James Tulloch
I spent 10 months at Light of Love children’s home from July 2005 to April 2006; 10 of the happiest, most rewarding and educational months of my life. And 10 of the hottest! Winter, I learned, is a relative term. Sometimes I felt like a bright white cockroach, constantly scuttling away from the sun into the shade. After six months I think I was actually whiter than when I arrived: And a lot slimmer.
It is impossible to sum up, those 10 months, although perhaps the best testimony to this special place is that I planned to stay only 5 months. Those remarkable, loving children are very persuasive. I miss them and their irrepressible vitality, their cheek and their charm.
I miss Dr. Premdas, his conversation – often saddening or shocking, often playful and hilarious (especially about my future marriage which, naturally, he would arrange), always informative and revealing of some truth about the Dalit experience. I miss the wonderful, flavoursome dishes that Jyothi concocted for us white chickens and her kind attentions. I miss the Telegu epics blasting out at 300 decibels from the TV. OK, no, that’s a lie. Peace and quiet existed in another galaxy, far, far away.
When I first arrived I was immediately impressed by the scale of the place, the reassuring solidity of the buildings after the endless shack settlements we passed on the train, the neat rows of palms and shady stands of mango trees, the wide open space of the cricket field, and of course the sheer number of clapping, shouting, laughing, singing little faces that greeted me. Oh, and the satellite TV connected just in time for the Ashes!
After Gillie Davidson had told me some of the children’s tragic histories I had expected to be confronted by many traumatised little souls. Nothing could have been further from the truth. From the moment I arrived they burst my over me in happy, excited, expectant waves. I was drenched with affection, with questions, eager handshakes, laughter and smiles, dazzling smiles. Little fingers stretched out under my door in the morning, accompanied by surprisingly big voices telling me it was time to get up!
And I had to feed them all! The first duty of all visitors is dinner duty, spooning out rice to all the children. It is surprisingly physical work. And it was, for me, the best way to practice the children’s names, having rashly promised, in my first speech of (far too) many, to try and learn all their names. All you have to do to win one of those day-brightening smiles, to light up their faces, is remember their name; it’s so simple.
Serving breakfast, lunch and dinner brings home the simplest reason why these children are so spirited and joyful; they are getting three square meals a day: Unlike so many of the children in Andhra Pradesh where infant and child malnutrition remains a huge problem. Clearly for some of the Light of Love kids the damage had already been done. For their age, they looked tiny!
Although they looked young, the children often acted older than their western peers, particularly the girls. They are resourceful, readily take responsibility when needed, and work well together. To see a 13 year-old girl leading 350 children in evening assembly and prayer, or to watch a team of boys, the same age, assemble and manage the sound, light and projection system for a Christmas dance performance, was to be immediately impressed.
They also instinctively look after one another. The sense of solidarity among the children, young and old, is remarkable. I rarely, if ever, saw any bullying, and cliques of children are rare. Young and old play together. This, after all, is their family. And they come from a village culture, where so much is shared, so much is common goods. They are quick to offer, to feed each other, to fetch for each other, and when someone has a birthday, he or she gives sweets to you, not the other way around.
When a 6 year-old girl with TB was rushed to hospital for an emergency operation the whole community halted the day, and prayed. She was one of my students and a few days earlier had thrown up in my class. I had no idea how ill she really was. Now she was close to death and here, unbidden, were several of the older girls who, prompted their love for their little sister, were sitting on the patio floor, late into the night, many in tears, praying and singing for Vashita. It was incredibly moving.
This solidarity has some curious, for me disturbing, by-products. There is the tendency for children’s possessions to be, ahem, ‘redistributed’. In India this is nothing to get too excited about but I found it difficult, especially when school prizes for kids that had performed well found their way to the class slackers!
Cultivating individual excellence, striving to win prizes, is perhaps difficult when what’s mine is yours and what’s yours is mine, when so much of everyday life is viewed and experienced as a communal endeavour, a joint effort.
Particularly in school, where copying each other’s work is standard, accepted practice. When I became a de facto full-time English teacher, I definitely found myself experiencing “culture shock”. Rote memorization and regurgitation in exams is the order of the day in the Andhra Pradesh curriculum (which seemed depressingly similar to Japan, where I’d taught before). Walk into revision study period and it was like entering a hall of Buddhist novices, gently swaying as they recite their mantras. Copying was a natural part of this system.
Children were genuinely shocked when I told them that, no, my exam questions would not be the exact same, word for word, questions they had already studied and answered in class and could therefore memorize. No, they had to learn the whole lesson and think their way to the answers to new questions.
Maybe I’m over-critical and too prejudiced towards western-style education but it seemed like an education system designed to keep people supine. Ideal for a caste system where society has memorized and refined, word for word, ritual by ritual, each caste’s role, and the individual’s function is to repeat that role, copy your neighbours (your caste fellows) and never aspire beyond your divinely-ordained limitations.
This is not to say that I didn’t enjoy teaching the children, or that they were all the same, or that they were relentlessly dull and uncreative. They constantly delighted and surprised me, they were respectful and affectionate, and often enthusiastic and there was no greater satisfaction than when I felt I had a good run of lessons, or when there was a frantic stampede to write the answer on the board, or when a forest of hands shot up pleading to read the next part of the story. I grew to know and cherish them as individuals and wished more than anything for their success.
As one teacher said: “This is not a normal school. Here you are not just their teacher, you are also their parent, their guardian, their main motivator. You are not just teaching them to read and write. You are nurturing a Dalit (Untouchable) revolution, creating a whole new generation of educated Dalits.”
This is hard work. One Dalit author described his schooldays thus: “we jumped straight from the jungle into the classroom.” For millennia Dalits have been warned that their place was not in the classroom but in the jungle or the landlord’s fields. Send your children to school and your family won’t have enough to eat. And many have internalized and accepted – memorized en masse – this subordinate status. Most of the children have a very limited conception of where their studies can lead them.
There were many exceptions – Jayaraju, the boy who wanted to be a sound engineer, Pallavi, who would like to be a nurse – but most little or no notion of what they would or could do after school. That’s why, for me, SLA’s plan for a dedicated further education fund is an excellent idea. The home and school are coming to a point of maturity where, in the next three or four years, a large number of the children will hopefully graduate 10th class (age 16). (As in America, if you flunk this your future possibilities shrivel.)
What comes next costs money. One year of 6th form studies in Tuni comes to about 3000 rupees, about £60; the price of a pair of trainers for a Scottish child. One year’s education = a pair of trainers!
Dr. Premdas once asked me what my vision was for the home and children. My dream is that one day all the LOL children will be able to go on to some form of further education, whether academic or vocational, and not end up back in the fields on starvation wages, or in the cashew-nut factory watching their hands disintegrate from the chemical discharge, or like Laxmi, married off after 10th class to a man she’d never met who infected her and her unborn child with AIDS (he’d known before the marriage and married her for the dowry money), a widow at 19, waiting to die, for her child to die.
For me, education for these children is not just about reading, writing and arithmetic, it’s about protecting themselves, about giving themselves a safety net which neither the state nor caste society can or will provide. Protecting themselves from the ignorance that has led to the AIDS epidemic in Andhra (there are about 30-40 AIDS orphans in the home); protecting themselves from exploitation, whether by landlords, employers, loan sharks or corrupt officials. It is about protecting themselves from the cycle of poverty and destitution that has swallowed up so many of their families.
I was surprised at how many of the children did have one or both parents living. But then I’d never before met a mother who simply could not feed all her children because her wages were so pitiful. Her humiliation and pain when she told me made me regret ever asking. Rural Andhra Pradesh is a place where drought and cyclone still make the difference between subsistence and starvation. I arrived in the middle of drought (the riverbed so dry Tata trucks were excavating sand from it) and saw six successive cyclones. We felt the pinch at the vegetable market, but the desperation of some villages where NASA distributed rice seemed insupportable. I was also staggered to see that polio, leprosy, and TB, -- to me historical, medieval, diseases – were part of daily life.
The Light of Love home family really is a sanctuary, a refuge from the destitution and cruelty outside. India is a violent place, where life seems cheap. Every time I came back from visiting a village or Tuni slum I sat serving dinner and felt so thankful, so relieved that the children I had become close to, my new brothers and sisters, were living where they were; with clean water; with healthy food; with proper shelter; medical care close at hand; with decent clothes on their backs. They had been given a second chance by SLA and NASA.
And with ridiculous white chickens to amuse and entertain them: I was how old? But why wasn’t I married yet? How come daddy hadn’t found a wife for me? I travelled alone! Didn’t I have any friends? You eat cow in Scotland? No rice for breakfast? You think this temperature/food is hot? Why are you reading?
Having made the mistake of showing off my cameras “one photo” became the most oft-used English phrase on campus – closely followed by “one pen”, “one sweet” and “one balloon”. The only way to combat this pleading, I found, was to reply, when asked “My name?”, that “Your name is…’one photo’. And your name is… ‘one pen’. And your name is …etc. etc. Howls of protest followed, but the begging levels definitely dropped.
As I said, I was immediately struck by the scale of the home and school, and it is truly incredible what has been built in Tuni in such a short time since SLA was founded. It’s very easy in India, and in any big institution like a school, to get caught up in day-to-day frustrations and miscommunications but stand back and look at the big picture of the Light of Love Children’s Home and it’s a magnificent creation.
And yet the work is never done. There is always a new need, always another way the children’s lives can be improved, or new children accommodated. During my time at the home a new boys’ dorm block, a new well, pipes and rooftop water tanks, a sewing co-operative building, a revamped electrical system, a fully equipped computer lab all appeared. Dr. Premdas is constantly devising new ways to make the children more comfortable, happier, and more secure. It could be something as complex as a new water filtration system or something as simple as handing out bananas.
I do wish we had had more time for excursions outside the campus. The children were always thrilled to get outside and many became more animated and expressive on the move, when given a bit more space to roam in. Some of my most treasured moments are of taking children to see King Kong in a magnificently decrepit old cinema, or taking them to the creaky funfair that stopped in town, and most of all taking them to the beach, where they went ballistic! The photos I have of them playing in the surf are absolute gems.
There are so many other highlights: the power and joy of the children’s singing; the grace and energy of their dance performances when fantastic costumes seemingly appeared from nowhere; the frightening speed at which they bowl a cricket ball; the even more frightening way they handle fireworks; the sound of 300-odd wind up toys starting all at once on Christmas Day; driving a bullock cart for the first and probably last time; taking portrait photos of the kids, watching them decorate the frames with style and invention, and then seeing them up on the school walls, smiling down at you as you pass; The inexhaustible energy of Dr. Premdas, his family and the staff of the home and school. I also had the chance to put together film footage for the SLA video, which was a huge thrill and immensely satisfying.
Finally, it was particularly heartening for me to see SalmonRaj, the polio-afflicted boy whose corrective surgery my generous sponsors paid for, make a miraculous recovery. When I first met him in a Mumbai hospital in June he was laid out in bed, in agony, barely able to move, immobilised by weights attached to his ankles, a primitive form of traction. By the time I left the following May he was walking everywhere with crutches and even able to take a few steps unaided. His determination and fortitude, and the grace with which he bore his pain and discomfort, are inspirational.
Service is the watchword of the Light of Love Children’s Home and I want to thank Gillie and Dr. Premdas for the opportunity to serve for a short time these beautiful, precious children. I hope that I will soon have the chance to do so again.
