A Brick in the Wall

There were two big events in our school world last week. The first being the high school's annual retreat for faculty and students called Minicourse. For this, small groups of students and their teacher chaperones spread out over central and northern India for a wilderness adventure, cultural exchange, and/or to delve into a community service project. Since Jonah and I both work at the high school, we alternate years of traveling and staying back so that one of us is around to manage the homefront.

Jonah spent his Minicourse week in far western Rajasthan, near the desert town of Barmer, where he lead a trip that focused on service and environmental issues.

Back in Delhi, my group worked with children attending a slum area school run by HOPE Foundation. This is the view from the roof of the Tigri School:

Although it seems impossible to make a difference in such a short amount of time, I'm certain that everyone involved in our Minicourse gained something from the time spent together. Part of the days out at Tigri was spent visiting the homes of a few students. Through the crowded, dusty streets with open sewers, my sporty, fashionable, multi-lingual, globally mobile students held hands with their Tigri buddies. The foul smell throughout the neighborhood was overwhelming at times.

In Sohel's house, eight of us huddled into the windowless room that was home to eight people. Sohel's father and an elder brother were barely awake, exhausted and filthy from their overnight work as welders. We sat in silence, waiting for Sohel to return from the shop down the street where he ran to buy a Coke for all of us to share. It was uncomfortable, but the good kind of discomfort that allows time to absorb a particular place and then multiply this home times a million - or more realistically, several hundred million.

Meanwhile, back at AES, final preparations were underway for the 60th Anniversary Gala which took place Saturday night. The grand event began with a ceremonial ribbon cutting for a new Commemorative Garden and the unveiling of its wall for which members of the school community donated funds for a personalized brick.

We did not attend the Gala but since it took place on the field outside the boys' bedroom window, we heard all the music and enjoyed watching the scene on the dance floor from a distance.

And this contrast illustrates a big challenge of living here: to observe and to process what we see and experience out and about in Delhi - or anywhere in India for that matter - with the riches we have at our fingertips within our community. Outside the campus gates, we feel small, insignificant, and completely overwhelmed by the massive number of people in this city and the proportion of them managing to survive each day despite extremely poor living conditions and the very slim chance that their circumstances will ever improve. Yet we move through this country with our western faces and the privileges they imply. We did not move here to change India, but it sure has had an impact on us. In our apartment, we remind ourselves to appreciate things like hot water in the bathtub - even just the bathtub itself, feeling safe, a seemingly endless supply of safe drinking water running from the tap, privacy, green space, access to a first rate education, knowing that someone (and probably lots of people) would offer to help us if we ever needed a thing.

There are no answers, just a heightened awareness of how luck got us here and a reminder to stay balanced as we continue to make the most of this opportunity.