Of Country and culture

My side job (pro bono) as the village doctor saheb is in full swing as well. This place is a dermatologist's wet dream and a nightmare for me. Lack of proper toilet, proper bathing and just simple poor hygiene is the main cause of all the problems. Head lice is a common thing and each afternoon children and adult women folk alike line up the yards and side of the roads and get busy with picking up juicy blood suckers. Thank god I decided to keep my head shaved.

Malnutrition and worms are two main issues for the poor health of the children. Even though there programs available for the villagers to go and get treated and get medication for deworming and iron tablets it is not a priority for the parents. Once again government failed to educate the people and thus ripping the benefits of their own programs. Only thing seems to work properly is the polio vaccination program where semi-trained, overworked and poorly paid workers go door to door and feed polio vaccination to the kids who need it. I guess Indian government is trying their best two have a nation without polio by the end of the 21st century.

After repeated threats and some carrot and stick approach I persuaded most of the kids and some parents not to jump in the filthy village pond for the afternoon dip. And it seemed to be working. Lack of proper medical help is so rampant that sometime I feel helpless. Within last two months I have witnessed two deaths of two young women, one was a mother of five young children and other was a young girl in her early 20's who was married recently. In the first case the young mother had pneumonia and which went undetected for several months, then when malnutrition, over work along with pneumonia took hold of her ravaged body her heart couldn't take the pressure and she suffered a heart attack. In case of the young girl, she was suffering from anemia and once again misdiagnose and lack of proper diet made it impossible for her to go on. On 15th of August she just laid down and when they took her to the nearest big hospital and tried giving her blood her body was beyond responding and she died next afternoon. These are the only deaths I am mentioning because I knew them personally, I was the photographer for the wedding of that young women and the first woman's kids are my students.

I like to keep a professional distance between the villagers and myself but when I am living among them and constantly being part of their lives it is a futile effort to be distant or to be careless about their plight. After all I am not a misanthrope. I have mentioned before about the countless mostly illegal pharmacies in the village and almost uneducated pharmacists who learn their trade from their fathers or by the method of trial and error. They do brisk business. For almost any ailment they prescribe at least one injection and two other medication. Like the education system treatment of the general population is also symptomatic. If one goes to the pharmacy with fever, headache, upset stomach and cough they'll get four different medications and possibly one injection. After all my research I have found only one real doctor in the village who is also a retired government doctor who also does everything from treating minor ailments to dentistry or sometime somewhat bigger surgeries. I just wish that nothing serious happens to me while I am here.

Since I posted my last blog so many things have happened in this little village. I really can't figure out where to start. Slowly it became my home, people in the village became my family. And as with any family and any home one starts to hate and love it at the same time. I am not an exception either.

We opened the door to our learning center in earnest and with a lot of hoopla and soon my toughest problem was not teaching the students but teaching my volunteers so that they can turn around and teach the children properly. Here in the village kids were never asked about their dreams, their aspirations and it seemed an abstract idea to them. And the volunteers were no exception either. Without going into details let's just say that now I know what kind of education is going on in the government school. They were amazed at the photos I showed them which I downloaded from NASA website. Pictures of The Moon,Earth, The Sun, Moon landing, space shuttle, the astronauts all are from a different world from them. They didn't know that we have landed on the moon or there are space shuttles which take people to the space and they do spacewalks. What is more amazing to them is that there are women astronauts. Very recently one of our seventh grade students brought in his school work to show me and he was really proud of his accomplishment where he got 100% score. When I looked at his work it was my turn to be amazed at the correction by the teacher. She marked few things right where they were no where close to right. Few examples : She marked it right when the student wrote that India's first President was Dr. Jawaharlal Nehru (He was the Prime Minister and first President was Dr. Rajendra Prasad). Next she marked it right when the student wrote that India's first Prime Minister was Dr. Manmohan Singh (He is the current Prime Minister). I can go on giving examples after examples but you get the picture.

From and outsider's point of view it may seem like corruption is the main cause of this mass failure in education system but if one looks closely it is clear as a sunny day that it is the government implemented system which is responsible for this failure. One of the Headmaster's of the local middle school puts it very plainly, “nobody cares if the kids are getting education or not and people in the upper echelon create projects or programs in a whim. If anyone things about a problem in the system they only come up with symptomatic remedy. You can only stop the bleeding with a band-aid only for so long.” I volunteer my time at this middle school twice a week teaching English to 7th and 8th graders. This school is one of the biggest in the area with student population of almost 900 with only 11 teachers (they don't have specialized teachers) and 8 rooms (one of the rooms is the teacher's room cum office). Forget about the student to teacher ratio. Most of the time on an average one teacher is out with some excuse, Headmaster is most of the time busy with doing clerical duties, two of the teachers are constantly forced to do government work and thus unable to attend to their main duty which is teaching the children. In India government school teacher are recruited to do census work, election work where these jobs can be easily be given to millions of educated young Indians who are unemployed. I went to teach yesterday and the 7th grade class was at full capacity with 212 students inside of a 20'/20' room. So in that class teacher student ratio was 1-212. After lunch the Headmaster said, “I thank God that everyday only 65% - 70% students show up.”

Only very recently Bihar came under the scrutiny of the entire world due to the death of about 26 students who ate poisoned mid day meal at a school in Bihar. It took the death of so many innocent lives (the cooks daughter was among the dead) for this farce known as mid day meal and the corruption and another impotent government run program to get some attention. This mid day meal fiasco is nothing new and all over India almost everyday some news crops up regarding bad food, corruption by the people involved in it. After the death of the children nothing has changed. Yesterday at the school I had my lunch with the students and it was delicious (it may not be the case in every school). No, the cooks were not aware of the fact that I'll be teaching or in a whim would have my lunch there and thus there was no special preparation.

Government of India has a standard minimum wage of Rupees 144 for 8 hours of labor. The cooks mostly women of poor families took on the job of cooking. Their work starts 9 in the morning. Sometime they have to gather firewood for the cooking and they prepare food without a proper kitchen. They work for about 5 hours a day and earn 1000 Rupees (currently $ exchange rate is $1-Rs.65 so you do the math). So Indian government is paying people who are responsible for cooking meals for the children about Rs.6 an hour. I think it is worse than slave labor. Now I wonder how the corruption happens! When you have people in air conditioned rooms in New Delhi making all the plans without ever setting foot in one of these rural schools you are bound to have corruption and low quality in service.

Today I'll be writing about education. Education in the state of Bihar,especially where I am running the learning center named S.E.E.K,H.O. The name of the village is Bishanpur in Kishanganj district. When we decided to open the center few months back we were skeptical about the response. But slowly we realized the sad state of education system here. Let me put it bluntly, education is not the priority for the politicians,educators and certainly not for the poor parents who would rather see their kids work on the field or tend to the livestock. It is well known that there is no actual teaching going on in the schools and even the private tutoring centers are just run off the mill quality where most teachers really don't care what the kids learning and most of the teacher's qualifications are questionable as well. I am not just saying this, I have witnessed these facts by going to the schools and also visiting some private schools and tutoring centers in this area. Corporal punishment is one of the ways the teachers deal with kids here and thus the fear of school or making mistake is like an epidemic among the young kids.

At the beginning I was concerned about how to teach these kids English and as soon as we have opened the center at the beginning of this month I realized my main concern should be teaching these kids their native language first not English. I knew how to speak fluent Hindi and started reading the print version when I got here and I am a novice at writing. But now I need to learn faster because of these kids. Thank god I have four volunteers who are locals and dedicated. I am amazed to see a third grade student doesn't know how to write Hindi alphabets or numbers and this trend is all across the board.

Since we started the center there are lot of rumors and funny yet touching events happened.

We heard and confirmed a rumor around the village that we have opened the center so we can still children and smuggle them out of this village. I really didn't have any energy to deal with this sort of things so some of the villagers with brain and our volunteers took care of the situation.

When we opened the center, we also built toilets for the children but the very first day I realized most of them are not using them. I was baffled and soon realized that most of the kids never seen inside of a bathroom and don't know how to use it. So here began my effort to train these kids to use the bathroom at the center. I have to hand it to the volunteers because they took great pain in explaining how to use the toilet to these kids. After few days I asked few kids why they didn't like to use the bathroom, the answers were in a sense just a reality of their lives. They said they were afraid of the hole in the toilet, closing bathroom doors scared them and lastly it was easier to use the field as they are used to it.

Today after the classes were done and the volunteers gone , I was sitting on the steps of the center and drinking my coffee when some of the kids showed and started asking me question about the far away land where I come from and soon we were learning "Twinkle twinkle little star". One of the kids asked if I'd teach them and I told them that I am already doing that at the center. She clarified her question, she wanted to know if I'd teach them again then and there on the Veranda of the center, after a moment of pause I said yes and in few minutes I had 13 students learning math and English on my doorstep.

As I write this blog on my laptop, which thankfully is still holding charge. The power is out again as it's been on most evenings. A single candle and the light from the laptop's monitor illuminates my surrounding. Just to do my part and partly to do my part in an effort to save some electricity I got used to using candle when I don't need light. I want to write about so many things I see around me. I am sorry if it sounds more like complaining but it is not my intention. There are so many things wrong here but at the same time I have met some wonderful people. One of them I should mention is Budhiram. He is a day labor who works at the work site where our learning center is being built. He's been with us since the day one and I have become very fond of him. Over last few months he has become very protective of me and the learning center's property. He earns Rupees 200 (little less than $4) a day and lives with his wife and countless kids in a slum near the village bazaar. He is appreciative of the fact that I treat him as equal and often share a bottle of whiskey with him on very cold days. He arranges for me to have lunch sometime at the work site. He knows that I prefer chapati (hand made flat bread) and egg so he arranges for one of his daughters to bring fresh chapati and omelet to the work site during lunch. Just by watching me he knows when I am in bad mood or hungry and always takes steps so that I am not bothered by anyone. When someone is trying to swindle me or sweet talk me into doing something stupid he'll pounce on me on the first chance he gets and makes sure I don't fall for something stupid. You'd love Budhiram too if you ever get to meet him.

My next point in this blog is environment and this time it is the use of plastic and paper. First plastic, plastic is everywhere you look around here including of course the garbage. There are shops here in the market where they sell nothing but biscuits and candies wrapped in colored plastic which gets thrown on the street after people are done with them. vegetable sellers, grocers,cloth merchants, sweet shops they all have one thing in common which is massive use of plastic bags. Very few people take their own bags to the market to do their shopping. Tea shops use tiny plastic cups which is for one time use only and these cups are the size of small paper cups you use at a water cooler in the dentist's office. By now all the tea shops I go to know that I dislike plastic cups and they serve me tea in a glass.

Another product is paper, here I am talking about newspaper. I doubt how many people seriously read the daily newspaper circulated around here because at the sweet shops I see fresh newspapers are cut into small 6"/6" pieces everyday. These papers they use to serve all sorts of snacks and also to wipe their hands. After the use these pieces of newspapers land on the shop's floors and then swept on to the street next to the shops and adds to the already garbage filled streets of this village. I also wonder what kind of poisons one intakes from the ink and god knows what other germs there are on these pieces of newspapers. Since I have been here I have treated more people for their stomach problems than any other ailments. I am not a trained physician but most times some of the poor people have no other choice but me. After I treated one old lady for her upset stomach, which she's been suffering for one week before she talked to me and I treated her with one dose of American medicine. She was cured in one day and the word quickly spread through the community around the learning center. Now I am running low on my stash.

Most people here know of me as the bald American (because of my shaved head) even though I am Indian looking enough, my posture and my backpack sets me apart. I speak fluent Hindi and read Hindi in print. Here the people speak a dialect known as Surjapuri (mix of Bengali,Hindi and Oria) and after being here for 3 months I have picked up the language enough to understand a conversation. Most people think I don't understand the dialect and that just suits me fine because I pick up the local gossip and even their conversation about me. It is also a great way to know which person to avoid and who can be a good friend.

Longer I stay in this village and learn about the way of life here I am amazed at the corruption and attitude of people toward it. Let me start with Chemist shops, in this village of about 3000 people there are more than 13 chemist shops (I have stopped counting after the 13th). Most of these chemist shop owners also have other jobs, few of them also claim to be doctors. One doctor/chemist has VDS written after his name and I am yet to find out what that VDS stands for. He happens to be a good acquaintance of mine and I have seen his palatial house in the next village. I know of two other chemists who are school teachers and I have never seen them go to school. Another one is suppose to be a professor at a local college and this one too always at his shop.

I have heard of the fact that local Mukhia (elected head of the village) appointed several teachers by taking bribes and I took these tales with a grain of salt. Today I went on a surprise visit to alocal school where our volunteers are teaching for the time being until our center opens in few weeks. I saw a lady who didn't look like a teacher sitting on a chair outside enjoying nice warm sun in this winter afternoon. When I asked one of the volunteers about her it all came out pouring and I had to calm the volunteer to speak in a quieter voice. This lady I saw is not a teacher but she was substituting for a person who was hired by the Mukhia as a school teacher. The person who was hired has a business so it is inconvenient for him to show up at the school to teach so he hired the lady to substitute for him. In this system everyone was happy, the Mukhia got money upfront for appointing the teacher, the Headmaster gets a cut to look the other way, the lady gets paid something to show up as a substitute (no teaching required) and the teacher gets some money from the government just for being a teacher on the paper. No wonder Bihar is one of the most corrupt, un-educated state in India. Local schools have hardly any students when the enrollment figure is almost 99%. Teachers hardly show up, even when they do they do nothing but sit and drink their tea and gossip. Education is a joke in this state.

I know of the Second officer of a nearby police station who sells alcohol in his spare time and at one point was challenged by a courageous local youth for selling alcohol to a minor. This young man wasn't afraid to slap this police officer around for this offending behavior. The officer couldn't do anything about it because he was on the wrong, so he waited for the right moment to take his revenge. That moment came few weeks back when this young man came out of a local motorcycle dealership with a brand new motorcycle. He had all the proper paper works with him but the licence plate. The Second officer saw his new motorcycle without the licence plate and hauled his new toy to the police station. The next morning it took the young man some legwork to get to the right people who can make some phone calls to get the motorcycle released from the police custody. Even then it cost him 500 rupees (about $9) for cost of tea and snacks for the duty officer at the police station.

As I sit down at the restaurant (if you can call it so. In any western countries one can not even think of such a place where one can eat) I take in my surroundings. There is the family hen moving in and out and picking off the scrapes from the floor, thus keeping the floor clean. Then there is the wandering goat, which I saw take shelter inside the restaurant couple days back when the temperature almost went below 0 degree Celsius. I look across the street which is only few feet wide leading toward the local bazaar  there is the bazaar dump. Goats, dogs, pigs, kids roaming around and in and out of it in search of food or plastic or scrap metal. And there are the occasional males who don't hesitate to whip out their manhood and relieve themselves in the full view of the animals and humans alike. I still sit there and drink my overly sweet chai which has hint of tea and freshly crushed ginger, in a rather large glass. I refuse to drink my chai in a flimsy plastic cup which gets thrown on the garbage after a single use and contribute to the pollution. I know it is pathetic but I am doing my part.

I sometime wonder what I am doing here !? I am suppose to work on bringing a sense of order in this place where everything seems to be thrown into the pit of chaos. No proper road, sewer system, running water, convenience of regular electricity, health care, education system is the norm here. Everyone blames the government and corrupt officials and washes their hands off and try to pass the buck to the next person in line. Here an average 8th grader can not read texts in English from fourth grade.

Here handful of Hindu business people have most of the wealth and land and live in somewhat comfort with generator, personal running water system. In some cases (couple of homes I have visited) they live in mansions and servants waiting to serve your every need. Most of the population of Muslims, some Dalits and handful of prostitutes live away from the bazaar where there are no street lights or creature comforts visible. One can see few two story concrete building among the thatched houses belonging to the Rich Hindu or Muslim fellows of the village. Despite this uneven distribution of wealth the poor seem to be most content as if they have lost the will to fight and go on. A rich businessman's son was showing off his new toy to me, which was a new iPhone he has purchased for $800. I was shocked to think that fraction of that money could have bought supplies for the learning center we are about to open.

I left behind an India which was just waking to the taste of somewhat free economy,cable channels,cell phone,MTV were unheard of. But as I Kept returning almost every other year, I was stunned with the fast technological progress this country was making. I remember when I visited India in 2004 friends and people in general would ask me for my cell # in USA and my reply was, "why do I need a cell? I am at work or home, if someone needs to get a hold of me they have the numbers and they can call." It was like a badge of honor to me not having a cell. But I too was hooked by 2005.

Before I left for USA, I have already traveled almost all over India and I had few friends (notably Andre' from Switzerland who still is my friend after 23 years) from the west and I was aware of the cultural,social,political and economical differences between our Motherland and the rest of the world. My awakening started when I landed in Bangkok on my way to USA for a two day stopover. From the get go the impact of real free economy in this country which was one of the nondescript Asian countries only few years earlier amazed me. Yes, it was still the Asian culture we know but there was sense of urgency,discipline in the air. Before I could take all in I was landing at Los Angeles International Airport and of course I was knocked off of my shoes. My treatment at the airport by the customs officials didn't really go well with me but years later as I got used to the culture I realized my hippie look and clothing really help my case either.

I remember going to  7/11 and the Punjabi owner took one look at me and refused to take money from and said , "welcome to America". My integration into culture was faster than most other India immigrants because I was surrounded by my American wife and her family and soon most of my friends were either American or of western culture. My enrollment into local community college to get the bearing of the education system and subjects which interested me (history,political science etc.) was a great decision. I was always a voracious reader and television shows soon filled the gap where school was lacking. Though by the end of the first year I was still the heavily accented Indian Guy.

Over the years I have succeeded,failed,regretted many things I have done or not done. I have traveled, over the course of 20 years I have traveled to 6 different countries beside America and explored 13 of the 50 states and enjoyed every bit of it.