A CHOICE I MADE

coming into the Peace Corps or at least the way it was for me it was really sort of a plunge you just didn't know what you were getting himself into I can't exactly remember why I came in I used to have a pat answer but I forgot it I don't know I have been more or less trying to settle down but then still having a certain amount of restlessness and I had this idea that there there there is something something that I could do it was the possibility of doing something that was really your own if I didn't do it now it would be a question of just keep on saying if I have your eye in which is no way to really go through your life we have taken me it's about 24-hour trip I gets across and I think any of us slept very much and we got to Bombay for the monsoon the hottest stickiest heaviest air I've ever felt and I couldn't help thinking my gosh is this what its gonna be like really as an American love well even does average means you're very fortunate you're just born lucky actually the education you have you're expected to get you know it's not something you even got to struggle for really and there was a chance to make some practical use of what I'd sort of lucked into all my I remember when we first heard about Finley and training a piece to our rep told us that this was a dying town and he was sending two volunteers here to put life in a dying time at a very interesting history is the big seaport for a while until another town about 25 miles down the coast took over it's the big Seaport all of the trade is gone elsewhere school was built about 1929 and it's probably one of the biggest building one of the biggest rebuilding some time good morning gentlemen what do you have first period English scooped it out so that I could be a good going early to fly good morning there's normally a Honda super Alex come that's why they avoid authorities the teachers room is an amazing place to win every morning and breathe it as usual in about four languages Telugu Hindi and English yeah most of them have expected us to be visiting education experts you spent quite some time convincing them that you're a recent college graduate who wanted to see the world and put into action some of the ideas that he had had for quite some time and you are not a visiting education expert whatsoever or for that matter a visiting expert on anything I remember my first three weeks here Sam and I used to come back together and we were almost ecstatic about all this is a great opportunity a great opportunity look at the things we can do and the letdown is not immediate it is not all at once but it is a gradual slow day-by-day realization that in order to get anything done at all you are going to have to bow down to the system slightly to play within it I thought my my first class before the headmaster NEPA students and couldn't understand me at all and about half the teachers in the school who thought that I was a expert on education it was the first classroom I'd ever stood up and taught first class I've ever taught I've never had any practice teaching really no education in the theory no nothing and I thought I started teaching and really it sounds worse than it was because I mean I was there and I had something I wanted to say and you know I kind of taught it you know it slowly dawns on you that that's not teaching maybe maybe you can like trip like that if you teach me you just got to assume that you're dealing like people who you've got to make learn you take a kid who can't even seem to grasp the conception of what volume is something like that okay who can just never get it straight that if you multiply a length times the length times a length you get something a space the volume all you have to do is go out to one of the villages and just see the whole atmosphere on it it's just so so utterly foreign to the the kind of little obscurities you're trying to teach them in science it's a wonder that they you know they can even be forced to sit in the class t-midi lucky warning your mighty Saturn holy [ __ ] Yamina see a bee on me no see Saturn I'm in love oh boy you're not Oh Barney jothee Colonel you jappy but I gotta be rpm Susan loss left around the hospital and then they met with the matron and she asked them what do you want to do so they asked the matron well what did you want us to do and she didn't know and they did a little bit of teaching and they found out that the teaching didn't work out because the head tutor for some reason didn't really want them you know I think possibly it could be from the fact that he thought they might lift threat to his job so they had many meetings not only with the matron of the hospital but also the superintendent and then they decided that maybe it would be best to ask for transfer maybe she'll be the strength that you project them spotted yourself could you go over there sometimes and you so irritated just for the pure of fact that you were winking it you're up and it's 8 o'clock in the morning and the same people are coming in they came in 12 days ago and they got the same things wrong with him and they just the same and you give them the net and you the next two weeks I don't know every day but you just can't be angry with them just personally you're angry at the total picture that just can happen and this continues to happen every day you know when your baby's starving and you know it and there's nothing you can do about it absolutely nothing you don't think of you don't think about the political arguments and not really being able to to feel the same way that people who feel who are suffering but it's so difficult for those people I mean you're you know you're a Peace Corps volunteer in India but you've got something to eat you know you aren't starving a good nurse in the United States is not necessarily a good nursing name because to be good anyplace also depends on the conditions now the nurses have difficulty with the conditions in India you have the problem of Sanitation you have the problem of clothes and boy it's here and they just can't expect that overnight whatever it's supposed to be is going to come to me and they also can't just take off and say it's stupidity it keeps your conditions away they are people are important but you have to make the conditions where there has been impact and nursing there's of course India really needs him but they need to kind of a person who can accept in the beginning what is there and then work with what's there there were about 300 birds here and the fellow was struggling to produce enough eggs to for the consumers there were a few obvious flaws and we can show him how to improve which he which he eventually did he had reservations about these newcomers that came in and thought they could tell everybody about everything about poultry and after we got him straightened around nobody else really seemed very interested we just just got into the country and we expected things to happen when we wanted them to and as was pointed out to us later by one of our supervisors he said in America when you turn a switch the light comes on but in India when you turn the switch it doesn't always come on right away but it takes some time for a person to get unto the locality the the modes of the people the just how the community operates how the people are convinced about things we've started this on a commercial basis producing at a high scale getting a good price for the distributing and selling the hens when you're finished actual results of what has been done it seems rather gratifying at times to see the amount of poultry that has been started when we got here there were perhaps 300 chickens as of today there are around 7,000 no I really realized the danger that we might be walking into that it's it's hard it's hard to imagine it in a country four hundred and sixty million people you can have too many eggs especially being Americans where eggs are used for breakfast and bread and cakes and it won't happen but here that's another thing that there's very very little sweets or pastries or anything made from eggs so one of the problems I think will be maybe to start a whole new concept in in the use of eggs other than riders ground what game Adriatic probably social games are not measurable but certainly we've shown people that a new idea can work if one puts enough effort into enough creativity in our example poultry we found it not very difficult to get courtly started no with that is invades then we can expand our operations into of Social Work and maybe bring some of these people in that have become our friends or you kind of committed to the Peace Corps in one way or another and inside you so we now hope to use some of these people and out of Social Work very gentle now we're using some boys from a very good private school here in Jaipur to work with us we have about thirteen or fourteen boys now for all come from very good families so right now there will be the leaders we can't buy footballers we're trying to get one though why don't you buy them not American South pretty soon we gotta start doing more activities but these kids know they're gonna get fired and it's one thing I don't want it to do is cheat generated and they're just kind of a sports club you got to get started we got to get some money agility so we can get started more immunities with the kids put a sense of urgency this is probably the hardest thing for us to do is to put urgency we want them to say I don't want to live in a busty area longer and I want to do things to get out I wanted with a school I want to learn I think we can mix with some percent each other well I saw some of the things that I thought were necessary like better sanitation so we I went to the people I showed them the plans for sanitary type of a dream and I started to build it and later on I went to the Rotary Club I gave them a thought I'm sanitation well one minute time and all these people said you know that's a very good idea something like six months ago nothing but I also was trying to set up a program in physical education there these students do only have any any actual class type you know physical education they're just you know let loose you know okay play go play so I got the permission of the superintendent of the elementary schools and for one month straight I chose them all these exercises and they taught the teachers how to do it you could do it yourself no ICC please try and do it you know I think these children like it why don't you you know they all said oh yes yes next day stuff never nothing I will go yesterday these are the remainder of people who are coming constantly since one years one day on is when Manas amar is a radio mechanic southern man is a rickshaw driver and be some of these other boys there's a few boys that are coming these boy there are some students in the school they're actually going to school I'd like to help you understand you know some of their difficulties and I still know that a lot of them are scoundrels maybe some of them they'll they'll just realize that you know when they go there's some of these peas and some of these young boys just a life that their parents have doesn't do it for kind of life maybe maybe that's a little give me a pen or pencil magani pencil Ghani I love my mother not a layman ternoon she gives me I mean I love my mother who gives who gives me food there's no place to go for us we're not part of the culture that's our strength so we have places to go stories on that drink of the party robbery and welcome right behind the speeding there is one of these small narrow gauge railroads it looks like something that should be an amusement park it's kind of a a connection between the the main line of the railroad between Madras and got better top speed is about five miles an hour there's one train that it's the school about 8:30 or 9:00 o'clock and so we're a good percentage of the boys who live in the villages along those four miles use this as their transportation to school naturally without tickets but they the train is going so slowly anyway they as it comes passing they'll jump on and when it comes to the school they jump off and it's a big joke to them living here at the school itself of course we are here the whole time the students know you're here we are accessible as we can be if we were any more accessible I don't know what we would do our place is kind of a semi-official local boys club you may say every evening every morning the noon time the holidays I mean we're the boys know we're here and if we're here then they feel they can come also right now we're having a big craze on monopoly the old the old game my sister sent me a set of this thing and I finally brought it out one day and it was amazing how quick these kids bought okay and just I just began some point would come the cut or scratch or something for the little teacher it's nothing on it if nothing else I can put a band-aid I've run through several hundred band-aids as a matter of fact there's nothing at me of course I don't begin to fool around they start timeing they're having heart pains and all this kind of thing I mean have a marvelous specialize an external medicine he and the ropes he is fighting trying to pull them loose okay finally I had the fortune to break the strings and wrench off the pit pull this one now this branch is too full so now his left arm is free he can move this hand all around the rest of his body also his hair is still tied down on the ground yeah he says by lifting it up to my face this arm when he raised his arm up to his face just I discovered the methods they had taken to find so he could see he could see what they did you to tidy the kinds of rules and the pegs and all of these things if you can see them at the same time with a violin this which gave me excessive pain excessive pain very much very much pain this is I who loosened the strings that tied down my hair on the left side okay here's what he's talking about remember he has this hair just in small pieces we're tied to the ground and now pull violin all right I just think you know I dunno if someone is holding some here excessive things very much but anyway he loosen these ropes yeah loosen he did not pull them out they became loose so he could move his head now about two inches only that much too interesting he now just yet it's alright by the system these little people they ran out run away before he could seize them cease okay let's see these little people hey he has this one hand now now he wants to grab it but they're in our way but change depending on his own fate webchange can be finding his own face what do you think you girl that my voice don't go suppose you were in that you slept for 24 years how much water displaced by this okay each one I have another question we often wonder how much the lives of our students will be affected by the fact we've been here for two years I think you're finding out more and more as we go along but the whole thing is down on an individual personal level we've all felt and I'm sure we've all felt an impact on our individual students this is why it has been a rewarding experience almost every week you have a different kind of basis there is a section in almost every class it varies anywhere from five to twenty to fifty percent of a class that you somehow have a feeling that they may not have understood a damn thing you've said since you've been here and it sounds terrible you would think when an examination requires 35% to pass you ought to your kick yourself clear the Calcutta if you can't make more pass it just isn't that way you've got some kids who you can help you've got some kids who are really hopeless the most benefit is to a fairly small percentage of kids who you have made realize that what they had in their books what they have in their syllabus it's just kind of kind of a bare-bones sort of thing they're just sort of have the you might say the lexicon of science thrown at them without any of the other spirit of it and the few who have maybe gotten a glimpse of things like this well maybe they're a whole new world sort of sort of open if you think of yourself just as a teacher yeah it's really easy to get frustrated as I suppose it is teaching anywhere I mean I think if you're on even if you're a good teacher it's not really too positive an influence if you just sort of sort of live to yourself well technically it's not a large town it's just little more than a village there's one main road where about 90% of the shops and the stores all of these things are located on this one road in the evening time from about 4:30 until 9:00 the road is just full of people this is my time for going into the bazaar after school of course but going into the tailor shop or to buy cigarettes to buy food things like this even going to the barber this is my time to go and with all of these people there I not only do I run into so many students going place to place but the father's the different merchants that I know know it's more or less just a friendly like like a walk at home would be walking through a small town you greet your friends you stop to talk to them you do your business of course now by this time the people they know me they know my name they know what I'm doing why I'm there I'm sure your home is perhaps just an experience with some body units of different ideas different methods and different goals just we need to make them more discontent with the way things have any way things will be this idea of being accessible and mixing with the people not just sitting in my house waiting for people to come the idea is that we can be more or less exchanging instead of everything coming towards me you can't think of yourself as doing something productive if you just kind of think of your total effect on things your total influence this Peace Corps is providing people who for whatever reasons come over and not sacrifice that's the wrong word but at least are here and will live under poor conditions there is impact because they are there they get to know India differently and of course you're doing a job for the country itself or helping it to become a country it has tremendous problems problems that very possibly want to be overcome in a long time something probably never will be but for a volunteer it's it's almost like being to use President President Kennedy's words a new frontier because here we can we can actually create something in society it may be just sort of a blind sort of optimism but I prefer blind optimism define pessimism actually so it really is just kind of a choice I make cuz I know I know there are good people here I mean they're good solid people who can take a problem work on it and solve it and that's what progress is gonna based on they have the saying that every bit of work that you do is for progress every bit of work that you do will have a multiple effect every bit of work that you do is doing so much good so that's why I say it's great by being an American and having different experiences and thinking differently you begin to give a quality to the activity that's going on this is what it's all about to me yeah this is the volunteers job and direction he takes to do it is dependent on his own personality their status there they don't fighter they can wear a tie for the minister and their shorts for the villager and then they use what they've got and everything becomes strengthened their skill is their attitude let's let don't be a few seconds beat me I told you I see