I’ve been thinking I needed to somehow bring closure, to at least this phase of the Maggamouse Blog for a few weeks now, certainly since I returned to the UK from India, probably a week or two before that even. After all, the dates would have lined up quite nicely if I could have published some kind of departing summary on the day I left. Job done. Case closed. Box ticked. Moving on. Next, please! I decided not to write about my last couple of weeks in Nagpur while still there though. In the few remaining days I had left, it seemed rather wasteful not to spend as many of those hours as possible actually being with eople, rather than in front of a laptop writing about being with them.

In theory, there’d have been nothing stopping me from writing this in the days immediately after my arrival in England of course. I could have done it a lot sooner than nearly 5 weeks later. The henna stains on my nails have grown a good half centimetre closer to the clippers since then and the tan line between my toes from my recently spurned flip-flops is barely visible anymore. I’ve distributed all the homecoming presents, I’ve served all the Indian meals I’ve learned to prepare. More than once. I’ve shared the biggest, most obvious titbits of ‘and then this happened!’ or ‘but of course it’s different in India!’, and I’ve almost stopped saying ‘ha’ instead of ‘yes’. The affirmative sideways head wiggle I realised I’d begun to subconsciously mimic, appears to have faded and yesterday, I took the plug socket adaptor out of the bottom of my bag. Later, I might even fish the old Indora to Bhilgaon bus tickets out of my wallet, though if I’m honest, it’s not due to a reluctance to litter that I keep stuffing the Nagpur INOX cinema ticket back in my coat pocket when if falls out with my hanky. An older version of normality is slowly reasserting itself, as if I was uninstalling updates to my operating system, one at a time. Writing about an increasingly distant experience was indeed becoming ever harder to find the motivation for, like a shore line becomes less photogenic as the boat sails on.

It was just as well his advice resonated with me. What with Hardware and Networking revision classes, the exams themselves, Tally practice and exams, MS-CIT resits, and even educationally unrelated things such as random centre closures for city elections, there was far less formal classroom time available than I had anticipated, even when taking ‘the unexpected’ in to account. It would have been very easy to worry about this and feel I was not providing what I had been asked to deliver, but, with Mark’s words in my mind and a few reassuring emails from Shakyajata, I was able to relax, let go a bit and respond flexibly to the reality, rather than agonise over the unrealised planning. We did, in the end, do enough. We did some work on CVs and we wrote, reviewed and typed some personal statements. We talked about how to find and apply for a job, we filled in some practice application forms, talked about black ink and ‘block caps’ and what N/A means. We chatted about how to prepare for and give a good interview, we briefly role played answering some daft questions. And then, around those shreds of ‘teaching’, we had fun. We enjoyed spending time together, and I finally, finally, eased off my expectations of what people might expect of me (which they probably didn’t anyway) and gently let go of the ‘professional’ conditioning that says you don’t socialise or share things with students. I then began a concerted effort to wring every last drop of these things out of the rapidly evaporating hours.

I went to market to buy groceries with the girls. I asked them to alter a sari for me and teach me how to wear it, as in actually get dressed myself. I was finally brave enough to sample their strange deep-fried biscuits and I let them paint my feet, Bihar style with pink alta. They painted my nails and drew ornate designs up my arms with henna. I didn’t get to run the ‘positive body image’ tutorial work shop I had started to plan, but I did have dinner with them and when I established that the conversation had run into areas such as ‘but you are fat and she is skinny’, I adlibbed a rather poetic series of rhetorical questions about whether a tiny, delicate jasmine flower was more beautiful or valuable than a soft, voluptuous rose, (and anyway didn’t they both smell just as fine?), before standing, hooking my rice-and-chapatti replete belly out of my salwar and pinching my gut up and down to make my belly button mouth along to my loud exclamation ‘I’m proud to be me!’ “Good example, Ma’am!” Hemlata commented, when the company had finished dissolving into fits of giggles. I realised I didn’t know, until I actually spent time with her, that her English had got so good. Of course it wasn’t all about the pleasure of receiving their hospitality. I devised, sourced and prepared an ‘English Style’ picnic, with cucumber sandwiches (crusts off!), peanut butter (on brown) and strawberry jam tarts. I don’t think I’ve ever put so much effort in to planning a ‘cultural awareness tutorial’ as I did into working out how to cook jam tarts without an oven. I introduced them to Marmite, but no one really thanked me for that. After about 15 minutes of trying to persuade Madhu that yes, I really had made all this ‘gourmet cuisine’ myself, I finally asked why she was in such disbelief. “Because she didn’t believe anyone would go to so much trouble for them” was Sheetal’s translation of her sadly moving reply. Half choked with pathos, half cresting the wave of appreciation, the next day I spent 3 hours scouring various supermarkets and ‘expat shelves’ and on our final night together, I cooked them a pasta party with spaghetti Bolognese, tomato penne, a pasta-bow salad, garlic bread (read garlic toast, I did my best), a green salad and a summer pudding. Sort of. As much as you can prepare a summer pudding without summer fruits. I probably spent about six times as much cash on that feast than I spent on an entire 5 months of photocopying and printing class resources. I lived in the same house as the girls of course, so it was easier to spend more time with them and the boys drifted off in dribs and drabs as they returned one here, two there to their home villages to sit the government exams required of them in their own states. There was time for those who remained; however, and it was thanks to the men, not the women (no stereotype enforcement here!), that I now know how to cook poha (flattened rice flakes cooked with potato, tomato and chilli) for breakfast and can just about prepare a batch of chapattis (I’ve stopped setting fire to them now). We chatted a lot about the Dharma. I bought them expensive coffee. I took them to Pizza Hut (Hey, my dad used to work for Pizza Hut, it’s practically in my genes!). We walked round town and went on the swings (who can get the highest!?) and visited the science museum to sit through a ‘planetarium show’ that turned out to be a very poor computer animation of some under the sea scenes in a rundown theatre of a battered, ancient exhibition centre that still had displays heralding the arrival of the internet.

When the students had all finally departed, I then spent time with the family I’d lived with that whole time. Sheetal and I went shopping, bumping up and down on the back of her scooter for the last few times. We visited the Deekshabhoomi to say ‘goodbye’ to Babasaheb’s stupa. We splashed around at a water park that resembled an aquatic version of those photos you see of the abandoned fun fair in Chernobyl. We went for more expensive coffee. I tried to make cookies on the hob; I made flat scones. Everyone agreed the jam tarts were better. I made a ‘Chinese’ that ended up having too much chilli in it even for Aryaketu and Ojas. I thought it was fine. I finally tried to make bread in a pressure cooker with the yeast we bought about a week after I arrived. The cows enjoyed a rather stodgy breakfast. What I learned (as well as just thoroughly enjoying my final fortnight) was that you can’t formalise real sharing. You can’t prescribe or manipulate a genuine connection. It is not possible to ‘plan and deliver’ that ‘content’, you just have to be. You simply have to be content to be you, with others; as interested and accepting of their version of the mundane as you are willing to spend time demonstrating and exemplifying yours. It’s not in the heights of academic discourse that we exhaust the limits of our commonality. We bond over the hilarity of the failed bread and we forge friendships in a dripping heap at the bottom of rickety old water slides as we share stories about summers long gone, before we learned to be scared of the foreigners. So much of that flies in the face of what I’ve been trained to do. It took me five and a half months to unlearn that when a student is crying, they must under no circumstances be hugged. It took me nearly my whole stay to remember that the best teachers are the ones who are confident enough to say ‘I don’t know the answer to that question. But I’ll show you how we can both find out.’ I still feel like a slightly suspicious and potentially untrustworthy liability when I accept a student’s friend request on Facebook. But why? We are, after all, friends. It strikes me as somewhat significant that I am gradually letting go of all this interventionist and ultimately well-meaning but fundamentally dehumanising policy against a background of heightened awareness of the need for safeguarding in the Triratna community. The movement has recently been re-engaging with a history of controversy, allegations of abuse and openly admitted failings in the backstory of a (very young) order that are now resulting in discussions around how to protect the vulnerable and challenge those who would manipulate them. Yet again I find myself realising that in this, as in all things, it is a question of balance. We must accept and address our human potential to fail, to mess up, to hurt each other, but please, never let this be at the cost of the genuine expression of honest, wholesome, friendship and affection.

So that, as they say, was that. That’s a potted summary of the final fortnight of my twenty two weeks in India. But can I give a meaningful summary of my key experiences? Can I provide an insightful reflection from the perspective of my homecoming? Honestly? I don’t know where to start. Nothing’s scared me more in recent weeks than the enthusiasm of friends who ‘can’t wait to hear all about it!’

Finally (you’ll be pleased to know), and with some surprise, since coming home, I’ve learned that sometimes the little personal or domestic ‘duties’, the changes we can make close to home are every bit as revolutionary as the stuff we do that stretches over continents and demands answers from global superpowers. Before I left for India, I had been staying with my (almost 84 year old) bachelor great uncle, indeed, I published a poem and a new series of photos of his home shortly before I went. He supported me with a couple of rent free months and a place to store all the junk I couldn’t quite bring myself to give away or chuck in a charity shop while I was gone. Two weeks before I flew back, he was taken into hospital and so what I had anticipated as a rather roomy period of time to vaguely drift about the country visiting all the friends I’ve been promising to drop in on for years as I tried to postpone a sense of obligation to ‘settle back down’, instead became a short, sharp return straight to his house, where I have been ever since. My time has been concerned with helping him keep track of his medication, and assisting him with liaising between the different agencies that are tasked with supporting his independent recovery in his own home. I’ve been helping, in return for somewhere to live, of course, with basic domestic needs and I’ve taken responsibility for trying to coax a severely diminished appetite back into existence with creative applications of mayonnaise, strategically placed digestives and deliberately timed Cup-a-Soups. The ‘get a cheap tent and walk round the UK because I can’t afford the travel’ plan was probably never a very good one anyway, though in hindsight, it probably wasn’t one of my craziest. Sure, helping round the home of someone with the frayed temper of one in constant pain for whom I normally have to repeat sentences at least 3 times, isn’t always reminiscent of a Butlins Holiday Camp, but I’m very, very happy to be doing it and I’ve been somewhat saddened by the surprised response of those who seem to view it as some kind of martyrdom or heroism on my part. Here is a human being, whom I happen to love and care for, who has helped and supported me, who now needs my help and support. I do not have any commitments or responsibilities that I cannot flex around meeting these needs. Why wouldn’t I do all I can to facilitate this? Perhaps it’s because I’m fresh from a country where this would never be a problem because families literally live three generations to a roof that it seems strange to question it, but I think it’s a sad symptom of a society increasingly fractured into selfish and insular units that value the hedonistic ‘me, me, me’ quick-fix, excite-and-move-on fast track, disposable gratification lifestyle, that so many people consider caring for your elderly relative to be something even worth remarking upon. So I am being the change I want to see in the world and I am quietly getting on with a private revolution in what might appear to be a conservative but has apparently now become an alternative lifestyle.

And so that was the end of the course. The increasingly distant completion of my time trying to teach English in India and my reflections upon it. It wasn’t a fixture in a diary, it wasn’t a note on a calendar. It came like the fading out of a ballad or a short film fogging away into the mist of a blank screen. It didn’t really happen, it just gradually drifted from future tense, to present perfect progressive, to future perfect progressive and then, simply past. See, I did learn some grammar. (Nah, I lied, I had to look that up.) I was sort of aware of this process, of course, and aware that I should be feeling emotional about it all somehow, this slow, slipping away. In India, people generally live much more up against their own emotions, or at least there’s an expectation that one should be quite clear about demonstrating these in certain contexts. My Stiff British Upper Lip didn’t quite get with all the weepy-wailing on several occasions and left me feeling as though I was somewhat cold or lacking. When I waved goodbye to Shakyajata for example, unlike all the students waving her off, I didn’t cry. When I said goodbye to Mark and left him at his farewell dinner with the rest of the young men he’d been living with, I certainly didn’t cry. Actually, I think I punched him on the arm before shouting ‘you smell anyway!’ and running out of the crowded restaurant only to emerge through a bush moments later on the other side of the window where he was sitting and treating him to my finest piggy nose on the glass. Well, I never pretended my expressions of affection were particularly ‘normal’. Sure, I felt a little uncomfortable saying goodbye to our young women’s community and since they all left on the same day, their absence left a palpable vacuum, but I didn’t cry. I wished the departing members of the men’s community good luck for the future with firm handshakes all round, but I didn’t cry. The morning I left the family home, the moment I waved goodbye at the airport, I felt a tug of detachment. But I didn’t cry.

24 hours later, I landed in Manchester on a cold, grey, Saturday dawn and stood on the ‘UK border’. How you can have a border in the middle of a suburban airport, I have no idea but still, I stood under the signs for it with my passport in hand and I didn’t cry. Later, I met my friends, I went to the Manchester Buddhist Centre, I found and hugged (broadly speaking) my ‘original’ Sangha; I didn’t cry. Still later that day, another farewell, to Manchester for London, on a Virgin train. I didn’t cry.

It is perhaps for this reason that I have felt it important to reflect on some of these things now, before writing about my experiences in Bodhgaya last week. It certainly isn’t because I have nothing to say about that, I can assure you!

The first factor that changed the dynamics of our teaching machine was the departure of Shakyajata as she returned to the UK. Every year for the past 8 or so, she has spent which months she can in India, teaching and running the programme, then living in the UK to fund-raise, recover and plan her return as soon as the hot Indian summer has abated. Not only is she the principle fund raiser for the project and an important anchor of consistency for the teachers and the staff, she is also the most experienced English teacher at Aryaloka and it’s her syllabus and approach to delivery that Mark and I have followed. While she has encouraged us to add personal elements and use our own skills where appropriate (my classes utilised a heavy application of illustration for example!), there was never any doubt whose course it was.

As a Dhammacharini (Triratna Order member), she also took the reins in Dharma classes and teaching meditation, often leading puja twice a day with the women’s community and with the men at least once a week. It’s easy, then to see, that when it becomes time for her annual migration back to England, there’s a significant shift in the daily running. Of course, Mark and I are both more than capable of teaching and even continuing the spiritual content but it was perhaps the first event that marking the approach of the end of the academic year, and with it a reminder to our young people that they will soon be leaving the safety of their communities and be back out in the harsh reality of a very flooded and heavily biased jobs market.

Far from the ‘stiff upper lip’ for which we Brits are so famous, my experience is that Indians live far more emotionally on the surface of themselves (at least in responding to the issues which are not socially taboo) and so the tears flowed and the weeping was wailed when it was finally time to wave Shakyajata off to the airport. Less of a personal wrench from my own perspective as one who will be hot on her heels in the coming weeks, the main difference it made to me was a sense of moving a step closer to the firing line with respect to responsibility for the course. Still, with everything left so well organised there was little to practically concern me and it was good that I could present a strong front to support the girls, especially. I did wonder though, if one or two of them looked at me slightly askance; surely I should be weepy wailing too!?

I was also aware that it might seem quite patronising for me to suddenly swan in and start telling them how to do their jobs so I was quite sensitive to couching the classes in flexible terms that allowed me to respond to their experience as and when it became apparent. Thankfully, I quickly realised I had nothing to fear and my colleagues were receptive as well as vocally grateful for a new perspective on both the software and the delivery of content. Education style in India is very teacher centred so it was a new idea to them to engage in a group discussion for example, in which one elicits the answers from the students rather than telling them the ‘facts’. I also soon found that there were many new skills and applications within the programme that I could share. It is all too easy to take one’s own abilities and experiences for granted, so it was a relief to find they were genuinely learning new things at the same time as receiving a new structure for teaching it themselves. Institute director Aryaketu was very vocal about how important he felt the classes were. For me to teach the students to use Photoshop would be one thing but to teach the teachers is equivalent to teaching the same number again for each member of staff trained and as I’d written an entire 12 class course with lesson plans and materials provided, I hoped to ensure that this would be practical with as little drain on their already busy schedules as possible. This was especially the case for Sanjaya; she teaches at the Raipur branch in Chhattisgarh, so her new skills would be spreading out even beyond Maharashtra. For not the first time I reflected upon how impossible it is to really appreciate the extent of your influence as a teacher. I don’t suppose those members of staff who first introduced me to Adobe software in a London suburb 20 years ago thought for a moment that they’d be indirectly facilitating the improvement of employment prospects and therefore living conditions for young people and their families on the other side of the planet two decades hence. That’s the wonderful thing about knowledge. You never really possess it, you just borrow it for a while and then pass it on. I just can’t believe anyone who’d try and keep it to themselves really derives any benefit from it at all.

Anyway, I knew the classes were going well right across the centre when I arrived in the classroom after 10pm one night to prepare for a 7am Photoshop class and found all our community women diligently plugging away at their screens in practice for their upcoming exams. They sit exams in accountancy software called Tally, general IT skills (MSC-IT) and Hardware and Networking (physically setting up PCs). These exams took place off site at the beginning of the month and most passed first time. One or two fell just a few marks short but all is not lost. Each entrant has up to three attempts but I’m confident that no one will require a third.

I have ideas of discussions I’d like to have with the young women (and possibly young men if that’s not considered inappropriate) on body image, I have plans for things I’d like to discuss with all of them about assumed hierarchy (why do you call me ‘ma’am??). I am still hoping to organise further work with NNBY before I leave and I suppose it speaks volumes about my overall feelings about being here that I have already started fund-raising for my return to India.

With only about 12 hours turnaround between returning from the NNBY convention and heading out of Nagpur once more, the fact that it was New Year’s Eve seemed pretty academic, and actually, if it hadn’t been for the hearty cries of ‘Happy New Year’ at midnight, I think I would have been completely unaware that it was even happening. We were heading to Raipur on an 06:30 train out of Kamptee (the stop after Nagpur and a little closer to the education centre in Bhilgaon) and this would be my first experience of a different state (Raipur is in Chhattisgarh) as well as on an Indian train. The purpose of our trip was to visit the branch of Aryaloka Computer Education run by ex-Nagpurian students Satish and Sanjaya; to give them a little support and meet the students benefitting from their tuition. We were only scheduled to be there for one night; a fact I queried given the extent of the five hour train journey.  Since we were going all that way, I wondered if it would not be better to have at least two nights, maybe spend a bit more time with the students, even run a workshop or two. I was greeted with nonplussed indifference by Aryaketu who couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. Five hours, he informed me patiently, is not a long train journey.

I had been told to expect delays; Indian trains, a bit like Indian everything else, do not run on time. At least, they run in their own time, a unique temporal framework that most Indians seem to tick along quite happily in synch with, but would drive most Europeans to distraction. I can’t remember if our train was due at 06:00 and arrived at 06:30 or was due at 06:30 and arrived at 07:00, which probably goes to show I am making some headway with regards to accepting a more relaxed schedule. Either way, it was only half an hour difference between the roughly predicted arrival time and the reality, which isn’t bad at all, even by British standards. I’ve certainly been delayed longer by trains in England.
I found the experience of train travel was equally a lot more pleasant than I had thought might be the case, though I expect this had a lot to do with the fact that we had bought quite expensive tickets to ride in ‘Three Tier AC’. This means the bunks stack three on top of one another (trains seem to be furnished as sleeper carriages by standard, probably due to the sheer distances involved) and the carriage has air conditioning. So, our travel wasn’t quite as swanky as ‘Two Tier AC’, but was a good deal more comfortable than ‘second class’, or even ‘general’ carriages; but then they probably

don’t really need air-conditioning since there’s not usually any glass in the windows. All in all, I really quite enjoyed the train. Once I’d clambered into my drop down bunk (I’d thought I might sit up in it but this wasn’t really an option so I reclined instead), the only thing disturbing the gentle rocking of the train was the calls of various vendors passing up and down the carriage selling ‘CHAI!’, ‘DOSA!’ or, intriguingly ‘CHIPSY BISCUITS!’ Now, I’ve felt desperate for a cup of tea once in a while but I’ve never realised it could be such an urgent business as to require quite so much volume, but never mind. As for the ‘chipsy biscuits’… I’m afraid I unadventurously left those to the imagination.
Despite the minor ‘reality shift’ in terms of our departure time, we arrived in Raipur reasonably on schedule and were met by Satish, who had organised a car to take us a local order member’s home. Here, we were greeted with a far more sedate cup of chai before being served lunch. The food was very similar to what I’d been told was standard Maharashtrian fare and I enquired about the difference with Chhattisgarhi dishes. Actually, it turned out the family were Maharashtrians which explained the familiarity!

After lunch, we had a little rest before meeting a large group of students in the family’s very impressive shrine room. The young people who had come to meet with us on the first day were all ex-students and had completed their studies with Aryaloka in the previous year. We were keen to meet with them to establish how successful they had been in their post-study ambitions; had they found employment? Were they continuing in study? Had they stayed in Raipur or returned to their villages? A great many of them were still studying, either in the equivalent of English 6th Form and Further Education, still working through their 11th or 12th Standard classes, or in first, second or even third years of BA or BSc courses.

There is not currently any provision for full time study as enjoyed by our men’s and women’s communities in Nagpur, however the courses offered by Aryaloka can frequently be fitted in around other commitments. Many of the young people we spoke to on the first day had been able to find employment following the course, often in accounting departments owing to their new skills in the programme Tally, and thanks to this were able to pay their course fees and support themselves whilst studying, or in many cases, pay their course fees, support themselves and financially assist their families, also while studying. It certainly set a contrast against the British system of support during study, despite the changes and controversy in recent years. There is absolutely no expectation or assumed right to education here; there’s no doubt in any mind that it is a privilege to be valued and paid for. The other outstanding observation I made and found very touching was the readiness with which most students expressed their gratitude, not just to the institute that is Aryaloka, but personally to Shakyajata. They were quite open in sharing an awareness that without her support and tuition, they would not be enjoying the benefits of their studies, nor feeling even half as optimistic about the future.

Another heart-warming discovery was the perceived role that the Dharma study had played in their development; a majority of the group were quite clear that this was an important element in their studies that had equipped them to deal successfully with many of life’s trials and tribulations in a balanced and trouble-free way. Two groups of young women had even set up their own communities since leaving and were supporting each other in their practice. They told us that this had been a unique benefit of the Aryaloka course, which they would not have found at another education provider.

Our schedule for the second day involved saying a grateful farewell to our hosts and their beautiful home. I was most impressed by the gardens; a roof terrace, watered by hand for at least an hour before breakfast and an equally well kept front garden with the first lawn I’ve seen since leaving England! Chhattisgarh seems wetter than Nagpur and is famous for particularly vicious mosquitoes as a result! We then took a car journey into the centre of Raipur to visit the Computer Centre and meet some current students. Sanjay and Satish again welcomed us and we were shown into a building that made me really appreciate the facilities in Nagpur. A tiny little building with not more than 6 or 7 computers and an even smaller general classroom that I think is probably used for English, when a teacher is available. We met with two groups that day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon and just as well too that it was split as we struggled to fit even half the group into the room. It was adequate though, for us to hear their stories, which sounded so very similar to many I have heard since my arrival. It struck me that it was probably not very common for anyone to ask these young people about their lives and regardless of any learning that they may or may not have received, even showing an interest in them was a

Our Raipur trip ended with a meal at the station before another, slightly delayed but generally comfortable journey home to Nagpur. The station fare may not have been the highest quality sustenance I have enjoyed in my time here, but I was left with enough food for thought to see me through. I found it genuinely impressive to see how Aryaloka operates in Raipur; it may be a smaller centre and not yet developed to the same degree but already the positive results of the work being carried out there are palpable and those who have benefitted are more than capable of voicing their genuine gratitude for the meaningful opportunities they have been given. That the Raipur centre is run by two ex-students from the residential courses in Nagpur also demonstrates just how far reaching the work of Young Indian Futures continues to be. It’s often easy to forget the scope of ones’ actions, it’s easy to miss taking into account anything that doesn’t happen directly in front of you and as a teacher it is common to end up wondering really just how much difference you’re making. This trip was a wonderful opportunity to realise though, just how far even small acts of positivity can spread, how a single seed of learning can germinate into fruit that not only benefits the student, but also improves the lives of those around them in so many ways.

Pushpa told us that shortly before coming to study here, she had started feeling a burning pain in her eyes and that they were watering a lot. She first noticed it at home, when she was sewing, and her family had arranged for her to see an optician, who had prescribed glasses. Unfortunately, her family had not been able to afford these and so there was nothing further that they could do.

The nature of the work with the residential students at Aryaloka as funded by Young Indian Futures has a history of stretching beyond the classroom into health needs and it was not the first time Shakyajata had arranged a medical appointment for a student, hoping to then fund the required treatment from the charitable donations to the charity. Sheetal was optimistic that an eye appointment and glasses for Pushpa would not cost more than two thousand rupees (that’s about twenty five pounds at the current exchange rate) and so, on Monday morning, I set off on the bus with them both to support as much as I could. I’d spoken with my mum at the weekend and she’d mentioned that she would transfer some cash to my account for Christmas, so while I’m having to be very careful with my pennies during my time not earning here, I felt I could stretch to this cost myself without dipping into the charity pot. It seems, from a western perspective, like a small thing, just a basic need, but something that can make such a big difference to daily quality of life.

I’ll be honest; my reasons for going weren’t purely altruistic. Yes, I did want to support Pushpa and yes, I wanted to help free up time for Shakyajata (she’s had a very busy week conducting interviews and filming a documentary), but I was also very interested to get a nosey into an Indian eye hospital! I’m not so curious about the Indian healthcare system I fancy trying it out for myself, but if the opportunity arises... well, why not? It wasn’t far, just a little further up Dr Ambedkar Road from one of our favourite restaurants and it seemed clean, welcoming and professional, if a little old fashioned. I hadn’t been too sure what to expect but I was pleasantly relieved. Sheetal told me that this would be a far better standard of care centre than the one Pushpa would have attended before coming to Nagpur. We registered and waited in the foyer, Pushpa looking nervous, Sheetal fielding questions about us (and I think mostly about me) from the other patients. I guess they were curious due to my attendance but at least it gave Sheetal (from what I could gather) an opportunity to promote the work of the institute and generally spread awareness of Aryaloka. I had tried to make Pushpa feel better by saying ‘at least you get the morning out of the classroom!’ but I’m not sure that did much to ease her nerves, especially when she was called up to read letters from a familiar looking chart, publically, in the waiting room! She was then handed a slip of paper with some details about her performance and we settled down to wait again. It didn’t seem that we had to wait long. I’d like to think we waited the standard length of time but I’ve been aware of a couple of times when the presence of a white face has facilitated a queue jump, so maybe we got lucky!

The optician was a kind man, with good English who told me he’d visited London twice, as a tourist. I guess an eye doctor must be a pretty well paid job! Perhaps not as well paid as some would like however; he examined Pushpa’s eyes and told us there was nothing wrong with her vision at all, it was actually very good. He said it was common for people to be given very weak and unnecessary prescriptions in order for the practitioner to receive some commission but that in this case, he did not feel poor eyesight was the cause of the pain. His diagnosis was sensitivity to airborne pollutants and instead prescribed eye drops! No need for any expense! The consultation only cost two hundred rupees (I tried to pay but they could not take my card or change my 2000 note, so Sheetal stepped up!) and the drops themselves, which we collected from a chemist on the way home, were less still than that!

A very good outcome indeed! No expensive glasses (and I imagine Pushpa is relieved not to be wearing them!) and no further messing about with fitting frames and lenses or going back to collect them the next day. We were even home in time for lunch! So far so good for Pushpa too; I asked her on Tuesday evening if the drops were helping. “Yes!” she said, her eyes were much better. Hopefully this will help her study, but if nothing else it’s enough that she’s simply more comfortable. So why have I felt the need to share this publically? Partly, it’s interesting, as I said, to see inside the machinations of healthcare systems in other countries but mostly for another far more important reason. I actually feel really grateful. I’m verging towards the proud but I’ll try and curb that one, mostly I’m feeling grateful to have this opportunity to work alongside such compassionate people. People who notice another’s suffering and take time to find and then provide what they need.

For the first few weeks, it was uncommon to be in the classroom alone and we were doing a lot of team teaching. This phase is starting to recede a bit now as we each make time for lesson preparation or other tasks and errands, but it was a wonderful rediscovery and hopefully won’t stop all together. In my first year in the classroom (academic year 2002/03), classes were actively timetabled to feature team-taught periods and it was a real joy to support each other, share delivery, improvise off unexpected moments of inspiration (or disaster!), almost like actors might and have the ‘so, how did that go!?’ conversation afterwards. A robust course, whatever the subject, should have input from various brains, I think. Not just for a greater breath of subject knowledge, but the different life experiences and personalities of different practitioners is bound to make a difference too. One of the factors that eroded my love of teaching in the UK was this gradual drift from genuine teams delivering substantial content to more than one year where it ended up being just me. Course leader, course tutor, only subject teacher. Just the one brain-full to go round the class.

I’ve always thought that course content is essentially greater than the sum of its parts and felt sorry for any group who only ever had me (or any other individual teacher for that matter) teaching them. It never seemed adequate.

With a good team, if nothing else, you can play to each other’s strengths whilst planning and we’ve certainly been doing plenty of that! Shakyajata is by far the most experienced among us, not just in terms of having taught in India for many years but also in her experiences as a Teacher of English before coming here. She’s been fronting a lot of the planning decisions as well as much of the more technical grammar points in active teaching. Mark is, a little like me, making a shift from his main subject, Science, to English teaching but before leaving the UK he attended an intensive TEFL course which sounded like a very useful, if slightly stressful, experience.

It’s not as if the cessation of my UK teaching career was exactly pleasant either (you can read the details here if you don’t already know them!) and before I arrived, I’d been out of the classroom for over a year, so I’ve not been feeling very confident with planning or delivery. Thankfully, one thing I’ve never lost any confidence in is drawing and I’ve been making the most of the generous preparation time that is comes with living on site to do lots of that! He’s been getting really stuck into his new direction, with lots of impressive ideas and confidence, happily taking on extra classes for non-residential students at the Indora campus in the evenings and even spending a lot of his ‘down’ time helping the young men’s community practise. And then there’s been me! I’ve not shared in Mark’s confidence with the language teaching. My TEFL was conducted entirely online and whilst there were bits I breezed through pertaining to general classroom management, delivery theory and assessment processes, there was also a lot that I sort of managed to limp through off the back of a lot of note taking and hope for the best in the multiple choice tests. There were more in depth written assignments but no actual teaching practice. I tried to arrange some experience by volunteering as an assistant at my local FE college but it never transpired.

As a visual learner myself, whilst I recognise the need to present information in a variety of ways, I definitely feel more fired up about lessons with a strong visual content. The students do seem to enjoy it too. There’s something very reassuring about going into a classroom with a couple of hours preparation under your belt. I never was one who liked to ‘wing’ it and I think I was one of the few teachers in my last team who did actually have filed lesson plans for each lesson, much to the apparent disgust of some more ‘natural’ colleagues! Through being able to produce lots of visual content, I’ve felt like I’ve managed to chisel out a tiny nook of comfort zone in an otherwise entirely new suite of (occasionally hostile) experiences. Being aware of my learning style bias has been important, but given the breath of backgrounds in our team, I don’t feel too worried and have thought how much I’d enjoy having three different teaching approaches myself; a visual artist, a singer/English professional and a scientist!

One benefit of team teaching is that even when you are taking a less active role, you are still in a really strong position to observe your colleagues and I’ve been learning a lot, not just about how to teach English but about the subject itself. Did you know that the difference between when you use ‘a’ or ‘an’ is in whether or not the next word starts with a vowel?! It seems so obvious when someone says it (a mouse, an elephant) and I’d have known if someone had got it wrong; but I’d not have been able to pin down why. Ahhh, bring back the relative certainties of red plus blue equals purple any day! Nevertheless, I’m badgering on, nibbling away at new titbits of knowledge as they present themselves and, slowly, I suppose, I must be making some progress! I’ve had some positive feedback from those who have seen my classes anyway, and the students are always smiling.

Aside from mild feelings of inadequacy alongside my more experienced or more confident colleagues, there have been many discoveries I have been enjoying about my unusual teaching renaissance and though there may be things about my Indian experience that leave me wanting (Oh, for the joys of a simple baked potato!), I feel my time in the classroom has been feeding a deep thirst that has been building for some months (or even years). The feeling that I am able to provide some assistance to others, meaningfully and in a way that empowers them to improve their own experiences of life is unparalleled in the sense of satisfaction it brings me. Feeling not just that I am part of a team delivering a much needed service but that the recipients are genuinely appreciative and understand the difference education can make to them is a rare luxury. I have found of my teaching in the UK that an almost resentful belligerence to receiving it is a sad symptom of the way we approach free, equal access to education. Many young people see school and college as a necessary evil to endure, a bit like a reluctant gym member; something one must be seen to be doing but with no real sense of purpose or faith in the outcome.

As well as the aforementioned team teaching, one refreshing difference here is that because we are not following a set qualification, it is entirely up to us to decide how to pace the content. Yes, we must make sure our learners receive the basis in the English language they need, but the freedom from deadlines and minimum unit content has been like taking a giant weight from my shoulders. Shakyajata is wise enough to recognise that, at least in this instance, less is most definitely more and as such we are planning for small amounts of  easily digestible content that stretch enough, but never too much.

Maybe then, it’s simply that given the freedom to operate as professionals, the time and space and trust to assess what our learners need and then respond to that thoughtfully and meaningfully, we are able to deliver a quality educational experience which facilitates genuine learning and meaningful progression, not just the ability to meet hollow criteria that doesn’t actually demonstrate anything beyond a bureaucratic dependency that never really benefits anyone. Maybe our learners are actually learning. And maybe they know that. Maybe that’s what they are grateful for. Maybe that’s (at least partly) why they invite us to dinner and want to play football with us at the weekend!

I have been here for six weeks now and it’s always about this time in a course where you really begin to see personalities emerge as you get to know a group. The naturally compromised nature of verbal communication to form a rapport might have had something of an impact on this but it’s funny the things you notice. Still, despite language barriers, personalities shine through. Hidden depths are revealed, life stories are told and I find myself become increasingly fond of every little idiosyncrasy I encounter. It’s always hard to say good bye to a tutor group you’ve really enjoyed teaching and though I don’t think for a moment that we’ll be able to discuss our deepest feelings in any detail by the time the date of my departure arrives, I somehow already know that these groups are not going to be among the easiest to have to say good bye to.

The experience of waking up at the weekend and realising I’m actually a little sorry to not be in the classroom is something I’ve not felt for a long, long time and it’s good that this is happening despite being in very new territory with my teaching. It seems like the good old days of teaching visual language may not be too far away anyway.