Meeting My Heroes

Throughout my life, I have met a handful of people I consider my personal heroes.  Among them are my parents, my brother-in-law (haha, just kidding, he's from Oklahoma), and now, the people of the Ekal Vidhalaya program and the villagers of India.  Ekal Vidhalaya runs schools (grades K-3) for children in rural areas all across India ranging in age from 6-14. Generally, these children live too far away from the government schools, or need the better part of the day to help out their families. So the Ekal Vidhalaya program trains rural teachers to educate the children of the village either early in the morning (6-9am) or in the evening (6-9pm).  The cost of a single school you might wonder?  A mere dollar a day.

The children of the Ekal Vidhalaya program in the village of Rehi

When I first heard about this program, I thought that I was overpaid at least a dollar a day, and decided to donate.  The last few days, I went to visit a school that I sponsor, and it very well may have changed the way I view the world.

As soon as we arrived at the village, the village elders greeted me with malas (flower necklaces) and had a look of extreme gratitude in their eyes that is completely indescribable.  I immediately started to get choked up and felt very unworthy.  Then, the village teacher gave the students a lesson so that I could see what a typical class session was like.  It was a nice interactive session where the students would go up to a blackboard and solve math problems or write their ABC's.  I might have expected the children to be able to add and subtract, but I was pleasantly impressed that they could also multiply, divide, and write the English alphabet!  I started to think how when I was that age, many kids in my school couldn't do some of this stuff.  This is especially impressive when you consider that most of their parents can't read or write.

This kid is all over these math problems

After the class was over (which included play time!!), the people running the Ekal Vidhalaya program told the villagers how none of this would be possible without my donation, and then the children all ran over to me and touched my feet (a gesture of respect in Indian culture).  Talk about feeling SUPER undeserving.  To them, I was a hero since this school would not be here without my donation.  I then told them (as best I could, and mostly using hand gestures since they speak Bhojpuri, a local dialect of Hindi) that what I do is very small, and what they do is huge.  The people of the Ekal Vidhalaya program have devoted their lives to creating these schools in the villages and making sure they are meeting the high standards set by the program. Despite my best efforts, I think they still thought I was the hero.

Some of the heroes of the Ekal Vidhalaya program.  The teacher Arti (girl standing in back) along with the Ekal Vidhalaya staff members.

The next day, I went back to the village where I gave a lesson on space, which was really, really fun.  Due to a miscommunication, I was introduced as someone who frequently travels to the moon, which I thought it best to go ahead and let them believe. Then the lesson. Explaining space stuff is hard enough when I'm in front of children in American schools (usually with the awesome Sara Hatch and Joey Brown!), but nothing could have prepared me to explain planets and the solar system to villagers in India.  I wasn't sure what they knew, so I started off with us living in India and India being a part of a bigger thing we call Planet Earth.  Oh, and by the way, the Earth is round.  I think the translator and I were successful in getting the idea of the solar system across, but failed when I was trying to explain that the solar system is just a small piece of a galaxy, which is a small piece of the universe.

"Hooray for space and NASA!"...is what these kids would say if they knew English

That night, I stayed in the village where one of the Ekal Vidhalaya members resides, which in itself was very fun!  Instead of occasional electricity outages like in many parts in India, they seemed to occasionally get electricity.  But of course, they don't have the benefit of having a backup generator like every other place I've visited.  I was then shown the bathroom (that field over there!) and slept on a wooden table where they put their best blankets out for me.  The next day, the highlight of my day was when it was time to shower.  Since there are no bathrooms in villages, the villagers take a bath at the local (government installed) water pump.  You just take off your clothes (keeping under garments on), and take a bath.  For convenience (or maximum embarrassment?), the water pump is placed in the middle of the village.  Everyone knew that I was new to this, so they all enjoyed watching me struggle with operating the hand pump and bathing while squatting.  As if I didn't feel weird enough, I noticed a group of girls watching me and giggling. Oy...

I eventually got the hang of this water pump thing!

While living like a villager for a few days was "fun" for me, it's definitely a simpler life that involves a lot more work for everyday things.  Here, there are no beggars, for they have no one to beg to.  But even if they did, it was easy to tell that they were too full of pride and wouldn't dare ask anyone for anything.  I kept getting treated like royalty (they kept reminding me of the Hindu saying, the guest is God), and they made sure I was as comfortable as possible.  I felt bad since I didn't want any special treatment, but there was no way around it.  Because of all of this, they are my heroes too.

Thanks to Ekal Vidhalaya, there is no shortage of smiling faces in the village of Rehi

Hopefully, with the help of those devoting their time to Ekal Vidhalaya, villagers all across India can overcome poverty through education.  In a day where I saw an impatient driver run over a dog that wouldn't move out from the middle of the road, and a train captain accept a bribe to allow someone without a ticket on the train, I had a renewed sense of hope for India. With everyday heroes like those in the Ekal Vidhalaya program and the villagers of India, anything is possible.

For more information about Ekal Vidhalaya or to make a donation (!!), please visit http://www.ekalindia.org/ekal_new/index.php

A Lesson in Humility

An Aunt of mine from New Delhi told me a very touching story a while back that I wanted to share...


Her and my Uncle were travelling on a local train between Allahabad and Ayodhya.  In general, this is a small train that doesn’t see a tremendous amount of traffic, and for a good while, my Aunt and Uncle were the only ones on the train.  They were eating their lunch on the train, and when they were full, they threw away a fair amount of food.  A short while later, people finally started boarding the train.  The lady that was sitting by my Aunt and Uncle had 3 children, and a few pieces of roti (Indian bread) and a single red pepper to feed them all with.  The kids were crying that they were hungry, and the mom was completely helpless.  Instantly, my Aunt and Uncle felt horrible about the food they had just thrown away.  As they later started talking with the woman, they found out that she was travelling to her father’s funeral, and that she had to somehow provide food for the entire village the very next day.  This, my Aunt and Uncle thought, would be an impossible feat considering she didn’t have enough to feed herself or her kids.  When they asked her what she planned to do, she said that God will take care of them, just like He always has.


When they got off the train, my Aunt offered the woman some money to feed her kids, and additional money to help feed the village.  My Aunt actually felt bad that she didn’t have more to offer this woman.  To their astonishment, the woman refused.  She didn’t want any charity, and had too much pride to come off as a beggar.  After my Aunt was overly insistent, the woman finally accepted the money.  Soon after, my Aunt later saw a beggar come up to that woman, and the woman gave him a part of the money she had just received, even though she still didn’t have enough to feed the village the next day.


What’s interesting to note here is that many people outside of India think of India as extremely poor.  While there are definitely parts of India that are extremely poor, if you stay in the city, you really won’t see anything other than ordinary beggars, which I see in LA all the time too.  It isn’t until you go to these more remote areas that you see true poverty: the children who walk barefoot for miles on an empty stomach to go to school, and then return hungry still because a corrupt official wants to keep the school lunch program money for himself; the mother going through a harvested rice field to find leftover grains of rice to feed her children; the woman who is too proud to beg for charity even though she is against the largest of odds to feed herself, let alone a village, and still finds it in her heart to help others. 


To me, this is true humility: People who have nothing, and will not let it stop them from becoming something.  We all have much to learn from these people who climb insurmountable odds everyday just to get through life, and many of them do it without complaining.  The next few days, I'm visiting a village in the midst of such poverty, and I hope to learn a lot from everyone there about living life in such a selfless, courageous manner.

Mission (Partly) Accomplished!

After I had decided that I wanted to come to India to do some social work, the big question was how long I was going to spend here.  I kept going back and forth between 1 month and 3 months.  I thought that 1 month was a short enough time that if I wasn’t liking it or if it wasn’t what I had hoped, then the end was already around the corner.  But after talking with people who had done similar things, it sounded like 3 months was a bare minimum to get anything worthwhile done.  It turns out, they were right, and I’m glad I listened.

The 11 weeks I spent volunteering has been the perfect amount of time.  Any less time, and I wouldn’t have been able to finish things up like I wanted to.  I could have volunteered more, but the high efficiency that I was working with is starting to flatten out as the initial research is all done.  Plus, I’m about ready to go back home and see my friends and family.

The people that for some reason or other, I miss and want to see!

This is my last week of work, and I’ve been wrapping things up.  We ended up identifying more than 10 ways to improve the oil extraction unit and process; making the process safer, more environmentally friendly, easier to use, and more efficient at extracting oil.  These changes range from adding a pressure relief valve so that the oil extracting tank doesn’t blow up (which will save a few lives every year), to designing a bike-powered crop cutting system so that they can cut the material more easily than a hand powered cutting system and cheaper than the diesel powered cutting system.

 

Old Crop Cutting System vs New Crop Cutting System!

If all the changes are implemented, then the villagers can earn somewhere between 2-10 times as much as they are now, which would mean a better life for them and their families.  Their children won’t have to work in the fields and can instead go to school.  They can all have enough food to eat and enough money to buy shoes (a luxury many village children I’ve seen don’t seem to have).  What’s most exciting is that the generations to follow can come out of the poverty trap that their families have been in for a very long time.

A few of the people who will benefit

However, there is still a lot of work left to go before this can happen, including testing all of the changes that we have proposed and then implementing them, and this is where I hand off the torch to IDEI.  In a lot of ways, the implementation is the hard part.  IDEI will have to convince the villagers that these changes are good for them. Often times, people are set on the ways that they’ve been doing things, especially if it was the way their father’s father also did it.  However, this is where IDEI really shines, as they have been convincing hundreds of thousands of villagers  for over a decade that their low cost treadle pump is a worthy investment.  So while my part is mostly over (except for answering any questions they have and finishing up a few loose ends back in America), I am confident that IDEI will do a fantastic job of finishing the job and creating a better life for possibly thousands of village families in India.

On a sappy note, I’ve realized through my time with IDEI that anyone can make a difference.  I originally thought that I had very little to offer in terms of being able to help people halfway around the world, but all it really takes is a little bit of will, and the right people around you to nudge you the right direction.  It’s through these experiences that I realize how lucky I am to be surrounded by such good hearted people everywhere I go, and I feel like everyone has been placed in my life for a reason.  And for all of that, I am very thankful!