Slummin' It

Today I had my first real day at work. In the past few sessions that I’ve gone, all I’ve done is talk to some kids about what they want to learn or something like that, but today I actually got to impart some of my expansive knowledge. The kids I taught today ranged from about 10 to probably 14 years old. As I pulled up on a moped, one of the kids yelled something in Gujarati and a bunch more came running over into one of the community member’s houses. I followed with my peer-educator who was helping me translate and was greeted inside by about 15 giddy little Indian kids.

I first started by telling the kids to say their name and what they like to do, and then I began attempting to teach them English. This was a struggle. The kids knew almost no English to begin with, so I started with “Hello, how are you” and taught them to respond with “I am fine” or “I am not fine”. After they seemed to get this, I went on to “What do you like to do” and they would respond with things like school work, cricket etc. This led to some funny exchanges when I had them practice with each other as they would mix all of it up (understandably, they had been learning it for a whole 5 minutes at this point).

Soon, the instruction stopped and the kids turned it into an America Q&A session. They crowded around me and asked me a ton of different questions: “how many tigers are in the USA?”, “when is your diwali?”, “what kind of guns does the army have?” and on and on. At one point they wanted to see an American dollar, which I luckily had on me. They were super-excited to get to hold one of these, because most of the time they just saw them in the movies. The picture above is them crowding around the dollar yelling "picture picture picture". These questions and interactions were really entertaining, and some were quite articulate. This part took up a good hour of the time we had, and near the end started to get silly, as the kids were asking me to breakdance for them etc. One kid (front right) then turns on music and starts breaking out some cool techno dance moves out of the blue which was a little startling for me.

The kids left after this and the mother of the house we were staying in brought over some samosas, which I had said earlier when the kids asked that it was my favorite Indian food. These were delicious. When the peer educator, an older kid and I finished these I was off on my merry way back to India proper.

This was a great experience, I can’t believe it’s what I’ll be doing for the next month.