Ek Din

I wake up in the morning, if all goes well, by 6:30.

I'm starting to look forward to this half an hour before anyone else wakes up. I do ten surya namaskars and use the straw jadoo to sweep the ants out of the living room.

Soon the water is running and we take cold bucket baths and make milky, ginger chai. By eight thirty Megha, Archana and I are ready, standing outside in the balcony over our peaceful street.

The auto rickshaw pulls in downstairs. Neelam,the sewing teacher at our organization picks us up in the morning since her brother drives a rickshaw. He likes to tell us about Chandigarh like we're taking a tour.

When I arrive to Bapu Dham colony, the area that houses a 50,000 person slum community and transport hub, Neelam and I walk down a small alley to the Yuvsatta building. For an hour the staff -- about eight regular people and teachers that float in and out -- sit around a table and inspect each other's lunches and talk about life and friends and work.

By 10 the girls of the Sakhi project arrive, saying "Namaste, didi" as they pass. The project is comprised of female teenagers who have dropped out of school, usually not by choice. Yuvsatta offers vocational classes in sewing, English, yoga, dancing, and how to open bank accounts and start self help groups.

Five girls from the class are in the education-themed drama Archana and I have prepared for an upcoming event, but one of them hasn't arrived. "She's not coming, didi," the girls tell me, "she has to stay home and wash clothes."

We only have one day until the performance, and the girls only get a few free hours away from home. I'm instantly stressed out, even though no one seems to worry about last-minute delivery here. The responsibility of the program has been handed, quickly, to me.

"Take me to her house," I tell her friend.

I'm led through the slum, stepping over running water, avoiding groups of smoking men. The city's tastiest food stalls originate here and there are women frying puris and samosas to fill their husbands carts before they head to the main markets throughout Chandigarh.

The air quality has turned suddenly thick and smoky and the houses have turned from ramshackled buildings to small huts. We're slowed down by a crowd standing outside someone's home.

I hear a woman wailing inside, but the crowd is unreadable.

"Someone died there," a girl tells me, completely unfazed. I find out later it is a fourteen year old girl who suffered from anemia. Apparently this has become increasingly common as girls reach their adolescence.

We find our missing actress washing her family's clothes. She promises to come on time, and our mission is complete.

Back at the community center there is much to be done. A minute-to-minute schedule has been made for the esteemed guest's arrival, but gets changed every five seconds.
I try an explain in my pathetic Hindi what needs to happen, but words like advocacy and women's rights don't come naturally from my childhood vocabulary.

The next four hours seem like a minute. The girls read their lines, giggling and forgetting, and worry about what they will wear.

And then the kids arrive at the library, kicking their shoes in the balcony and turning on the radio to Bollywood music. Their after school lives are my main project, so the television is now off limits, and their shoes have to be realigned.

Today also marks the last day of the Read Bapu Dham campaign, which honors the two best readers with new bicycles. The librarian, sweet and quiet against the chaos, tells me that we have to test them for their comprehension.

We set up a room for the examination and I'm instantly against this idea. The girls are literally trembling with fear of being tested, and hold on to their books as long as they can.

"Relax, this isn't school," I tell them. But the tears have already started to fill some eyes. Only two kids are completely confident, and they don't end up with the bikes.

Back in the library it's time to clean up. The kids are enthusiastic about helping, and we spend two hours taking down 5000 books, making sure they're in order, and wiping down the shelves. The kids balance from all kinds of wobbling surfaces to reach the top of the shelves.

Archana and I have a meeting to attend so we walk to the bus stop at 4. The bus doesn't show up, so 30 rupees later we are at the meeting place, my legs aching as they've been doing a lot here.

Three hours of discussion later, we are ate home, scrounging to make some daal and rice and scrub at least one kurta for tomorrow.

Sapna

In Delhi's fabulous Khan Market, a cluster of high-end boutiques and delicious food, there is a hidden treasure called Manzil.

This is where students of all ages and socio-economic classes come to learn.

It works especially well because it is in no way a school, and from what I see, everybody is somehow a teacher.

Here I sat in a room last week, faced by two guys who created a community radio program, and was asked the question: Do you believe in education or learning?

Somehow these have become separate entities, and India's government schools often highlight the disparity in plain colors.

In the past month I've met children who can recite their numbers in three languages from one to one hundred. But if you suddenly ask for the numbers out of order, or backwards, they're completely thrown off.

Similarly, as I work with Yuvsatta in Chandigarh, I notice that when I give the children a creative activity, they are aching for rules and guidelines.

Rote memorization is not just a method here, it is a lifestyle. And a problematic one.

I think back to my own education -- 18 years of free, public education.

I was a terrible student. No one believes me because I always scraped by in the top 5% of my class. But you should know that I was lazy, I hardly studied, I read at least three non-school books for every one that was actually assigned.

In fact, it took 20 years for me to realize that I wasn't an idiot just because I was the only Indian who wasn't in super-duper-advanced Calculus or Biology.

Most of history and psychology class was spent daydreaming, and writing stories in my mind or on paper. Any textbook I have is filled with sketches, and any notebook filled with short stories without endings.

So when I whittle down social issues -- poverty, gender inequality, environmental catastrophe -- the only solution I ever see is through education. Not that this thought is monumental, everyone knows that awareness is key for change.

But when the word education has lost it's true meaning, the solution is also foggy.

Abdul Kalam, one of India's premier scientists and national leaders, wrote a book for developing India called Ignited Minds. In this book he writes: Dream, Dream, Dream. Dreams transform into thoughts. And thoughts result in action.

This spoke to me especially because I spent eighteen years of taxpayers money doing exacty that.

Appropriately, then, my first activity with the "impoverished" children I'm working with was to create Dream Books (Sapne ki Kitab). I asked them to write their goals, their dreams, their desires.

Some kids sat down for the entire two hours, sketching and writing. They drew rainbows and skies and doctors and teachers. They drew gods and money and houses.

Some of them asked me what their dreams should be and I just smiled and gave them another oil pastel to draw with.

Until I figure out how to make learning and education synonymous, I've decided only this much. This year I am not going to measure our impact on children through exams or English skills or public speaking.

This year, I'm going to measure these children only by their dreams, and how far they will allow them to grow before they turn into a thought, and eventually, an action.

Kachra

Mother India has been good to me.

In the form of her daughters and granddaughters -- the women who have opened their doors and kitchens and farms to me without question -- she has taught me patience, kindness and how to make rounder rotis over a fire.

In the tekra, the largest slum in Ahmedabad, I was welcomed into a woman's home at 7 a.m. on a humid August morning. She was already cleaning the shower area behind a stone wall, clad in a thin sari and rubber sandals. Her two grown sons and grandchildren were still asleep in the small room, equipped with a television and fan, that constituted their home.

I had made a conscious decision the night before to not only observe her life, but to take part, to help, and to learn.

After a few hours of playing with the children, a 7-year-old boy and 2-year-old girl, and teaching them hindi letters, it was time for my host mother to go to work. Like most of the women in her economic class and condition, she was a trash collector, or rag picker.

The work of a rag picker in India might be the hardest labor of all. Coupled with inadequate pay and no stability, it remains an anomaly how this livelihood supports entire cities. We took enormous canvas bags and started down a busy Ahmedabad road, stopping once in a while because she thought I would get tired.

When we came to a hotel we were led past the stagnant water drains to the kitchen, where the cooks and helpers stood leering at me and trying to figure out why this obviously healthy, confused looking girl was following around a 50-something woman who wore her years of work on her face and frail body.

My host mother proudly announced that I was sleeping in her home, and eating with her family, to which the men laughed and stared harder. When I finally convinced her that I wouldn't just be watching, we started with the dirty work.

We hoisted crates of the hotels waste to a side alleyway, the juices dripping in between my toes and making me gag. I hesitated before putting on some latex gloves, since my host mother had none.

Outside we had attracted a crowd as we sorted through the trash to separate organic matter and plastic. The plastic is the most valuable, and my host mother would later sell it to a less-than-reliable middleman for money.

As we worked, sometimes casting aside used condoms and tampons, I could hear the men start to talk about my presence. But now, instead of laughing, they were wondering: why would a girl from America be here? Why doesn't she think this is beneath her?

The questions, regardless of the answers or action, were satisfying enough. I knew my host mother did not need me, and I knew my time was limited.

I helped my host mother hoist a huge bag of trash on her head, a task she would not let me do at any cost. We walked back toward the slum, weaving through oncoming traffic, auto rickshaws stopping because they thought I needed a ride.

Back at home, her out-of-work son cooked potato sabzi and I helped roll out some rotis. I spent the rest of the day playing with the granddaughter, and trying to ween the grandson away from the Bollywood songs on television.

At night I slept on a rope cot, wedged between children and my host mother, listening to the drunken snores of the son outside. I wondered of her strength -- her body still working and intact. I wondered of her heartbreak -- apparent in her words and eyes. And once again, I adjusted my view of reality, and my place in it.