Home Is Where the Heart Is

Imagine my surprise this morning upon opening my email and finding several messages from family and friends with titles such as "MIZZZZOOOOUUUU!" and "How 'bout them Tigers?" It made me so happy to see MU's football team had knocked off the #1 Sooners. And it made me about as homesick as I have been since starting this journey. With that said, the post I had written before I found out the news of Mizzou's win fits right into that theme:


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Five days in Tirur and the place is—unbelievably—beginning to feel like home. Our new job has had a lot to do with that. Teaching at JM Higher Secondary gives us a daily mission, a sense of purpose, a reason for being here. Inevitably, working eight hours a day has taken our minds off the insects, the mold, the dirt, the grime, and the smell in our apartment. Three solid nights of cleaning has also helped give us an illusion of domesticity.

We have taught four days and seen a steady parade of students. Jenna has a total of 13 classes, which she will teach twice per week. I have a total of 18 different classes, most of which I will see only once every week. Therefore, getting to know individual kids on campus has been a challenge. I recognize a few faces now but still could tell you no names beyond the mischievous sampling a talked about in the last post.

Still, Jenna and I cannot argue with the rock star treatment we get each day. From the moment we enter the front gates in the morning, students mob us as if we were Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. They extend their small hands and shout, “Good morning, sir! Good morning ma’am! How are you?” Those that have not met us yet ask us our names. They sometimes follow up with: “What is your native place, sir?” It takes a concerted effort to finally get to the teachers’ lounge on the second floor as a shuffling pack of students follows us each step, more students glomming on to the mass as we go. Even after we get inside the lounge and begin unpacking our notebooks and pens and lunches, a scattering of students will hover outside the door or beyond the grated windows to peek in and watch us—as if we were models in a museum diorama suddenly and magically come to life.

The classes themselves have gone remarkably smoothly. This week consisted of standard getting-to-know activities and a basic conversation lesson. The students—for the most part—are willing and eager participants, with a few boys becoming too rowdy for their own good. Yet, the behavior problems Jenna and I encountered so frequently in Houston—snappy attitudes, unwillingness to work, overt defiance—have been absent here. We are not totally surprised, owing to our one-week experience in Kolkata. Still, each lesson ends with a refreshing air of accomplishment. “Yes,” that air seems to be telling us, “this is what teaching should be like.”

Several times, in fact, Jenna and I have started conversations this past week with the phrase, “Can you imagine if the kids we had in America…” and fill in the rest with something we had observed that week at our new school in Tirur. For example, “Can you imagine if the kids we had in America had to go to a school that had no lights?” It’s true: not a single light bulb in the place, not to mention no overhead projectors, data projectors, TVs, or desktop computers in the classrooms. Yet, somehow, learning gets done.

Or, “Can you imagine if the kids we had in America were forced to have gym class on a muddy field while running around with no shoes?” We wondered that while watching a group of boys energetically play a game of soccer while slipping through ankle-deep pools of brackish water and kicking the ball past two cinder blocks that served as goal posts. Yet, no sullen student sat on the sideline, refusing to participate.

Or, “Can you imagine if the kids we had in America were asked to sit respectfully through a class in which the teacher had to write everything on a chalkboard?” Several times, in the midst of a lesson this week, I have turned around after writing a sentence on the board to find each of my 30 some odd students with their heads up and their eyes forward, waiting for me to finish. Yet, no spitballs were glued to the back of my head.

This is not to say that the kids we had in America were pampered or led luxurious lives of wealth and affluence. Quite the contrary: they came from some of the poorest neighborhoods in the city of Houston. Many of them did regularly live without electricity. Many of them came from broken homes. Many of them rightfully carried loads of emotional baggage that would break people like me, used to easier lives.

Yet, it is all about perspective. Poverty in India is on a different level than it is in America. Our students in Houston—with houses, cable TVs, iPods, cell phones, and Air Jordan sneakers—would be considered middle class here. Indian impoverishment entails begging for food from strangers, unrolling a dingy bedroll on a street corner, and walking all day without even the cheapest of sandals. Hence, the chance at an education and the allures of advancement it entails are a greater motivator in a country where knowing English or your math tables can be the difference between sleeping with a roof over your head and sleeping on the street.

It is a message driven home to us everyday we come back from work. Our apartment is—by both our estimations—the “worst place” either one of us has ever lived. Yet, it has a roof. It has running water. It has a gas stove. It has a bed. It has electricity. And we still have the disposable income to add our own domestic flourishes: a floor mat, some burning incense, a clothesline, a toilet bowl cleaner.

Home definitely seems to be where the heart is. It may have taken a few days, but it appears our hearts have followed us to Tirur.