Bodhgaya

Yesterday while I was surfing YouTube for chickens dancing to techno it occurred to me that maybe I could make better use of my time. The kids are in school now and I'm lucky enough to have a reliable nanny to help with their care so it could be time to get back to work. Specifically teaching. Something I may or may not be paid for. But no one pays me to laugh at digital chickens anyway.

My teaching so far has all been voluntary. Government teachers in this country are only one step up from voluntary anyway so that's no big deal. I started out teaching at a small school in Nepal which was great - until the royal family was massacred and things became, well, unstable. I then moved to Bihar, which is pretty much unstable all the time, so no nasty surprises there.

People in Bombay don't believe me when I say I loved Bihar. Or at least my little patch of it. I lived and taught in the town of Bodhgaya. There is a tree in Bodhgaya, or at least the descendant of a tree, under which the Buddha is said to have gained enlightenment. As a result it is a bit of a hub for Buddhist pilgrims from all over the world, during the cooler months anyway. During the summer it was mostly just another small rural town, with an unusually high number of monks.

The school I taught at in Bodhgaya was run by a Tibetan Buddhist foundation. I'm a bit hazy on my Tibetan Buddhism - too many deities and ceremonies for my feeble brain to remember - but essentially it encourages the virtue of compassion, in this case expressed by building a free school for underprivileged children. The school was run by an Australian headmistress and employed Indian teachers on their staff. Occasionally they also took volunteers, like me, mostly to teach English.

How to describe my students? Most of them lived in impoverished households where alcoholism, abuse and neglect were common. By fifth standard at least three of my girl students were already married. The stories I heard about their lives and things which had happened to them haunt me to this day. And yet, for all that, they were such a joy to be around. They came to school smiling and greeted their teachers cheerful enthusiasm. It was infectious, and addictive. I came to love teaching in Bodhgaya.

Of course there were many challenges working within the children's environment. It couldn't be assumed that even things like basic nutrition were being provided in our pupils' homes. This especially affected the girls, as poor families often diverted most of their meagre resources towards their sons, leaving their female children with only the scraps. Girl students who did poorly at school were commonly malnourished. To combat this the school provided two meals a day to all students, and this made an enormous change to the kids performance. It's funny what we take for granted.

I don't know how much we improved the children's prospects. At the end of the day, most of the boys will no doubt end up eking out a living as vegetable sellers or rickshaw drivers like their fathers - if they were lucky enough to have stable employment. Girls would end up married with children at a young age. Cultural and religious pressures had far more influence than we ever would. But it's a start, and hopefully things will change for the better as each generation is better and better educated. I'm one of those people who thinks education really is the only way to change the world. And at least for their schooling years the kids had a safe place, where they could play and learn and maybe expand their horizons a little.

Whatever the impact on the children of our school, teaching there made a huge impact on me. I will never forget the optimism and hunger to learn of my students, or the kindness and humour of my fellow teachers, who put up with my strange foreign ways. Or the day we put on a concert attended by Richard Gere, where I made a complete fool of myself singing (oh god!) 'It's a Small World.' Hm. Now. Where did I save that dancing chicken?