The Girls, Part 2

If yesterday's experiences troubled me, and they did, today's gave me hope. First of all, I can't ignore the fact that despite the that we keep hearing about the devaluation of women in India, every site visit we have made, and every lecture we have attended (except the U.N. Information Center) has brought us into contact with at least one strong, remarkable woman. That's the contradictory nature of India again, I suppose. More to the point: today's visit to the Katha School knocked most of us out.  

We stepped off the bus into the heart of a slum. The smell hit me first; we have smelled garbage before on our journey, but this was the unmistakable odor of human excrement (poop, children). People and animals shared tiny spaces pressed in along the road, with upper story cells reached by bamboo ladders. I'm struggling to find the right descriptive phrases, really. The point though, is that from that simmering stew of destitute humanity we stepped through a low plastered archway into a school. The walls shimmered with mirrors set into mud murals with primitive designs and pulsed with the kind of energy and enthusiasm we try to generate in our own elementary schools. In the classrooms children who would otherwise have been picking through garbage at the city dumps developed functional literacy skills and studied environmental science and social studies topics related directly to their lives in the urban slum. I saw girls learning to sew and putting together portfolios of the their stitching and embroidery work, and I saw girls in the wood shop. Students used computers to work on their writing skills in the English language academy, and upstairs, students and adults from the community learned Java and c++. In the corner sat a bicycle-driven electric generator built by a student team, and spread out across the table were books of student poetry in Hindi and English--products I would be proud to have my own students producing.

 

The school is staffed primarily by women who have attended the school themselves. They are not university trained teachers, but slum girls who have completed the Katha School curriculum themselves and attended crash courses in teaching. They know their community and they reach out to bring girls in particular into the school. Girls from the slums return to the school not only as teachers, but to run the school canteen (a kitchen service) and to work with a self-help group developing handicrafts to sell through the Katha organization. The girls and women attached to the school often become the primary earners in their families, demonstrating their value to fathers who may never have seen them as anything but a burden. As our afternoon lecturer, Dr. Bhutani said, "You can solve most problems through eduction."