At 9:15 on the morning of Monday, July 11, there was a knock on the door of our room in the office building of Jingle Bell schools to summon us to a scheduled 9:30 rendezvous downstairs to begin our orientation for our upcoming month of volunteer teaching.

First, they gave us a tour of each of the four campuses. Two of them were right there by the office building. These serve the lower grades, and special needs children. The facilities were being expanded considerable, and already were quite impressive. Kimberly would be working with these students on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

On those days Dennis would be teaching students at the next stop on our tour, which was a campus about 3 blocks away. Here, he would be working with 6th, 7th and 8th grades. This facility included a band room, a media room, a chemistry lab, fields for cricket and “football” (soccer) and a full-size swimming pool.

Finally, we were driven to the remote campus, about half an hour away, where we’d both be going on Thursdays and Fridays. This campus has students from K-12. Kimberly would be teaching kindergarten and some of the elementary grades, while Dennis again would be teaching grades 6-8 (at least at first).

At all of these campuses, when we would enter a classroom, the students would stand and say “good afternoon” or “good morning”; and if only one adult is entering, they add “sir” or “ma’am”. And they remain standing until the adult tells them to be seated — or, in our case, until they realize that the adult doesn’t know to tell them to be seated. When a student wants to enter a class that’s already in session, he or she stands in the doorway and extends a hand into the room, waiting for the teacher’s permission to enter. All of the students normally wear uniforms, with different color schemes. The older grades are divided into four groups with each having a different color uniform, rather like the four houses for Hogwarts students in the Harry Potter books. (We don’t know if that’s where they got the idea, or if the tradition inspired J.K. Rowling.)

After we’d been driven back to headquarters, we were served lunch in a little cafe/ herb shop downstairs. Then we had a meeting with the four principals, school director, and other administrators. Of course we were served chai with cookies (“biscuits” in the British parlance adopted by the Indians); chai, which is sweet, spiced Indian tea with milk, is served at every occasion and opportunity in India. In our experience, it’s almost always delicious.

Our main question for the staff was whether we should go for depth or breadth. In other words, did they want us to visit all of the classes at all four campuses — which, given the large number of classes, would have meant no more than 2 or 3 visits to each of them — or conduct more extensive sessions with a select number of classes. They weren’t really prepared to answer that at the moment, so they said they’d think it over and get back to us later. (Their decision was for depth; eventually, however, we’d be changing horses after some teachers apparently complained because their own classes were being left out. But we’ll get to that.) Additionally, we always have the option of teaching separate classes or team teaching, both of which have their advantages. With the huge number of students we’d be reaching, our only option was to split up.

Then we received our class schedules, so we could go to our room to rest up and begin making our lesson plans — when we weren’t busy watching the monkeys cavorting on our balcony.

It was also a priority to make certain we had reliable Wi-Fi. Which initially we didn’t. The one open signal was not strong enough in our room, and the one signal we could pick up was secure. So we went down to ask our contact if we could get a password, and he referred us to the IT guy down the hall. The IT guy, however, was rather protective of his passwords, as if he were guarding a holy grail. So instead, he took one of our phones and installed a hotspot on it, so that as long as it was on and we were close to it, we could get online quite nicely. How does he do that?

Dinner was supposed to be brought to our room every evening, but the night before, it didn’t come until 8:00, by which time we’d already rustled up some grub on our own. One night during this first week we gave up on it and went back downstairs to the cafe to buy a couple of sandwiches, which were about 50 cents each. The woman who was supposed to cook and bring our dinner was there, and she was apologetic because she was under the impression somehow that we wouldn’t be needing dinner that night. She offered to go ahead and cook us some, but that would have made it even later before we ate, so we just went ahead and ordered the sandwiches.

She consistently brought our dinner (which was always quite tasty) up to us rather late — usually about 8:00, an hour when we’d normally be getting ready to get our showers and start thinking about hitting the sack. But we didn’t want to mention that we’d prefer it earlier; she was a teacher herself, and had the additional duty of feeding us (for extra pay, we hope), so she had to put in a full day of teaching before coming home and playing chef. One night, she invited us to come down to her own room and chat while she prepared our meal; her quarters were even smaller and more spartan than our own — there wasn’t even an air conditioner. So we certainly would have felt like privileged whites if we’d complained about the tardiness of our repast.

Soon we hit upon a solution. One night we went ahead and cooked our own food when we wanted it — about 6:00. Then when she brought dinner to us, we stuck it in the fridge so it would be ready for the following evening when we were ready for it. Then we saved that night’s dinner for the next night. And so on. Problem solved, with no additional inconvenience for anyone.

07/11/2022