Waifad!

I’ve spent most of the past week in a village called Waifad, about 17kms (takes over an hour) from another larger city called Wardha. I got there in a rickshaw that had 12 people (+ a huge thing of eggs and my luggage, etc - rickshaws are legally allowed to have a driver + 3 passengers). Theres a common practice called shared rickshaws which is basically a rickshaw driving around shouting out the name of where he’s going and if you’re going there or somewhere in between you can hop on and pay a set fare which is usually much lower than if you went on your own. Once, I drove the rickshaw 17 kms back from Wardha to Waifad- it was pretty fun, but a little intense, especially since there were 8 people in the rickshaw!

In Waifad, I was learning from some people at the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation’s Village Resource Center, which is this really cool place that has a bunch of computers and aims to use technology to provide information and help alleviate poverty in rural areas. I really like the work that they’re doing, and when there I met an intelligent girl from Bombay (Savitri) who just graduated and decided that it’d be good for her life to spend a year working in a village… It’s so rare to find people in India who actually want to do good work and aren’t just doing NGO work because it is the only job they can find, so that was really cool to see. I realized realized that coming from Bombay to a village on the other side of the state might be as much of a different world than America to a villlage in India.

Anyway, so Waifad has been a lot of fun… I became buddies with some of the kids here, who try to wake me up at 5:30am to do all sorts of things like go for a long walk to the river and temple and stuff (I never take them up on it)… I went to the farm and tried to participate in some farming activities, but I sucked at it, so it was mostly a chance for the kids to have a good laugh:
I was trying to plow the field with these oxen or bullocks or whatever, but mostly I would fall off the plow pretty often and the Oxen would never do what I wanted them to, and one would stop to pee and the other would keep going and stuff…

Got to sit on a Ox-cart for a bit, which was nice, except for the road is so bumpy and muddy that it hurts quite a bit and we decided that we should walk instead:

One day, we went to the local school to try to convince the teachers to get their kids to come to the village resource center. Even though I knew a bit about the state of the education system in India, visiting and talking to teachers was a little eye-opening. The kids weren’t learning anything, and the teachers were hardly present… when we came, all of the teachers came and sat around a desk with us for about an hour without teaching anything… It’s amazing that kids learn anything at all.  I also sat in on some English “tutions” that Savitri Madam was teaching… the english texts that the students have are riddled with grammatical and spelling errors, so its obvious that kids who learn English here will have problems with these things (it’s bad enough that they teach them to spell organise, flavour, and colour, the way they do, and they pronounce ‘z’ as Zed - crazy!)… 
Here’s a reading comprehension section from a 12th grade exam - First of all, these kids have never seen email so its ridiculous… secondly - this thing is full of errors! 

This is what was going on in the classroom (3rd grade I think):

Not a lot of learning to be sure.  It actually makes me wonder how my grandfather and father (growing up relatively poor) learned such good English after being schooled like this - or were times different back then?

We went to Gandhi’s Sevagram Ashram, which is where Gandhi lived from 1936-1942… The buildings themselves aren’t that much different than the Sabarmati Ashram, but the Ashram in Ahmedabad is better maintained.
Gandhiji’s House:

7 Sins:

I stood in for Dev (inside Joke) at a wax museumish thing of the Danda March:

At Waifad, the staff members have a cook come to make food for them, but I thought that we should cook one day, so Savitri and I decided we’d make the food.  It turned out to be pretty hilarious and messy - here’s a picture of the roundest roti that we made most were probably worse than this one… note the flour “tika” on her head:

Me mixing up some daal (how hilarious is the ’stache?)… so when I tried to get them to shave my goatee completely off at the previous village, the barber looked at me like I was crazy and basically refused to shave off my moustache, so I decide to leave it for a few days to better blend in with the villagers):

I’m now in Pune, but I’ll have to blog about this place later on because I have another bus to catch to a village called Mhaswad.  Pune is sooooooo different from where I just came… Yesterday was really cool though - here’s a teaser - a lot more where this came from with the next post (hopefully some video too, though no promises, because I don’t know what my connectivity will be like):