Our class.

Apparently the whole reason for going to India was to volunteer and give back (while healing the deep emotional scars of cancer) which is a big job and one I also didn’t fully grasp.

After arriving in India and realizing that I had signed up for a lot more than I bargained for, I found out I would be spending the next few weeks in the local slums of New Delhi at make-shift school. The children would be between the ages of 3-7 and my primary responsibilities would be to help teach them basic English.

Sounded reasonable enough, but internally I loathed the thought of being placed with small kids. Yes, I read the list of possible placements but it was the last one I wanted to be selected for. To be honest, I would have much rather held the hands of the dying and destitute than forced in to a small room with screaming children for two solid weeks.

I don’t know what has happened to me over the years.

I used to love little kids, but now, I just don’t have the patience for them. Maybe it is the stress of cancer, always feeling like I am living on the edge of cliff, but the anxiety I feel after chasing little kids for any length of time is almost unbearable. I’ve spent 19 years raising kids and it hasn’t been an easy go. For half my life I have been responsible for taking care of the constant demands of others and I need a break. I thought India would give me at least that much and although I knew volunteering with children was an option, I figured it would be the last thing anyone would choose me for.

My skills speak more to compassionate caregiving don’t they? Maybe management, or organizing, or empowering women?
Surely, the people doing the placements would read past the ‘I am open to anything’ statement on my volunteer application and realize it was just the people pleaser in me coming out.
Surely, they would put me somewhere I would be useful and impactful and they would realize although volunteering was supposed to be a selfless act, I had limitations.

Nope.

I fake smiled as they handed me my assignment.

Shit.
Of course- the school with the little kids.

I get it.
This was all about that f’ing acceptance word again wasn’t it?
I was catching on quickly but internally I was also giving the universe the big fat middle finger. There would be no hand holding while watching someone cross over to the other side. There would be no peaceful contemplation of the cycle of life. No self-fulfilling prophecy that I was actually here to make a difference in someone else’s life.

No, this shit was all about me and it was becoming very obvious that I had a heck of a lot to learn about being a better human being. I wasn’t selfless. I was selfish.

I was willing to give, but only on my terms and that wasn’t how this was going to go down.

I signed up for this and said ‘open to anything’ when really what I meant was ‘EXCEPT for children.’
Lesson number 435 in India, be impeccable with your word.

Thankfully, I wasn’t going to be alone at the school because the 75 kids at Vidya Children’s Centre likely would have eaten me alive. I found out the hard way-they like to bite.

Our first day of volunteering started out something like this. It was an unseasonably hot and sunny clear morning in Delhi. We were on time and ready to go to our placement before the driver even pulled up, a rare occurrence, but apparently 3 out of 4 of us were super excited.
Our kurta’s were pressed, our hair perfectly coiffed, and our shoes clean. The bags we carried were full of coloured pencils and we looked fresh and ready for what the weeks had in store for us. We all smiled at the camera as Terri, our facilitator, took the customary ‘off to work’ picture, so proud of ourselves for the selfless acts we were about to preform-Gag.

First day. Eliel, Kristen, me and Sheila❤️

The commute to the school seemed short and when our jeep pulled up beside what looked like a garbage dump I almost had a heart attack.

Denial and shock flooded in. Was THIS really where we were going?
I paused, this couldn’t be right. It looked dangerous.
It couldn’t be possible that we actually had to walk down that long stretch of muddy road in shanty town all by ourselves every day, was it?
This had to be a mistake. Wasn’t there a different school closer to the road we could go to?

Eliel, a testicular cancer survivor and the only man in our group took the lead. Along with Kristen (my room mate) and Sheila from Chicago, I walked down the long road and into the trenches of the slums. It was in the middle of this little ‘town’ that we found the tiny school we would be teaching at.

Sheila looked at me. She could tell I was internally shitting my pants (and so was she I am sure) but instead of coddling me she tilted her head, threw me some of her trademark swagger and blurted out a few words of wisdom. “God is with us, girl.”

Sheila is ex military so everything about her is bad ass and strong including her faith. I like that about her and after spending a few days getting to know her, I decided that she must be on good terms with the man upstairs. You see, theoretically, her cancer is considered stage 4 but right now it is untraceable. I don’t know about you but to me that is a miracle and quite frankly if Sheila was connected to miracles than I was sticking close to her as we walked down the green mile every day.

When we arrived at the school that first morning we were greeted by teachers and the bright, dirty faces of 75 children. It was morning prayer. They lined up and like little angels listened to the headmaster beat his drum and instruct them to give thanks for their blessings.

It was almost too much to take.

Blessings?
What blessings?
“Hhhheeelllllooooo……has anyone looked around here? What are the heck could these kids be grateful for?”

They had to be asking for something didn’t they? They couldn’t ACTUALLY just be saying thank you for what they already had, because by our standards, they didn’t have anything at all.

I had just walked through some pretty unspeakable conditions to get to this school, if you could you even call this place a school. There was no limitless supply of paper, the chalkboards were crumbling and there were no desks or chairs for these kids to sit on. The little shanties I could see through the barbed wire fence down the street were, in fact, their homes and this was in fact their life.
They were dirty. They had lice and what seemed to be hookworms. Their noses were runny and only some had shoes. The ones who didn’t have shoes were also the ones who didn’t have lunches which meant they were hungry. How on earth was I going to teach these kids anything. It made no sense. I looked over and noticed the mats in the corner. One little girl began laying them out. They smelled like pee.

I started to panic.

What did the bathroom situation look like?
I peered around the corner and pointed to Sheila who again tilted her head at me.
Where the heck was God now, huh?

Yes those are the shitters!

I needed a plan. If I was going to be here day in and day out I was going to have to start storing my waste like a camel. There was no way in bloody hell I was using these toilets. This was too much. I wondered, could I relocate my services elsewhere? Was a transfer acceptable in the field of volunteering?
I felt like a total asshole for hating my placement especially when my counterparts looked happy and excited.

Prayer finished while I was still calculating my water intake. Suddenly, all hell broke loose. Kids were pulling me in every direction.
“Didi Didi, Didi this way!!!!”

Kristen and I followed each other to the back of the building. It was filled with about a third of the kids.
Perfect, only 25 of them and we had a teacher. Maybe I could do this. I mean, I could bring myself to sit on those pissy mats to colour and play. They were pretty cute. I had already scoped out cleanest ones and decided I’d pair up with the kids who visibly didn’t have bugs in their hair.

Again, I looked over at my counterparts. They all seemed enamoured by these children. Kristen already decided who her favorite was. Anil, or as I named him ‘ The Fonz’ was the worst kid in the class but she didn’t care, she was in love.
Oh great-not only was I a volunteer failure, I was also a human being failure and it was only day one.

As that first day came to a close, I didn’t feel any better. Actually, I was in full blown trauma. We had learned that we weren’t there to lend a hand to the teacher. We would, in fact, be leading the entire class. The teacher kindly told us that she wanted us to bring photocopied worksheets for the kids each day and asked us to plan daily crafts and activities for the children.

I had no idea how or what skills I needed to instruct an entire class but to top it off the ‘teachers’ were now suddenly relying on us to teach them too?
They explained they wanted us to show them new ideas/approaches from the western world and handed us a book filled with the previous volunteers contributions. Each song we sang would need the words written down. Each craft we made, the teacher wanted a copy along with a detailed explanation of the process.
There were language barriers and so many frustrations with the rambunctious kids we taught and it didn’t take long for me to realize my self serving thoughts about all the good I thought I’d be doing by coming to India was complete bullshit.
I was not doing anyone any favours. The magnitude of the problems here and the needs of these kids was far beyond the scope of anything I could offer. It wasn’t my responsibly to change things. It also wasn’t possible. I felt helpless.

But I was judging it all, and I had no right.
It was not my place to judge what was going on here, how they were living or what they prayed for. It didn’t matter how I felt things ‘should’ be done. Instead, I had to accept what was and understand all I could do for the next couple weeks was simply show up and be present. Oh and bring new pencils.

A very loose rhythm to ‘teaching’ began to form in mine and Kristen’s class. Eliel and Sheila seemed to more in sync with their daily routines but that was in part because they spent an hour each morning doing flash cards with the kids and we refused to touch them because they smelled like poop.

Our approach was more about taking turns wrangling our kids. We would start each day confident it would go better than the last. We always had our photocopied sheets filled with letters or shapes just as the teacher asked. Each morning we would explain a certain word and the kids that could write would try to spell out the letters in english. It was somewhere during the process of bringing out the coloured pencils and crayons when we usually lost control.

In some ways it was just normal kid stuff, like they all wanted the purple crayon at the same time, but there were deeper issues too. Lack of motor skills, hunger, and a desire to steal the supplies for home meant chaos. The constant language barrier meant we couldn’t always settle them down and at times our classroom was more like a jungle gym than a learning facility.
I was tag-teamed by 3 of hardest to handle in the class. I took ‘The Fonz’s’ whistle away and he almost lost his mind and bit me. Then out of nowhere he called for back up and two of his buddies came Out of nowhere to take a chomp at me too.

“DIDI!!!!!” I screamed “OH MY GOD, DIDI, THEY BIT ME!!!” I needed my own back up but poor Kristen couldn’t do anything because she also had 6 hanging off her.

Mostly, that is how it went. We’d call in the headmaster, he would ramble off something in Hindi, the kids would settle down and then we’d start all over again.

We had to do better. We needed to be more organized and more in control so Kristen and I decided to teach them a few simple things in a daily routine. We started small. Kristen was in charge of arts and crafts because between us she is the most creative and I suggested we teach the little hooligans “Peace”.
I love it when little kids say peace and it seemed easy enough to show them that the number two also meant something else, plus, we really needed some peace in our class.

So, peace (which is shanti in Hindi) was the basis of most of our program and each day we greeted each of them with this gesture.
Peace meant they had to try to be nice to each other and us to them. Peace meant we couldn’t let the anger and frustration we all felt possess us. Peace meant we were in this together. We had colouring sheets with the peace sign, we showed them peaceful interactions and told them that peace means also meant love.

Then we showed them I love you, by simply pointing to their eyes, and then their heart and then to who ever they wanted to. Whenever they did something nice, we would tell them. “I- LOVE- YOU” and whenever they did something nasty we held them firmly and said “Peace”.

Peace Didi!

It didn’t always work, but after 2 weeks each kid would chant the words as soon as they saw us. From windows in shanty town, to as soon as we walked into the classroom, they lined up to say peace and I love you.

They also danced with us. It was a good plan. Instead of trying to keep them pinned down all day we decided the last hour of class was going to be dancing. ‘Happy’ by Pharrell Williams was the song of choice and thank God for Sheila and her wireless Bose speaker and willingness to lead the soul train passed the shitters.

By the middle of the second week something had started to shift. Being in the slums got easier. I found a way to look past everything that was wrong and everything I didn’t like or couldn’t accept and just love these little kids for who they were. Just like the grinch, I felt my heart had started to grow. The head lice didn’t matter anymore, I had grown accustomed to the dirty smells of their clothing and I began to see them for who they really were. Beautiful little souls.

These kids, who had nothing by our standards, were haywire and rambunctious because they were excited. They were excited about us. Sheila, Eliel, Kristen and myself were a gift to them. Singing and dancing and drawing with new people was simply fun. They didn’t have iPods or modern technology to distract them, they didn’t have anything better going on in their lives outside of these four wall and so the best part of their day was being with us.

Lucky to have shoes. Even if they don’t match and one is for the wrong foot.

When I realized this, it almost bulled me over with heartache. Never before had just being with someone or being somewhere felt like enough. I have always been someone who thought I had to do more and then do even more. I’ve always needed to buy more things, have more things, go more places, over-schedule, over-promise and over-extend. It is just what I have always been about. I have never been able to show up as my imperfect self and just ‘be’.
Suddenly I got it.
This whole experience wasn’t about changing anything. It wasn’t about going in and writing a better program for learning, it wasn’t about conjuring up ideas for better sanitation or a need to see tangible results for my efforts. It was simply about giving of myself and my time and being present and connected enough to really see these beautiful people and myself for who we really are.

It was about understanding, instead of being understood and it was about learning that each of us, as human beings, are more the same than we are different. The kids in slums of Delhi’s live in a daily struggle. As people affected by cancer we also live in daily struggle and it is because of our struggles that we can relate to each other. It is what makes us the same and breaks down the barrier of separation that exists simply because we live on different sides of the world.

Bingo- It hit me. Volunteering was amazing.

But volunteering in another country sometimes gets a bad rap. They call it voluntourism I think is the term, and during my first few days when I started at the school and was feeling very mixed up the universe was sending me a ton of articles on all the reasons why a person shouldn’t volunteer in a different country. It was weird timing but it also wasn’t lost on me why these articles were flowing in my direction. Of course, because I like to self-punish, I read them all. They had typical statements like-“Big organizations who run these programs are the only ones profiting. People’s lives shouldn’t be exploited and they shouldn’t be treated like animals in a zoo. We are taking jobs away from locals and it is an over privileged first world thing to do, selfish and self serving.” Blah, blah, blah.

Here is what I think.
There might be some truth to the statements above but, in life, there is always an opportunity to look at things in positive light or to focus on the negative. Now, having had the opportunity to experience volunteering in another country I choose to look at all the good it can offer. No, it’s not all perfect and of course no one person who only has two weeks to share can impact major change but I do believe the trickle effect of that person’s intention can be a catalyst to possibility and hope of progress.
Do I agree some of the wrong people might be making too much money and more could be done to help the poor long term? Yes, but I also don’t think we do not have all the answers either. We don’t live their lives thus there is no way for us to truly know what they really need.

While in India, I learned the story of a man who after volunteering in Africa felt the people in the village he visited needed better water. So he went home, fundraised a bunch of money, came back and built a well. Years later, he again visited only to discover that no one was using the well. When he asked why they didn’t use it the response shocked him. They told him that the well took away  social time and was causing a disconnect within the tribe. You see, getting water, washing, bathing and playing at the river was part of their daily ritual and it was something as a community they valued. It was sacred. The man had never thought about the needs of the people from this perspective and it struck him how far too often we assume what others needs are. For some reason we think we know better.
I guess unfortunately, being privileged can also sometimes result in righteousness.

Maybe though, people are being exploited….

I thought about this too and decided instead of using the word exploited what I felt was that they were being was open. Open to learning and being vulnerable. Open to sharing and having strangers come in and experience their lives. Open to help. Open to change and on top of being open they were also being very grateful.
Sadly, there is no real possibility for immediate change with children I spent time with India. The teachers know there is not suddenly going to be a budget surplus from the government and the resources will come flowing in. These kids will not likely get a better chance at life. It is this reality that I found heartbreaking and hard to move past. Despite this, it was not sadness or anger or pity that I felt as I walked away from the slums or the kids at The Vidya school. It was hope, that I too one day could find this level of acceptance, kindness and appreciation without judgement in my own life.

I never once got the feeling they didn’t want me there. Even though we hardly gave them anything, I felt a deep sense of gratitude for what we could offer. I certainly never like I was taking away any jobs, in fact, I felt more like we in some small way helped to make someone’s job easier.

Is it an over privileged thing to volunteer in a third world country? Yes maybe it is irrelevant because the one thing I learned is that no matter who you are going into something like this you aren’t going to be the same person coming out. Yes, I was oblivious to how self serving I really was but this experience made me humble.
So, although little was accomplished in the measure of progress by my volunteering if I was able to leave just a little bit of peace and a little bit of love behind and come home with more acceptance and grace than I only have three words left to say.

Thank you India.