Our first day of teaching went remarkably well, considering A.) the novelty of the tasks at hand, B.) the language barrier, and C.) our still-lingering exhaustion. The school is a brief walk down the dirt road from the home; we left with the girls at around 8:45 to get there on time. The school itself is ostensibly nothing remarkable (four rooms, no electricity), but pretty incredible considering what these nuns have to work with. My mom, the two girls from Notre Dame and I were assigned classes to teach for the morning. I taught first and seventh standard ("standard" is the Indian term for "grade," a remnant of the days of British colonization) until lunch... pretty humbling, to say the least. I soon realized that the language barrier would be a tough one to climb over, so I did my best to establish some sort of common ground: i.e. learn the English words they knew, and for those that they didn't, improvise using gestures, etc. The English vocabulary of the students, especially the younger ones in the first and second standards, is essentially limited to basic terms: mother, father, teacher, student, uncle (what they call me), auntie (what they call Mom), book, and, not surprisingly, Jesus. I peppered the stories I read to them - mainly picture books left over from my preschool days - with these terms; it was the easiest way to hold their attention.
After lunch, Mom and I taught the third and fourth standards until the end of the day at 3:30. I've realized that to fill the time, I have to allow them to teach me. They performed for me various songs and games in Kannada, expecting me to do the same for them. I attempted to teach them "I've Just Seen a Face" by the Beatles, which was fun if nothing else.
Tomorrow will be more of the same. I'll devote the rest of the evening to tutoring, eating, and playing with the girls before hopefully crashing early (time is very relative here, and I'm still acclimating to the ten-and-a-half hour leap ahead).
Hopefully, I'll have pictures up soon, but considering the connection here, I might have to wait until I can get wireless on my laptop in Delhi next Thursday.
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