Visiting a Local School
Despite the modernity of some
of India's largest cities and its role as an emerging
high-tech center, life in India remains centered on the
500,000 or so villages where the majority of the people still
live. Ranging in size from 400 to 5,000, these semi-autonomous
units remain the lifeblood of most Indians. Each village has a
school, and compulsory education until the age of 14. Still,
the education can be spotty, as children are often needed at
planting and harvest times, as well as when family
members are ill. Roughly 50% of Indian children receive an
education that lasts through their early teens. Schools often
consist of little more than a cleared area of dirt under a big
tree, teachers are often ill-educated themselves, and there is
an abject lack of school supplies. On our visit to Pushkar we
visited a local school to meet the children and to bring
much-needed supplies. By Rajasthani standards, this was a
fairly developed school, with a campus consisting of three
rows of block buildings and a recreational field (photo above
right). Singapore American School has continued to donate used
computers, and so the school was also advancing
technologically. Our group focused upon the
necessities--pencils, pens, erasers, and other school
supplies. While these are things that we take for 
granted,
Rajasthani children may have some difficulty attaining the 
basic supplies needed for
learning. The photo above left shows us assembling the
packages for distribution to the students. Each classroom
covered an entire grade, and the students were segregated by
sex. The photo at bottom left shows the seventh grade
classroom. It was a fairly stark setting, a clean whitewashed
room with 2 ceiling fans (donations) and rows of desks, with
the boys seated on the right and the girls on the left. After
distributing gifts, we had a question and answer session with
the students. They were a bit hesitant at first to try their
English, but were very curious about life in the United
States, and what type of music students in Singapore liked.
While they have a hard life, it was easy to see the optimism
that these students had about their lives and the value they
placed upon education. The photo at the bottom right shows
four eighth grade girls practicing their English with the
encouragement of their teachers.
