Having just completed my first full school week at Parijat Academy, I thought a description was in order. Parijat Academy is located in the back half of the Teron property. Several buildings in the front half house two grandparents, three brothers, three wives, two small grandchildren, and one weaver, 15 boarding students who live too far away to commute to school, and myself and my roommate Sankar who live in the guest house, alohi kor, next to the pig pen. The guest house is built to a higher standard than the rest of the buildings and I have to say I appreciate it. Mostly I like the privacy. Additionally inhabiting the compound are at least three cows, goru, one piglet and several pigs, one obnoxious rooster, at least three chickens with chicks, one cat, and a variety of vagrant cows, goats, and dogs.

I wake up to the rooster around 6:30 and slowly make my way to courtyard for a small cup of sweet delicious Assamese tea, lalsa, a read of the newspaper and rice. School starts every morning (except Sunday) with an assembly at 8:45 where between 200 and 300 students form lines by class and sing songs about their school. The students are then dismissed to their classes ranging from nursery (5 year olds) to class X (15 and 16 year olds). There are 4 classrooms made of bamboo and woven plants walls and the rest are housed in one long partitioned building. Younger classes have one teacher and older classes have teachers that rotate between classes, opposite they way we do it. Teachers make about $50 per month when there is money. Students take science, environmental science, social science, Hindi, Assamese, English, computer, and math classes. Teachers seem to take their time getting to class so sometimes I will pop in and interact with the students…ask their names and see whether they remember “elbow” from the day before. I've taught class 10 to play hangman and class 8 to play girls vs boys "Pyramid." Sometimes I fill in for English classes, grading quizzes and painfully homogeneous responses to questions I write on the blackboard. Recently I have been teaching computer classes to classes 9 and 10 in the new computer room. This will likely be my primary job while I am here. Compared to bamboo classrooms, fifteen brand new computers from a donor in Mumbai seems a luxury out of place, but they will be a huge asset to the school for a long time. It’s difficult to teach when the power comes and goes but I can already see improvement in the students' typing and basic computer skills. 

At lunch I play “dang,” the 5 based cricket-baseball game, often with students from class 7. (I think there are as many outs in an inning as there are batters and I've learned that runners can tag up.) Recently some have bought me small lunch snacks. I don’t know what to make of this but of course I thank them and enjoy new flavors of junk food.

After school is my favorite time of day when I can sit on my porch and read having earned my keep for the day. The sun sets around 4 and I often walk to the market in Garchuk around dusk. Sometimes for 10 rupees we take a cycle-rickshaw from a driver that smells like marijuana. The last few days Uttam's brother Prosanta has been showing me the sights of Guwahati on the back of his new Honda motorcycle...It is more fun than I expected. In the evening I come back and do what I want - play with kids, read, write, learn Assamese words, drink tea, shower, peal potatoes, eat rice, check the internet, and go to bed. 

I am making friends! My 17 year old roommate Sankar speaks English as his fourth language well enough to help me with my Assamese. He finished classes at Parijat last year and currently attends university as a commerce student, but today he taught English to the kindergarten class when the teacher was gone. Each of the last 3 days we have walked to the local town, Pamohi, to buy vegetables at the market or yesterday to buy me a mobile phone. The shop wouldn't sell sim cards to a foreigner so Sankar generously loaned me his...but now I am getting calls for him! On the way home he helps me with my Assamese and explains Indian things. (I did not ask about the man running the jackhammer in bare feet. I didn't feel his answer would clarify the situation.) I taught him and the other boarding students to play baseball on the rice patties and Sankar and I played cards and dice games together yesterday.

Today a girl in class 8 brought me lunch of chips and chocolate wafers and then invited me to play fist-cricket-baseball.

Uttam's father, Mayaram Teron is a retired train driver, now mostly blind. I asked his name aapunar naam ki? before dinner today and he quickly opened up, increasing my vocabulary with all the words that he also knew in English. He has a wonderfully wrinkled face and a big old man grin that broadens when he teaches me a new word. Now I can say hello, thank you, good, bad, tea sa, Assamese tea lalsa, ask someone's name, ask "What is this?" and say "no more," na lagai when I am full and ask for more rice and more potato. It's a good start I guess. 

Sport at Parijat

(Copied from a story I wrote for Parijat's page on Omprakash.org)

Two days on a new continent, the homesickness comes and goes. Only 13 million people speak the Assamese language (myself not included) and so sports and playing with babies are the only languages in which I can communicate for now, but I will talk about sports. Australian visitors brought Frisbees a few days ago and they were a huge success at lunchtime. The children LOVED a new toy, from 5 year old boys to teenage girls. I showed them to catch alligator-style and throw with the label facing up. When my spirits were down later in the day, 90 minutes of spirited badminton with boys in the schoolyard brightened my day and made me really feel like part of the tight family at Parijat. All those lunches spent playing badminton in high school are unexpectedly paying off!

Today we played tag at lunch, me trying to explain in English that tag was the opposite of the game we were playing where all the students chase me. A few girls joined in the game with the little boys and when I got the idea across I was still the target for most of the "Its." After eating I watched boys play a cricket-baseball hybrid with fists and a tennis ball. Baseball is my game back at home and I simply sat and observed how this game was played.

The playfields at Parijat are disused rice patties. Each patty is roughly square, the perfect shape for a game of cricket-ball. The hitter stands in the middle of one side of the patty and each corner is a "safe area"/base, effectively making 5 bases including home plate. The pitcher pitches and the batter swings at the ball with his or her fist. Unlike baseball, the batter can choose to run or not based on how good the hit is and like cricket, a hit anywhere in the field is runnable, fair or foul. Each base can house multiple runners who can score on a hit, making the possibility for 5,6,7,10 run grand slams. There are no wickets, so outs are flyballs like all good schoolyard games, pegouts are encouraged. Tonight I brought out my baseball and funky mitt without webbing to show what a real baseball looked like...also a big success.

Sports are fun. They teach teamwork and leadership, structure and competition, make men of boys, etc. But I have never experienced it as such a literal form of communication and I am thankful now for my modest athletic ability.

The foreigner has arrived! 36 hours after leaving Seattle, I met Uttam Teron and drove in a taxi past mahouts domesticated Elephants down the street to Parijat Academy. The last plane ride from Kolkotta to Guwahati was spectacular. First off, I could see the Himalayas WAY off in the distance. Closer, we flew over the Brahmaputra River plain, mostly in Bangladesh. Villages dotted the landscape every few kilometers connected by rivers and roads as far as I could see. It looked like pictures you see of axons connecting neurons. It's easy to see how Bangladesh is the most densely populated country in the world.

Also, driving is fantastic...a new, bright, loud, radically different alternative to a what I'm used to. Cows, goats, pigs, dogs, elephants, people, bicycles, motorcycles, cycle rickshaws, auto-rickshaws, buses, trucks, army jeeps, cows crossing major national highways, people hanging off the back of trucks garbageman style on major national highways, party buses blasting Indian techno trailed by a crowd of dancing people on major national highways, broken down vehicles every few kilometers, of course Tatas everywhere. Yep. Good fun. 

On November 13 I fly from SeaTac to Inchon Int'l Airport in Seoul, then to Mumbai, Kolkota (Calcutta), and finally arrive in Guwahati about 2 days later. The headmaster of the Parijat Academy, Uttam Terron, will pick me up at the airport.

I plan to teach English and volunteer my time and energy in whatever ways the school sees fit for 4 months, until mid-March 2013. They have graciously agreed to give me room and board. I am most excited to work with children and try to communicate in the regional dialect of the state of Assam, Assamese (not awesomese). I am least excited for diarrhea. Between mid-march April 2 when my Indian employment visa expires, I plan to travel west and see the sights of India. Currently fielding suggestions...

I will arrive in Kathmandu before April 1 for orientation of a pay-to-volunteer program run through International Volunteer Headquarters. I will then be placed somewhere in Nepal to teach for 6 weeks, after which I am free to roam and trek until I return home for a friend's wedding. The return flight is currently scheduled for June 1, but I can change that date for free.

This blog is for my family and for anyone else interested so that when I return, perhaps, I will not have to describe 6 months of my life into 30 second snippets using words like "good" "nice people" and "mountains" quite as often. Enjoy!