Final Report March 2009
Ms. Griselda Murray Brown


Introduction

I arrived in the village of Setrawa at the end of August 2008, intending to stay for six weeks: two flight-changes and seven months later I finally left!

I volunteered with Sambhali in Setrawa so much longer than planned because of the great potential I found there – both in the girls and the project. By the end of September, I had learnt the names of my pupils and was just getting to know them as individuals; by then, Helen (my fellow volunteer) and I had just started a special literacy class for Dalit girls Guddi, Laxmi and Maya, who received no other form of formal eductaion. It seemed to me the beginning of something exciting, not the end – so I decided to stay on...

Living in Setrawa

The volunteers’ amenities, like those of the villagers, are basic. There are two hobs, a mini-fridge, a computer with (sometimes painfully slow) internet access, a tap and buckets for washing, and a squat loo (to these, Helen and I added: a sandwich toaster, kettle and electric heater – but they remain ‚basic’). Yet the longer I stayed in Setrawa, the less that seemed to matter: the more involved I got in the life of the school and the village, the less I seemed to need by way of material comfort. The things I had previously thought necessary in life (T.V., dishwasher, Starbucks...) seemed needless in Setrawa.

The villagers were more hospitable than I could have imagined. We could hardly pass thorugh the market without hearing eager cries of „Come my house?“ from either side. Several times a week, Helen and I took chai, accompanied by delicious Indian sweets, at the homes of our pupils. We were invited to have supper at our neighbour Teena’s home (with her two, energetic, young sons!) with a similar regularity; Teena is a little crazy, but kind-hearted - and makes fantastic curries! Our immediate neighbour, Gunjan, is a friendly, intelligent woman with a lovely sense of humour, who, sadly, we only really got to know near the end (she is also an excellent cook).

In February, we were invited to take part in the Sambhali School’s local teacher Rekha’s ten-day wedding – an experience of traditional Rajasthani culture that simply doesn not present itself to the regular tourist. Each day, we were invited to have both lunch and supper at the home of a different member of Rekha’s extended family. We walked though the village to these houses, together with Rekha, her sister Usha, and various aunts, sisters-in-law and female cousins, singing traditional wedding songs; when we arrived were each time presented with a huge Rajasthani thali to share. It usually consisted of curried vegetables, daal, rice, chapati or pani puri, various pickles, curd, and an array of sugary sweets – a veritable feast! In the evenings there was singing and dancing, either to live Marwari drumming or to a Bollywood mix! I could not have felt more welcomed nor more involved.

Though the people of Setrawa have relatively little (and some less then others), they seemed to want nothing more than to share it with us. That is part of the reason why my volunteering experience was such a rich one.

Teaching English

Attendance: 5pm English Class
Around seventy girls and women enroled when the Sambhali School was first established in Setrawa. Around forty of that number attend the 5pm English Class on a regular basis (i.e. more than twice a week); and, in March, 2009 thirty to thirty-five girls attended that class each day. Some girls came almost every day, while others came a couple of times a week (depending on family/domestic obligations).

We had no wish to ‚punish‘ absence (and could not have, anyway), but instead decided to reward attendance. In October, we made an ‚Attendance Chart‘ - a poster-sized grid on which each girl had a box for each day, in which she would receive a sparkly, coloured star sticker if she turned up; when she had accumulated twelve stars she was rewarded with a small gift (a coloured pencil, Micky Mouse eraser etc. – all bought in Jodhpur). The system worked far better than we had anticipated: class numbers rose, and the girls became positively obsessed with their – and their classmates‘ – star tallies!

Organisation of the English Class
From September to early November, Helen and I taught all the girls in one class, with Rekha translating. When Elisa, a volunteer from Germany, arrived in November, we decided to split the class so that she took the older girls (called the ‚Big Girls‘ in Rekha’s register) and Helen and I the younger ones. After Christmas, though Elisa had left, we decided to keep this arrangement: the older ones liked having their own class and were able to cover more complex material more quickly; it also benefitted the younger ones, who were able to dwell for longer on a topic and to show when they hadn’t understood something without worrying so much about holding the older ones back. After Christmas, the classes were fuller than before (particularly the older girls‘class), which meant that splitting the class (and using both classrooms) was not only preferable but necessary.

The two classes were not strictly divided by age (as in Rekha’s register), however. Helen and I decided to put some of the bright younger girls, who we thought would benefit from being stretched, into the older class. We decided not to move older girls into the younger class, as it might affect their enthusiasim and confidence (and the younger class was the bigger class anyway).

(Future volunteers: please ask to see my reports on individual girls (with photos), if interested.)

Structure and Content of English lessons
We began each lesson by asking the class, „What day is it today?“; the girls would put their hands up, desperate to answer, and the one who was chosen (often someone quiet) would reply orally, „Today is the...“, then write the sentence on the whiteboard for everyone to copy. They seemed to like the familiarty of having this routine; also, it provided a good opportunity to encourage shy girls to speak up.

We usually taught one ‚topic‘ per week. With the younger girls‘ class, it was often a ‚vocabulary topic‘ such as: places in a town, food and drink, clothing, animals etc.. With the older girls we focussed more on grammatical issues, such as: sentence structure, regular present and past tense verbs (and some irregular ones), prepositions etc. (Future volunteers: for an exhaustive list of everything we taught from September to March, see the seperate, appropriately titled document.)

We taught the selected topic on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, and on Thursday gave the girls a short test on what they had learnt. Surprisingly, they loved these tests, and often asked more for of them! They were a good way to find out how much they had taken in and whether the topic needed to be repeated the following week. (On Fridays, we did games and sports in place of 5pm English class.)

Active, oral English lessons proved most effective and most fun. The girls spend much of their school day copying mindlessly from blackboards: understandably, they don’t always want to do more of that at Sambhali. Their spoken- is generally worse than their written-English, so we tried to incorporate some speaking into every lesson. For example: in a lesson on ‚Describing People’ (and when to use the verbs ‚To Be and ‚To Have’), after conjugating the verbs and asking various girls to fill in the blanks in some example sentences (such as ‚He is happy.’; ‚We are sisters.’), we made them chose a partner and sit in two long lines facing each other. We gave each girl in one line a picture of a person cut from a magazine; she then had to descibe the person, using the correct verbs, to her partner, who wrote the sentences down in her book. They then did the same with a new picture. The excersize was good because it relied upon the girls’ communicating with each other.

Special Topics (5pm Class)
The World

The girls seemed to have little awareness of the world outside Setrawa: indeed, when I asked them to point to India on the world map (hinting that it was coloured pink), their fingers finally settled on Iceland!

We started by teaching the appropriate vocabularly (The World, continent, country etc.), then with a couple of lessons on some facts about the word...

Griselda: „Vimala, how old are you?“
Vimala: „Um, ah, I am eleven years old.“

Griselda, on the whiteboard:

VIMALA IS 11 YEARS OLD.
THE WORLD IS 4,600,000,000 YEARS OLD.

[Gasps heard all around!]

We then gave a basic introduction to the six different continents (not including Antarctica)- their climate, population, languages, religions etc. After this, we split the class into six groups, distributing the older girls equally between them, and allocating each group a continent. Each group was given two A2 size pieces of paper, a collection of pictures of their continent (taken from travel brouchures, National Geographics etc.), the information about the continent from the previous lesson, the use of a communal collection of coloured pencils, glue etc., and told to produce a poster.

At first, they were bewildered, never having designed something of the sort before. Soon, however, they got into it, sharing out the tasks between them. When the posters were finished, a few lessons later, the older girls from each group presented their poster, complete with the facts about their continent, to the rest of the class.

We did other similar ‚poster’ projects throughout the year, to encourage teamwork and creativity. These included one on animals grouped into habitats (‚Desert’, ‚Jungle’ etc.), and one for which each group had to come up with a new Bollywood film and design a poster advertising it – the posters were then judged by Ernestine (from Sambhali’s Austrian partner organisation, Soziale Initiative, who was visiting) and a prize given to the best group!

3pm Literacy Class
We set up a one-hour literacy class for Dalit girls Guddi, Laxmi and Maya, who at that time did not attend school. We focussed at first on writing the English alphabet (some of which they had been taught by previous volunteers), then on learning the phonetic alphabet, and then on reading English words; I have written about these classes and the girls’ progress at length in a seperate report also on the
Sambhali website. The girls now attend the private Saraswati School in Setrawa (sponsored by Helen and me through Sambhali’s ‚Literacy Program’), and will, I hope, continue to take part in the life of the Sambhali School and attend the 5pm English class.

Sewing Class
The morning sewing class (11am – 1pm) involved not only sewing but various other art and/or craft activities. The class was attended mainly by unmarried girls in their late teens, a few married women and those girls who did not attend school (though that will now no longer include the most regular participants Guddi, Laxmi and Maya – see above). The teenage girls and women spent the time sewing and chatting, while Helen and I introduced the younger girls to different arty activities. These included: making beaded jewelery, making ‚friendship bracelets’ from coloured thread, drawing and painting (sometimes ‚still life’ compositions, sometimes imaginary creations), spray-painting (with old toothbrushes!), stencilling, making felt faces, and making things with play-dough. It was a great time for them to be creative, and to concentrate quietly on something away from the noise of home.

At the beginning, the women worked on their own sari blouses etc. on the machines, and the two hours felt more like a social gathering (a kind of support group, perhaps) than a class. In January, however, it was decided that the Jodhpur project Sambhali girls would run a week-long market stall selling their handicrafts in Jodhpur, and we thought this would be a good opportunity for the Setrawa girls and women to contribute their own items and earn some money: after that the class felt slightly more structured. The Setrawa participants made simple cloth bags in plain but appealing colours with decorative ‚Indian’ boarders round the tops, which were sold for 150 rupees each. The bags sold well and they seemed motivated by the money they had earned. The following month there was another Sambhali stall, and this time the Setrawa project contributed silk cushion covers and a new style of bag with a hand-embroidered pocket, as well as the original bags. The cushion covers sold particularly well.

Quality control was an issue: some of the cushion covers were made too hurridly or marked with pen and were therefore unsellable. We had to explain several times that the covers should be the same size - that there had to be a standard size – if they were to sell. The girls are skilled on the machines but, understandably, lack ‚comercial awareness’: they could make attractive items for the Jodhpur Sambhali India shop (which is planned for the future) but would first have to be shown examples of the kind of quality needed.

Extra-curricular
We celebrated Rekha’s and Helen’s birthdays with cakes brought especially from Jodhpur (not available in the village!) and various party games. The girls loved these parties, and they were a good time for encouraging integration of ages and castes (e.g. through games that relied on teamwork).

In February, we took about 10 teenage girls, two women and Rekha and Usha in a jeep to Jodhpur to see Slumdog Millionaire, do some shopping and go to Mandore Gardens. Some of them had never been to the cinema before, and most rarely get the opportunity to go to Jodhpur, so it was exciting for them. Again and again, during my time in Setrawa, I was struck by how significant the things that I would consider unextraordinary were to the girls, and what an impression we could make without even trying.

Near the end of our time there, Helen and I aranged a whole-school trip to Tiweri, a Jain temple and garden complex a couple of hours away. We played games, sat around on the grass (something you can’t do in most of the Thar desert!) and ate food cooked by various girls’ mothers and cakes brought from Jodhpur. Tiweri was a beautifully kept place- perfect for our outing. It was a lovely way to say goodbye to the girls, and for all of us to say goodbye to Rekha, who was to marry the folowing week.

Concluding Remarks
Volunteering in Setrawa was a hugely rewarding experience for me. There I felt truly immersed in local culture: it was not only about teaching. Indeed I felt I had a pastoral role towards many of the girls, as our lives became intertwined. Gradually, over the six months, I saw them grow and mature - that is something I wouldn’t have witnessed had I left after six weeks as planned.

Sambhali’s Setrawa project is in its early stages and volunteers can therefore influence its direction, and can bring their own relevant interests, if they wish – this is perhaps something you would not find at a more established NGO project. I would recommend volunteering in Setrawa to anyone who is prepared to give up a level of material comfort (and, often, personal space!), for a unique insight into Rajasthani culture and the sense that you are inspiring and perhaps even changing the young lives there.