Gone Fishin'

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. 

Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

I have painted this old Chinese proverb on the bare plaster wall of a staff room today. Its simple wisdom speaks volumes to me as a teacher, and as a human. It is relevant to so many aspects of life, especially right now as I live and work as both teacher and volunteer.  I feel that my most significant role whilst working here in Nepal is to be passing on skills and knowledge, not just donations or simple school lessons. It feels more important to leave and impart lasting knowledge than put a plaster on simple immediate issues and provide a stop-gap for short term sustenance. Hence why I undertook the teacher training programme, rather than just teach for three months in one of the schools. Hence why I’ve been working with teachers to improve their knowledge, rather than with students to teach them short term lessons. Hence why I painted the proverb.

I had an important meeting with Ramesh from Icon Nepal earlier in the week, where we discussed (amongst other things) trying to provide some long term support for the schools that I have helped with my training. He has offered for himself and Mr Krishna to continue working with them for just fourteen pounds a day for each follow up training session; something I hope that myself and PoD can come together to help fund, to give these schools a lasting chance at professional development.

He also invited me along to Shrijana Higher School on Wednesday: a school that Icon started work with two months ago, introducing their innovative training on creative teaching and implementing their superb text books within the school. The difference in this place compared to comparable government schools after only such a short time was astounding.

I spent time with Ramesh inspecting the kindergarten classes (the six classes he’s been working with) and doing a training session with their teachers. Every teacher had displays around the walls, folders for each child’s continuous assessment, and calm, focused and enthusiastic classes. The children were playing and learning with real concentration and excitement – proving the merits of positive discipline, stimulus and creative teaching.

Our second meeting made me laugh. We went for coffee after the school visit to a nearby café, with something along the lines of ‘Chicken lab’ in the name of the shop (dubiously uninviting, but with lack of options we thought coffee at least would be safe). We sat down and before we’d even ordered, a jovial young lass bounded up to the table with two coffees. Amazed at her powers of telepathy, I sat open-mouthed in awe, until she muttered “Complimentary”. Unsure why, we merrily sipped away, thinking we were on to a winner. Two minutes later, another cheery chap skipped up with a little plate of morsels – onion bhajis, chicken skewers and popadoms, again with a “complimentary” announcement. At this point I felt a bit concerned; not just for the profitability of their enterprise, but also for my own digestion. Was this some sort of scam to poison us and rob me blind? Why would anyone give me free things so happily (the grins were immense and unnerving) when I’ve not even bought anything? Fortunately, the mystery was solved when I quizzed the most senior member of the Happy Days Clan who informed me that today was their official opening and they were wishing for happiness to be spread to all people who entered “The Chicken Lab”. Bring on the bhajis!!

On Sunday morning, I had a breakfast meeting (sadly not as glamourous as I’d always imagined) with Mr Goutam, the government official from the District Education Office who had attended my training days. Whilst quaffing on cups of curdled Nepali tea, I eagerly quizzed him on all of my concerns about the suffering teachers I’d been working with and the current plans for development within the education system as a whole. His answers and his comments were saddening but at the same time very mildly heartening. He explained how one of the biggest problems that the ministry face with the current system is their inability to remove “bad teachers”.  It seems that the country is plagued with lazy educators who have been nestled snugly in their role for many a year and have no desire to leave. They also have no desire to do any work and don’t care tuppence for training, school development or the little kiddies they are tending each day. Should a complaint be made which creates enough of a stir to call in the big guns, they are simply unable to do anything to discipline or improve the situation, because (it appears) of the fragile political situation the country still trembles within. Everyone here is strongly affiliated with a political party, the Maoists being the top dogs for threatening power, and it seems that these “bad teachers” just get their equivalent of NUT terrorists to have a few words to Mr Education Minister and his pals and case closed. How you even begin tackling a messed up mine-field like that, I have no idea.

We talked through several other issues, including my concern that teachers are not getting sufficient training. He informed me that there is training available for teachers if they ask for it. ‘Do they know this?’ I questioned. ‘If they’ve had it before, then yes they do.’ ‘Well, how would they have had it before if they don’t know to ask for it in the first place?’ I urged. ‘They ask for it and then they have it.’ Hmm. Not sure if that conversation was flawed because of our stilted language issues or a lack of any sort of sense and logic in the system. Fundamentally, I suspect this is thus not an advertised service on offer, hence the total lack of training and expenditure on their behalf. Unbeknown to him and his buddies, I plan to spread the word to all and sundry, and pronto!

I also grilled him on what seems to me to be the ludicrous conundrum of non-English speaking teachers teaching a curriculum entirely in English to students that cannot speak English with books written in elaborate and lengthy anglicised prose. ‘We are aiming high’, he grinned. ‘You are utterly insane’, I silently retorted. We agreed that the current system was somewhat flawed, and he fed me a glimmer of hope in his explanation of the plan to enforce a clear curriculum into all nursery classes to ensure that children can read and write by the time they start class one aged six years old (and have to begin reading Dickensian-esque text books). Oh dear. I guess a little glimmer of hope in a vast cavernous empire of educational doom.

To refresh my mind and soul the following day, I took an early morning hike up to Happy Village; a neighbouring area two miles along the lake.

Greeted with ‘Namastes’ from all and sundry, my day began with breakfast at Feel Great Restaurant, surrounded by butterflies and dragonflies.

The walk took me past lakeside paddocks with nature’s finest scenes at play: cows nudging green shoots alongside storks, lizards and lily-padded landscapes.

I felt both great and happy when I returned from the village at noon, hoorah indeed.

The latter half of my week has been a paint-tastic festival of coloured gloop, paint brushes and cartoon animals. Part of my follow up work with the schools has been to offer them aid with their basic needs and four of the schools requested painting in their nursery.

I started off with Anapurna Primary; the first school I ever visited, and the one that had responded so enthusiastically to my training. I had spent time designing and planning the three rooms (I decided to paint the entire school for them, as it was so small) and had spent a laborious two and a half hours sitting in the paint shop buying the stock (the free cup of coffee and fragmented chat did not make up for the tedium of watching paint being made. Worse than watching it dry, believe me.) Yet the blank walls of Anapurna begged for colour, life and artwork.

Two and a half days later, with thanks to the three other PoD volunteers, we achieved a make-over worthy of a dodgy day-time TV DIY programme. Time for the big reveal:

Every room fills me with joy – even if I do say so myself. I think that simply adding colour and life (and hopefully academic stimulus) to rooms that were bare stone walls has lifted the spirit of the place and the children will hopefully feel that spirit when they return. I was also thrilled that the three teachers gave up their holiday to join us and help. They then returned the thanks by offering us a blessing on our completion – tika blessing, flower posies and a khata.

Keeping the theme of that proverb alive, I asked the teachers to take responsibility for decorating their staff room themselves (sometimes used as a spill-over classroom), after having watched me at work to see how I did it. Hesitant at first, they soon set to work sketching a design and were eager to seek my approval. Less eager, however, when I gave them all a paintbrush and some paint tins and told them to “go for it”. The results were exciting, endearing and utterly awful. I was so proud of their achievements but it was like giving a child a paintbrush for the first time and asking for skilled artistic input. Straight lines, clear forethought, symmetrical strokes and neatness were all non-existent, but they did write a Nepali quote on the wall about education (translation makes it a bit iffy) and the months of the year and seasons.

My absolute favourite wall, however, was the tree wall. During my training, I had used the metaphor of a tree to describe a school; explaining that the building was the trunk, the teachers were the branches and the children were the leaves. We extended the metaphor thoroughly (as is my pleasure) to incorporate lots of other pedagogical concepts. Thus I was thrilled when I was ushered into the staff room to inspect their finished work and saw that they had painted a huge tree on one wall, void of leaves, and planned to get every child to put a painted hand print on when they come back from holidays to make the tree complete. Just wonderful.

(Here’s how I envision the final product…)

To finish, I added the “Teach a man to fish” proverb in the large empty space they’d left blank (or rather, severely botched up) to give them that little bit of a push for the future. Here’s hoping that lots of little fishermen and women depart from that school in a few years time.

Welcoming my best friend’s baby, Sofia Beatrice, into the world this week reawakened my thoughts on innocence. A baby’s innocence is surely the most precious and beautiful thing in the world. The more children I meet out here, the more I value their innocence and feel angered at how so many children here are being forced to grow up too quickly. Once shattered, such innocence can never be remade. Seeing how tough life can be for children out here is hard to stomach. The amount of children living on the streets is the most shocking aspect of Nepali life for me. Children as young as five or six can be seen running barefoot in rags around the streets at all hours, huddled together in doorways at night. There are no governmental provisions for their protection or salvation; it is down to individual charities to save them. The children I have spent time with in the orphanages (all of whom have been rescued from the streets) have all lost the hopeful innocence they were born with; life’s already been a struggle for them. And yet the more children I spend time with over here, the more hope I feel that it is never too late to cherish their childhood: innocence, once broken, can never be repaired, but what lingers can always be nurtured. Seeing the street-kids playing with their plastic-bag kites fills me with hope. Watching adolescent boys grin with glee when swinging on the communal swings erected for the holidays fills me with hope. Taking a struggling café owner’s children out for the afternoon to play on the swings and skip gleefully along the lakeside shore fills me with hope.

Part of my job as a teacher is to nurture children: whether I’m teaching Shakespeare, working on sixth form UCAS statements or child-minding two cheeky Nepali children for an afternoon, I am striving to feed a mind and nurture a spirit.

I re-read Angela’s Ashes this week, a beautiful novel about the hardship of an Irish childhood, and came across these wonderful lines:  Stock your mind, stock your mind. It is your house of treasure and no one in the world can interfere with it…Your mind is your house and if you fill it with rubbish it will rot in your head...You might be poor, your shoes might be broken but your mind is forever your palace.

Whatever my role out here might be (and I am yet to understand exactly what it is) the importance of helping to build these hidden palaces inside the minds of children is surely something to strive for. And what more can I hope for than to encourage teachers here to help these little fishermen and women to cast off into the most idyllic waters imaginable.