orya basti and dance lessons

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i don't have time to write right now, but i wanted to put up these photos. they are from a community near the union carbide factory that is made up of people mostly from a rural area (i think its called orissa). sambhavna sponsors a school there, where the kids learn traditional languages, as well as english and hindi. anyway, i'll tell you all about it later, but enjoy the photos!

here's the day's post:

It has been a few days since I wrote anything properly, so I’ll try to fill in what is missing from the photos!

First off, these ones of Orya Basti are of a school that Sambhavna helped to start up, and I think is even able to provide some funding for. The headmaster at the school is this very authoritative little guy named Gangaram. He is a gas survivor, and features largely in the book Five Past Midnight in Bhopal from what I have heard (I haven’t read the book yet). At any rate, Anisha, Casey and I originally went to the school to see the kids there do some dances, because Anisha is in her university’s Bollywood dance troop. Ganagaram immediately decided that we should partake in the Independence Day celebrations on the 15th.. which means that we are to learn one of the dances and perform it for the community on for the celebrations. Ahem… the last choreographed dance I did was to Baby Got Back in the twelfth grade, so needless to say, it’s been a while.

The kids at the school were really sweet though, and they loved having their photos taken and whatnot. I wrote my name in Hindi in one of their books and damn near started a riot, because afterwards they ALL wanted me to write my name in their books afterwards. You can see it in the photos a little bit…

Ganagaram showed us around the community garden that surrounds the school. It’s a pretty impressive garden, and the whole community just works together and takes what they need from the garden. It’s a really nice example of how group efforts can work really well actually. Gangaram seems to be the kind of leader of the community. Everyone just kind of does what he tells them too, which I found impressive. The kids will even sit down and listen when he tells them too (this is opposed to most of the kids in the other neighbourhoods we’ve visited. The presence of a camera makes the children absolutely insane and vying for the attentions of the photographer, and there’s absolutely no calming them down afterwards).

So we were told that we would come back at 4:30pm everyday to learn the dance. I was going to Delhi the next day, so I missed the next lesson, but you can read about that later… Gangaram also asked us if we could bring some school supplies (which I suspect might be the reason behind some of the rather excessive hospitality), so we agreed to bring some notebooks and pencils and whatnot. The notebooks are only Rs. 5, so it’s not exactly a huge financial commitment. The school itself runs off of nothing as far as I can tell. For fifty students they have two teachers who both look like they are about fourteen years old (although Sathyu informed us that they are in fact older), as Gangaram to maintain order. There is just one actual room of the schoolhouse, and another little patio-like area, where they sit when it is hot outside. There is no electricity, and they just use chalkboards, and the students all share a few textbooks. Its pretty impressive how much they have accomplished though, especially considering the school is free. A lot of the schools here require that the students pay for their own uniforms and supplies, which means that a lot of families can not afford to send their kids. So not having uniforms and providing the supplies means that almost all the kids can go… especially the younger girls, which I like!

Anyway Gangaram insisted on serving us chai, and we stayed until after lunch being shown around the garden and making arrangements for the coming to learn the dance. At the end of the day he insisted that Anisha get up in front of the older students (who come back after lunch) and pretend to teach them some English so that Casey and I could take photos. I had to laugh, because she wasn’t actually teaching them anything, so god only knows what he wanted the photos for.

after this, we went out for dinner at hotel ranjeet, which i wrote about in the next post, so enjoy!