week I tried to cross the street without checking for cars illegally passing in the wrong lane. One such vehicle narrowly braked in time and I touched the hood of the car as I dodged around it. [Readers, please do not think that I am in too much danger of dying on the roads. Think of all our U.S. traffic accidents. I’m truly just as safe here as I would be driving in the U.S.]

- When there’s no water – that is, when the pipes are empty and the faucets don’t work – I go to the school’s giant well and pull up a bucket full of clean, drinking water that I can pour directly into my water bottle.

- When I had lunch with an older friend of mine here, she offered me a fork for the first time since September. (Everyone in India eats with their right hand, a surprisingly efficient way of eating once you get used to it. There are also fewer dishes to wash.) Anyway, I had to refuse the fork because I don’t know how to eat Kerala cuisine with anything but my hands.

- It is “winter” in Kerala and many people dress for the “cold” by donning sweaters and wrapping shawls and blankets around their shoulders in the morning. I think it’s finally comfortable at a balmy 75 degrees F.

- One night I stopped at the door of my room and stared out at the night. The full moon was a brilliant yellow/orange color and shone through the branches of the coconut tree near my bedroom window. The tree was silhouetted against the fullness of the bright moon, and the beauty of the scene was stunning.

Oh.
Wow.
I’m in India!

Work and Play

“She worked hard, and she played hard.” Although many people truly enjoy their jobs, most, I believe, still think of work and play as separate. Play might be going out to dinner with friends or playing games with your children or going to a movie with your spouse, but it’s almost certainly different than the work you do for your job from 9 to 5. I’ve always though that work and play should share more common ground, that they should overlap more. But in high school and in college I often had to rigorously separate play from work. Here it’s different.

I do have “work” as a YAV in Kerala. Teaching spoken English classes and music at Nicholson School is definitely work (and hard work!), as is the editing and clerical work that I do for the Tiruvalla Ecumenical Charitable Trust (the progressive social justice organization where I work once a week). But I’m gradually discovering that the time I spend playing with the girls at the school probably constitutes the most important work I do here. So for me, work and play are overlapping in wonderful, glorious ways. Let me give you some examples.

Halloween

I hosted a Halloween celebration at the school for all the boarding students and teachers. It was a blast! Halloween isn’t celebrated here and most of the children had never heard of it. So I asked the school principal to explain the holiday to the children in the morning assembly (in Malayalam so the younger ones would understand). Then I carved a jack-o-lantern and invited all 400-some boarding students to come to room between 8:00 and 9:30 that evening to trick-or-treat. As you might expect, it was chaos. But it was fun chaos. The girls came up with some really creative costumes especially considering that their only resources were the few clothes and toiletries the keep in boarding. Some came as ghosts or vampires with white talc powder on their faces. One group of tenth graders even put together a scary dance and song that they performed in front of my door! I was delighted that the teachers (who also board at the school) came trick-or-treating too. When they knocked on my door and yelled “boo,” I was indescribably happy. Most of them had also never experienced Halloween, and I was so glad that they wanted to participate in the holiday because it meant that they were also engaged in the cross-cultural celebration. It also seemed to me like an affirmation of the friendship that I’m building with them.

The Halloween celebration was a lot of fun for everyone, but it was also a teaching moment. The children got to learn about an important Western holiday, how it’s celebrated, and what it means. It was also a chance for them to use their creativity in creating costumes and (in some cases) songs and dances. Much of the schoolwork that the girls do does not nourish creative thinking or imagination, so opportunities to be creative are in short supply for the students. I also think the celebration gave them an opportunity to escape the strict rules of the boarding school and to simply play for a few hours. I believe (at least I hope) that the holiday escape from study and routine gave them a much-needed chance to learn by playing.

“Singin’ in the Rain”

Last week Nicholson School had a huge Exhibition as part of the school’s celebration of it’s centennial, which will occur this coming February. The Exhibition was a lot of work but it was also very fun. The school invited lots of different organizations to come and set up stalls. So, for example, ISRO – the Indian Space Research Organization, i.e. India’s version of NASA, – filled our auditorium with models of rockets and satellites and a Kerala-based Marine Fishing Organization brought aquariums full of dragon fish and clown fish with anemones. The students also made hundreds of models, charts, and experiments as projects to display. Picture the a huge high school science fair/art show, then add aquariums, rockets, and locally produced honey and you pretty much have it.

So for this grand Exhibition, I worked with some seventh grade girls to build a model solar system. You know, painted plastic balls with planet-name-tags on wire circles suspended from the ceiling. It was actually pretty cool when we finished. But that’s not the point. We were working on this model one afternoon, when it began to pour. We’re currently in the last stages of the NE monsoon season, and that afternoon, the skies opened and rain came down in sheets, flooding the school courtyard in minutes. The girls and I rushed out of the classroom where we’d been working to watch the downpour. I love rain, and I especially love big storms. So we stood on the balcony overlooking the flooded courtyard laughing at the beauty of the rain. Holding out our hands to catch the clean rainwater in our palms. Then I started singing the beginning of “Singin’ in the Rain,” which led to an impromptu teaching of the song to the girls. Then I taught them some basic swing dance steps, and we reveled in the rain with song and dance. The girls, in turn, showed me some classical Indian dance steps. (One student says she will teach me, so maybe by the time I leave Kerala I will have learned classical Indian dance!) Singing and dancing in the rainstorm the girls and I rediscovered the magic of playing, of finding impromptu fun so spontaneously.

Hindi Radio Appreciation

During the beginning of November, I accompanied a group of 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade students on a field trip to Kochi (on of the biggest cities in Kerala). I was partly there as a guest to see the tourist sites that the girls would visit, but I was also implicitly there to help keep an eye on the children. The other teachers and I obviously needed to keep the girls from getting lost, pulling each other’s hair out, or, I don’t know, sticking their hands in stray bee-hives. So I was there partially to help supervise the trip.

The field trip was a lot of fun, and all the sites we saw in the city were great. However, the best moment of the day took place on the bus. On our way to the city in the morning the driver turned on a radio station that was playing popular Hindi music. The girls were so excited about being on a field trip that they were nearly jumping out of their seats talking to each other and singing along to the songs. Then one of the other teachers and I stood up and started dancing in the aisle of the bus. (Traffic and roads in India would merit a separate and very long explanation. For the moment just accept that while this wasn’t exactly a safe action, it’s not uncommon or illegal.) Within seconds most of the girls were on their feet dancing and falling over in the aisle of the bus as we went over bumps and bridges. All the while we sang to the upbeat, rhythmic melodies of the Hindi radio station. At least, the students sang. I don’t know Hindi and didn’t understand the words of the songs, so I just danced and encouraged the girls to embrace the moment of fun. The chance to be free and play with the students gave them a great opportunity to overcome their shyness of me. When I danced with the girls to their favorite Hindi songs, I wasn’t their classroom teacher; instead I was a friend or maybe a little like an older sister. Such icebreaking moments are really important for my relationship with these young girls, many of whom live at the boarding school far away from their homes and families. Dancing and playing with them has made them more comfortable around me, and now some of them are comfortable approaching me with problems with their friends or family or with their own feelings of homesickness. I need to play with the students because it’s through play that we can truly become closer.

Through all these moments of play, I’m learning to break through the shyness that some of the students still have around me. And this is my real work. Because when the students overcome their shyness and nervousness around me, they talk more with me. Simply by becoming comfortable talking with me, they improve their English speaking skills (which is, after all, what I’m supposed to be teaching.) More importantly, some of them are now comfortable telling me about their worries or their homesickness, and then I can try to offer them emotional support. So for me, play is work. Right now in order to do my work as I understand it, that is, to be a mentor for the girls and help them with their English at the same time, I need to play with them. Finally, work and play for me are one and the same.