Three Years Later...

Well it has been a long time since I began writing this blog. At that time, Kunwar and I had not even been married a year. So much has happened since then. I have so much to say, so many stories to tell. I want, need to write a book. Suffice to say I aim to tell my story here on this blog with the intent of eventually publishing the stories in a book one day. So I would appreciate feed back and comments from everyone who reads this. Since that last post Kunwar and I opened a school for the children in our area, and so my PhD was put on hold so we could focus on this project. I will speak of this more in the blogs to come because it has been quite a journey to say the least. Our reasons for opening a school were based on the low quality of education we saw in our area. For many years Kunwar had focused his efforts on bringing education to our area. He was solely responsible for bringing the government school to Sainji in the early 1980s. But that was a time when teachers would live in the village and were able to provide consistent education. After a few years however, things changed and teachers won the right not to have to live in the villages. As our area is in the hills teacher absenteeism became the norm. Teachers only had to pay bribes to officials who could not be bothered to even visit the area to check on teacher's attendance. Resources never reached the village schools, and the quality of education quickly dissipated. So Kunwar invited a group of missionaries to open a school in the village. At least the teachers were living in the village and providing daily education, but again their funds were limited and the teachers who were hired were poorly educated themselves. In India a passing grade is thirty three percent. This is the strategy of the government to counter the high drop out rate experienced throughout India. In order to pass into the eleventh standard children must write a board exam. In our village some children had to write the exam three and four times just to pass. One evening children were coming to our home to ask Kunwar to check their test results via the internet. I watched as they scanned the lists for their name and was surprised when they broke out into smiles having marks of thirty five percent. "Why?" I asked. "Thirty five percent is a terrible grade." "But it means they passed," Kunwar explained. I shook my head. I had set up a small library in our home and was encouraging the children to read. I had offered volumes of Harry Potter to children in ninth and tenth grade thinking they would really enjoy the books, but with each child they would return the book to me the next day, saying it was too difficult for them to read, and would end up settling for a book intended for a second or third grade level of reading. That night after the students had left with their results Kunwar and I talked and that is when we decided to open an English Medium School. We sent word out that we were considering this project and wanted to find out if there would be any families interested in sending their children to our school. The response was immediate. Families of eight children said they wanted to enroll their children and when the local missionary school got word of this they immediately expelled those children from their school. We had to open our school the very next week. Having no time to prepare we began teaching in a room in our house. Two weeks later we had secured an empty hospital building and began our classes. Our niece, Neelum was my only teacher at the time. Together we worked as best we could. Kunwar taught too, but while he has many wonderful attributes, teaching is not one of them. I still smile when I recall the time I checked in on his kindergarten class and saw him holding a long wire (trying to hook up a new light for the classroom, while four year old Mukhul stood at the blackboard, pointer in hand, directing the rest of the kindergartens in reciting the alphabet. After three months we were asked to leave the medical building and had to find another location. We resorted to our cow shed, a few meters down the road. I cried when I saw it the first time. The cows were still inside. But the fathers of the children came and they worked night and day transforming an ugly stone building into a beautiful little school. Our rooms were lovely, all different colours and we painstakingly painted sums and words, and rhymes all over the walls, benches, and tables. The children were so happy with their new school, and took such pride in keeping it nice. Everyone would help to keep it clean, even the littlest ones would pick up brooms to sweep the classrooms and pick up garbage. Soon after we hired another teacher and the number of students began to increase. By our first summer there were twenty one students, classes kindergarten to class 3. By the following year we had eighty students, and before the year was finished we had 125 little GEMS enrolled. It was time to move to a new location, and in April of 2012 we shifted to our present location where on the first day of opening we expanded to 230 children, offering classes from Lower Kindergarten to class 7. We now employ eleven teachers, three teaching assistants, two bus drivers, one cook, three guards and one caretaker. There was so much that happened in this time, and I want to tell the stories so I will relay them over time, one by one. This is only the beginning of a very long tale. For more information about our school you can visit our website at www.gems-school.org.
www.gems-school.org