Day 20 - Architecture

So you've seen a little bit of the architecture of the school, right? It's a nice example of sustainability. The red bricks were all made by the parents and students when the school was first built, from locally available materials.

The doors are all carved from locally available wood, and if the door frames (for those doors that have them) don't match up and the doors don't close completely, it's okay because it's a school, not a private house. For the relative cost, and the purpose of keeping students out of the rain, it mostly works. And rain isn't usually the problem in this part of AP. Actually, it's not just Telangana - having too much rain's not really a problem in many parts of the state.

The openness of the place is most useful for letting the wind through on hot days. The construction is well-suited for that.

The whole point of this is that the school was built cheaply and sustainably (and with the community's involvement, which keeps them invested in sending their kids to school). Because of that, a group of 138 architecture from Hyderabad have come to see the school. They arrive in three busloads and walk around measuring everything with their handy tape measures.

After they've eaten lunch, they sit down along the corridor for a while as the headmasters and teachers talk a little bit about the RDF, the school, and their philosophy of teaching. Some of them don't understand Telugu, but they pay attention when my mom and I are given the microphone since we speak mostly in English.

The school needs more volunteers, especially people who can talk to the students in English, and I say as much. I hope we've inspired at least a couple of them to come back when they have a holiday and help out at the school. Afterward, a pair of students come up to my mother and say that they will in fact come volunteer. The teachers also say that they will talk with and remind the students even after they go back. So I guess it's worked, at least a little bit. Having college students from Hyderabad as volunteers is much more sustainable for the school and useful for the kids (since these college students know how the Indian school system works). I hope they follow up on this.

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P.S. I'm going to be spending the rest of the day writing up the procedures for all of the experiments I've done that I didn't bring with me. I only have a couple more days here, and I want to make sure the teachers have everything they need to continue doing the experiments. They've been sitting in on the classes and helping me explain things in Telugu  to the students, but it's nice to have a written copy.

Day 18 - Home

Initially, I was supposed to do 2 weeks and Matendla and 2 weeks at Kalleda. But the headmaster, teachers, and students asked us to stay here an extra week. Kalleda gets plenty of visitors (including a small group of WashU students at the junior college every July), but Nik and I were the first ones to visit Matendla this whole year. As far as I know, the last visitor before that was Nik's sister Bella, who stayed for three weeks last summer and then went home and raised Rs. 14,00,000 (yes, the comma is in the right place - that's read as 14 lakhs) or about € 20,000 for Matendla. Impressive.

At any rate, we went home on Saturday afternoon and planned to come back Monday morning. Unfortunately, my mom got sick, and then I caught a light case of whatever she had with a two-day delay. So by the time we finally get back to Matendla, it's Wednesday. We can take the evening English class, I guess, but we've missed the morning one and the actual school period (which my mom has been taking over since the English teacher spot is vacant).

Day 8 - Baala Mela

Sunday is normally a holiday, but today is special. Vandita Rao, the CEO of the RDF, is bringing some visitors to the school. The students will be here, and some will have classes, but they will also be participating in cultural programs and the like, showing off all their skills. The days of the week don't matter as much here, so they will get tomorrow off instead.

The visitors arrive at about 9 in the morning, and assembly starts as usual at 9:30. Unlike everyday, however, the entire school squeezes into the courtyard as the primary school kids join the high schoolers in morning exercises, prayer, and the rest.

Today's joke is acted out by one of the teachers and a group of P.S. kids up on stage.

The students closest to us are the nursery (preschool) kids, who don't have uniforms. The red/green/yellow/blue patches on the students shoulders indicate the groups. The students wearing white here and there are the group leaders for their classes.

The visitors watch from the sidelines, and step onto the dais as they are asked one by one to come up and introduce themselves. Since some of them only speak English, the teachers pick an older student to try and translate. If that fails, the teachers themselves do the translation. For the rest of the time, Marena and Dan (foreground), Nick (by the pillar) and the other visitors whose names I don't know, just chill. Or bake, rather. It's pretty hot.

Upstairs, the high schoolers have created a mini planetarium with a flashlight and holes cut out of a deflated basketball (I can spot the Big Dipper just there!), a model of a solar eclipse, and various other astronomical phenomena. Pretty cool for a school.