"Blissful Chaos" by Prof. Chantal Krcmar, USA

JANUARY 29, 2013

Blissful Chaos

The Photo Pals Project Continues

The Photo Pals Project between Parijat Academy and Epiphany School of Global Studies is utter chaos on our end…and I think it’s great. With Mama and I at the helm, it was bound to be pretty wacky to start with, but given how things work (and don’t work!) in rural India, it’s even wackier than we imagined. Regardless of all the glitches, the Parijat students are loving it, and I feel so grateful to have been roped into this project. (Oooops. The truth comes out…I did not come to Parijat to work on the Photo Pals Project. I came to do English language training for the teachers. But upon arrival, Mama and I realized this Photo Pals Project was a bit too big for one person to handle here, so I became her partner. What luck!)

It’s all the challenges and hurdles that we face in this project that make it such a rich learning experience. To be honest, these challenges and hurdles also make it frustrating, but those blips are worth it. Some of the challenges were to be expected. For instance, we have too few cameras (This school desperately needs funding!) and the students don’t know how to use them, as they are living with very little access to any technology. (I bet most 5th and 6th graders in most parts of the USA know how to use computers, video game systems, digital cameras, ipods, etc. That is not the case amongst the poor here in Pamohi Village.

But some of the challenges have been less expected. Here’s an example:

This morning I was sitting in the courtyard preparing to go into the Class 5 classroom to take them out for a photo shoot, and one of the Class 6 boys approached me. He seemed kind of distraught or over-excited or both.

“Ma’am! Ma’am!”

“Yes?”

“You come?”

“Come where?”

After some miming and more broken English I realized he meant, “Will you come to our classroom?”

So I asked, “Why?”

“No teacher.”

How could I say “no” to that?!

He also happened to see the cameras I had with me and that bumped up his level of urgency to get me into the Class 6 classroom.

“OK,” I said. “Five minutes.”

Mama and I had to figure this out (i.e. scramble like mad!). We did a head count, and Class 5 and Class 6 had 49 students all together. And we had ten semi-working cameras.

With the help of Uttam, our fearless Director (whose English is very good), and two teachers (whose English is passable), we got Class 5 and Class 6 out into the courtyard to try and work things out. After much wrangling and creating and re-creating groups, we decided to take Class 6 out with the cameras today, and Class 5 out with the cameras tomorrow.

It might seem strange that even creating groups is so challenging, but it is. The English proficiency of the students is wildly varied, and I am coming to see that some of them do not even have the ability to count very well— even in Class 6, which is our equivalent of 6th Grade! This is not the fault of Parijat. Many new students enroll throughout the year, and you may recall that I wrote earlier that many of them come from households in which their grandparents, parents, aunties, uncles, and other adults are illiterate and uneducated. Many of these children are literally walking in from the fields. One may learn a lot about planting, harvesting, chopping down trees, tending chickens and other important tasks from time in the fields, but language and math skills will be lacking.

Uttam, Mama and I stuck it out, though, and finally had the students in some semblance of order. We got Class 6 into groups, impressed upon them the importance of sharing the cameras— as well as the consequences if they did not!— (There were 38 students, and ten cameras, so one of today’s lessons had to be about sharing.), and set out to take photos of their neighborhood.

It was crazy. And crazy fun. At first, the students seemed a bit shy about using the cameras— no matter how many times we said and asked their teachers to translate to them, “Take pictures of anything and everything.” But once the students finally jumped in, their joy was totally unleashed…and totally infectious. Despite the fact that it was hot and I was overdressed and I had to mediate some student disputes over cameras and I was trying to make sure students would not get run over by trucks rumbling by on their way to the quarries (This is a village, but there are quarries nearby, so the traffic that does drive through Pamohi Village is loud and big and potentially dangerous.), it was so great that I wanted to stay out with the students and their cameras all day long.

But all good things must come to an end. One of our biggest challenges— low quality batteries bought from the nearest town, Garchuk— started to shut down the works today. Slowly but surely, more and more students came up to me saying, “Ma’am! Low battery, Ma’am!” And, sure enough, their cameras would die right in the palm of my hand. So we walked back to the school and promised that we’d take them out with the cameras again day after tomorrow. That promise was met with broad smiles.

Now we are committed to take Class 5 out tomorrow and Class 6 out the next day. I must admit I am a bit perplexed about how we’ll pull this off. Most of the cameras are out of commission since the batteries are dead and many of the memory cards (pieces of junk, really) are full. It is so hard to find batteries here and we’ve been out of electricity all day so I can’t upload photos onto the computer, thereby emptying the memory cards. (My fully charged laptop has allowed me to write this piece, but I need the office computer to do more sophisticated stuff for the school.)

Hmmmm…This is tricky, but we’ll find a way. I’ll do whatever I possibly can to give the students more opportunity to use the cameras tomorrow.