Welcome New Year

Dear dedicated reader,

Happy New Year!

As the watchman rang the bell at midnight, Melissa and I found ourselves fighting the deadened silence with our cries of “Happy New Year” in a deserted school courtyard. Here in Kadod, 2009 was ushered in with less pomp and more circumstance as Diwali and Eid represented the true new year for the majority of the residents. Our noise-makers sounded like noses blowing underneath the silent, starry sky. For a moment, a pack of dogs started to sing a dirge in honor of the passing of 2008 so we listened respectfully, and then went back inside the house to sleep so we could get up and teach this morning as January 1 is not a holiday here.

The coming of the new year predictably leads one to reflection on the time that has passed since the bell tolled on the last New Year’s Eve and the journey that brought me from South Boston to Kadod has been an eventful one that you’ve followed dear reader as I’ve adjusted to my life here in this village. The trail has been inevitably forged with successes and failures. I felt some satisfaction yesterday as I looked around my classroom and realized that I had a roomful of students whose names I know busily engaged in productive exam preparation (since, now knowing the format of the exams, I can actually prepare fruitful practice for them). The perseverance it has taken to accumulate all of this knowledge and amalgamate into anything resembling effective teaching has taken Melissa’s and my combined and sustained effort over these past seven months.

This feeling of satisfaction was short-lived as a few students lolled about at their desks, no notebook, no pen, no decorum and after plentiful warnings coupled had to be thrown out of the room, where they continued to create a ruckus, jumping in and out for attention and distracting the other boys. After the class, Tabussum and I took three of the instigators to the male supervisor, who screamed at them in Gujarati and slapped them across the face so hard that I could only look down at the ground, bite my lip, and wonder what the right thing to do actually is.

The feeling of satisfaction returned as we walked around the village after school and we stopped to talk to the regulars: the previously taciturn fruit man who has warmed to our onslaught of inquiries about his health, family, origin etc; the triumvirate of families who run the phone booth, the general store, and the infamous tailor’s shop; Gitaben and her English-mincing son Manishbhai who informed us excitedly that he has just applied for a job in America (though he doesn’t know where it is); the students whose houses we pass and the small children who scream “Ms. Ivins!” every time they see Melissa’s smiling face (since she teaches the fourth standard, the small kids really have a thing for her). Yogeshbhai, whose son built a telescope from scratch, gave us a friendly wave on his way to Surat with the telescope in the back of a truck, the vegetable-wala who sits in the main square by the temple smiled and said “Namaste, teacher”, and the crew of kids who play at the temple and ran and screamed and tried to scare us by jumping out of dark corners as we passed by on our way home to the gates of the school.

As we passed inside the gates, a large black-faced monkey bounded from the roof of the prinicpal’s house, shimmied down a school drain pipe and then ran to freedom through the streets of Kadod. The small children screamed with nervous laughter and fear.

It was this quiet existence that stood with us in the silence at midnight as the sound of the midnight bell died away: this settled pace of our everyday life. As Melissa and I listened to the dogs howl and the crickets chirp in the first minutes of 2009, it felt right that these routines which have become etched into my internal clock, my sense of place and my orientation would usher us into the new year.

Best,
Cat