Our Diverse Communities

Please enjoy the weekly diary of my experience..... Read on!
If you want to add your comments, please use the messageboard, halfway down the page under my diary.
To see a few photos of the summer, click on the link to Photo Gallery on the right hand side of this page.

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27th July 2005

"Shanti Bhavan" (Place of Peace) near Bangalore in South India is a boarding school for children from very poor families, as well as orphans.
The headteacher there, Mrs Lalita Law, accepted my offer to volunteer for six weeks, and I'm to help to mount a theatre-in-action performance with the kids for their annual School Day celebration.

The school production will be very different to my own childhood school plays at Ellison Street Primary in Newcastle under Lyme!
Nearly ready to fly out; and I'm still not sure how this will work out!

The idea is that children of poverty at Shanti Bhavan are no different than more fortunate children - so long as they are given a chance to dream and to aspire, and (of course) are supported through education and constant encouragement.

About the production we hope to mount, Mrs Law has outlined the pros and cons.
First, the challenges:
The children's parents speak one or more of the four South Indian languages - Tamil, Kannada, Telugu and Malayalam. So, the performance has to have a universal appeal; and not be too subtle (she says) for such an audience.
Next - all 193 children must take part (gulp!), and ‘props and costumes’ have to be part of it all.

Fay looks to the stars

Then: the advantages.
There's a Steinway baby grand piano and a portable synthesizer (Yamaha).
The performance will be in the day (no need for lighting...that's good) because parents can come from up to hundreds of miles away.

Now, if you were me, what would you do?

Plan - first draft!>>
Well, I asked the teachers there to get the children to write something about ‘shanti’ ("peace") as well as its opposite. They wrote and drew so much that only samples have been photocopied and sent to me!
From these I’m working out a possible outline. This will probably have to be thrown away when I see the actual situation, but it’s reassuring to have an idea.

Mrs Law says ‘props and costumes’ but I keep thinking about the heat.
So yesterday I went to Milan, also notably hot, and bought €137 worth of watercolour makeup. There is less makeup than the same sum buys in England but it should be enough for face and body painting for a try-out, tech rehearsal, dress rehearsal and performance.
(Algebra problem:- if one cake of makeup paints 60 faces and 192 children are going to use it 4 times, I should be okay – but then that breaks down because some colours are obviously going to be more loved than others. Hmm)

Packing>>
So now, I’m trying to leave my flat in Turin in order, organise the pet-sitter (cats and aquarium), finish off work here, pack...
I’ve taken the course of anti-typhoid pills; and learned ‘kannada bara ille’ ("I don’t speak Kannada" - the best I can do for now...).

I'll keep you informed week by week - wish me luck!

7th August 2005

This diary is late of course - after a week missed because of the disaster in Bombay (Mumbai).
Worst rains for 95 years. The drains blocked by plastic bags.
Many people died in their cars because electronic windows won't work in water. Radio warnings to drive with windows open.
But then houses fell down.

So when I got as far as Frankfurt on my way to India, Bombay was awash and Air India computers were down - but they were still thinking it was a blip.
In fact the whole midlands of India phone system was submerged.
It took me three days and a whole other ticket to get to Bangalore (via London, Abu Dhabi and Delhi in the end).

Arrival in the rain>>
Luckily some-one had routed my several contradictory emails through and Satid was waiting with the van to drive me to Shanti Bhavan.
It isn't far, but most of the roads are very bad so 25 kilometres takes 90 minutes. However, now that I've done it by daylight, people drive well. It just sounds a bit alarming at first because you're supposed to honk at the vehicle in front before you pass.
And I've seen my bullock teams, monkeys, kites, baobab trees and other India icons.

Shanti Bhavan is amazing>>
Solar electricity, recycling and double-using (in summer the huge irrigation tank is filled in the morning, the children swim and then in the evening the water goes to the banana trees, which are the cash crop, or the fruit trees for food for the school.)
Nearby the George Foundation also runs a medical centre and an art museum. All of these places give preference to women for jobs and they're also actively campaigning to get lead out of fuel. The Foundation also helps te local schools to keep open and keep standards up.

So to the kids.
I see them in groups of 2 classes at a time. This is not ideal and I have already split third and fourth grade, but I didn't want to undo all that timetable work.

Art staff are great and superkeen. It's hard to change my mind about anything - I mention it and they start to build it! Music staff are also getting interested - one of these is Patrick, a volunteer from Michigan - but it seems we have to have 'The Impossible Dream' from Man of La Mancha because the boss likes it! That's fine, I can use it.

Apart from the staff's kids, the children have very poor and very tough backgrounds. There is a psychologist at the school who works with them.
But they are a joy once you get them focused. And they like to dance and they like to sing. The philosophy of the school is that literacy is not enough. Poor kids must have the best education so they can leapfrog. If kids can't cope they get support from the foundation in one of the other schools they help.

I must say one difference between Bangalore and Wolstanton is that we had an indoor stage at Ellison Street Primary!
But I hope too that the children will start to enjoy theatre as I did at good old Ellison St (and later at the Orme).

Next! Ideas >>
So the ideas for the performance are:
Seascape Tinies. Featuring belly dancing sandworms.
Animals in the Forest: traditional peacock and snake dance....a hunter is scared off.
Normal day. School, work, going to the boxing match (they're 9 years old), disco.
The peaceful kingdom: variation on above.
Good queen abdicates. Things start going badly as the top guys keep everything for themselves.
Trouble starts and is fanned by witches (the 8th grade kids love Macbeth!)
Shanti appeals to war but he says he has to get rid of the tyrant.
Fighting all over. Stage looks like the end of Hamlet!
The birds from scene 2, who learned to fly together when they were caught in a net, fly back in. (Impossible Dream may occur around here I think)
Survivors begin to help the others. Co-operation rules.
Something? Dunno what.
Final happy dance of all, like Katoichi. With possible Hindu song, once I can find out what the words mean. They sing it really well - but seem to have no opinion about what they're saying.

All all done in English, Tamil and Kannada by three different casts...
Just ideas now - let's see how they go.

The day>>
Meanwhile we eat the organic veggie food, get up at dawn if we want hot water and work hard. My volunteer sheet says 32 days, 8.30am to 8.45 pm.
But no day goes straight through without breaks. I have been given a big table for my big room and I have lists of names and alternative running orders strewn all over it.

And I'm having a ball. Thank you, sponsors.
And I'm taking photos which I'll get developed onto a CD to add to this diary eventually. Particularly of the tinies, who are doing well now but may well burst into tears when they see their parents for the first time after a whole term.

Next week I go to Hosur. While the van buys the chicken for our one non-veggie day they'll leave me in the internet cafe to complete and send you this diary.

Please, please, why not email me too? If you have any questions about what I'm doing, where I'm staying, the wonderful country of India itself, or just comments, I'd love to hear from you. Just drop down to the bottom of this page, and use the form there to send over your thoughts and I'll read and answer them.

Wish me luck!

14th August 2005

Hosur is a gritty little town where the cows leave a lot of evidence of their presence(!) and the internet cafe here is dreadful.
But the drive was fun - no monkeys, but a lot of the lean bullocks who pull stuff (the milk cows by comparison are built much like in Europe), and ladies in saris dumping rejected product by the road outside the brickworks, and villages packed with people on everything from bikes to electric cars or walking, and tiny shack-stalls selling all sorts.
And I mustn't forget the people selling buckets and pots from their bikes which look like they are models of the kind of molecule only Buckminster Fuller could love.

(Hello to my Prague friends - Swarovski is in Bangalore, and Bata is even in Hosur!)

School>>
The children here are amazing. I'm slowing down on rehearsal and adding regular drama and theatre games and storytelling so they don't get stale, while the art people soldier on.
We still have two dances to choreograph and grade 5 have to reduce their interminable saga to ten minutes.

One of the reasons we have security people patrolling here, and solar battery lights for as much of the night as they will last, is that some of the girls have relations who want them for marriage or sexual exploitation - although they themselves want education.

Sad stories like this are common. I came across the story of a woman offered work but the man in the van which picked her up just gang-raped her and dumped her - and then, as is tradtional, the village cast her out.
So she poured kerosene over herself and set it on fire.
Her 4-year-old son tried to save her and got burned himself.
The foundation is paying for his plastic surgery.

Clothes>>
The fashion look in the area is attributable to the fact that most of the clothes are donated by the "Church of Latter Day Saints" in Utah, USA.
So particularly, girls are pretty - but a bit prim!

However, everyone is clothed and fed at the school and getting a great education.
At assembly, the news is also presented, since papers come late and there aren't many media outlets. In fact, I depend on that news, at least on the days it's presented in English and not Tamil, Kannada or Hindi.

What I have noticed - very much - is that everything is so precious - every pencil, scrap of paper, the 20 CDs and 30 videos we own.

And internet time is especially precious. Now I'm running out of it!
More next week from the better internet cafe in Bangalore...

 21st August 2005

I'm learning a lot. I can tell the sound of the "dimwit lizard" falling from the ceiling yet again from the sound of an entire ants' nest losing its grip and landing on my worktable - although I can't tell the sound of coconut leaves hitting each other from showers.
I can spot buffalo, although they're not bigger than cows.
I know the shower head saves water, but that, when there's no hot water, just sloshing yourself using the jug and bucket system is not so chilly.

The last issues are to do with our freak weather. We have cloud and wind instead of rain, so our passive solar water heating and solar electricity are stretched to their limits. And we are near the bottom of our arterial water.
And Chennai (formerly called Madras) thought they had a tsunami this morning! It was just a full moon high tid,e but it came in as a wall of water as tall as a palm tree (???? palm trees can reach various heights at Shanti Bhavan), and travelled 50 kilometres inland. However the citizens, with healthy paranoia, took to the streets and mostly got out of the way of the water.

Driving About >>
Bangalore was once the Garden City. Now it's a building site. But the little 3-wheel auto rickshaws know where there are still roads open, and get you where you want to go.... except on the day the buffalo gave birth on the nice wide stretch of road near the roundabout....
One of the joys of the long bump-in is reading signs on vans. 'Change your Kismet', 'Life is drama, man is an actor', 'Maa jujhe salaam - love is sweet poison', and always 'drive carefully - sound horn - save water'.

India - land of contrasts >>
Monday was Independence Day. Teacher dress-code required a sari.
I can't swear I remember my babyhood, but it feels to me like wearing a nappy (diaper).
Usually I use salwar khameez (pants and tunic) which I bought last trip here and which changed the kids' attitude to me.
It also helps that my skin is quite fair. There is a lot of colour prejudice in favour of white skin, and half the ads you see are for lightening cream. The teachers try to change the children's attitudes. In fact they do change them but then the children go home for the holidays and come back re-prejudiced.

The children love their parents and are motivated by the wish to make better lives for them. But they go home to one-room shacks, sexual exposure and often abuse, alcohol abuse on the level of holding the bottle of spirits in the air and letting it pour into your mouth (I couldn't believe it the first time I saw it); and then the drunken man beating their mother and/or them.
They come back from the holidays with respiratory complaints, worms, skin diseases and injuries. It takes a month at least to get school life running again.
But by the time I had arrived they had been back a while, and the new little ones had been in for six weeks.

The little ones like theatre and drama, enjoy theatre games, love stories and went wild when I got the makeup out.
Teachers from the north of India were more calm about that because they have 'holi', which is the festival where you pour buckets of water, packets of powder colour and combinations of both over each other until everyone is soaked through and luridly coloured - and it takes a week of baths to get it all off!
Teachers from the South are a bit alarmed by it all.

Performance news >>
Good news is that the performance itself will be videoed by the School of Journalism, which is another venture the George Foundation set up, and will be on their website (tgfworld.org).

We got a shipment in on Thursday - clothes, toys, books, videos and bicycles. A lot of people both in Utah and the New York area collect for Shanti Bhavan.
Getting the stuff in is hard and slow. Customs officers are very corrupt and ask for bribes at every level but they are also poor and this is how the government economises on their salaries.
Then the movement to right-wing Hindu fundamentalism within the government means that if they can block anything they perceive as coming from Christians (and I imagine also Muslims) they will do it.
But we have the bikes - and one has a bell!!!! I imagine, and fervently hope, that it will have been rung to extinction quite soon.

Festival >>
On Thursday we had another Hindu festival, Raksha Bandhan.
Everyone asks Lakshmi, goddess of wealth, for boons; and sisters tie rakhi strings to their brothers' wrists. An adroit social move is to tie them to the wrists of other guys who then become your brothers and have to look after you like brothers and can't look at you in any other way.

I am also learning a daily ritual. You clean your house and the pavement or whatever outside. Then you draw an intricate design in white chalk, which is the part I'm learning.
The drawing is called culamn (??? not sure of spelling as we wrote this while bouncing in the van) but if you then colour it, it's rangoli. The god you have done this for will then walk into your house.

Thank you BBC Staffordshire. Thank you sponsors. This is an amazing time and I'm happy to think that you will eventually be able to get an idea of the performance.

August 28th

We took the bus today and it's smoother than the jeep, whatever the George Foundation thinks.
Once at Hosur we climbed up to the temple, part hewn from the rock, part built with what was hewn out. From outside the view is of a tower of colourful figures; inside, it's low and pillared with all the statues behind railings, even the white cow into whose ears we are supposed to be able to whisper secrets.
We didn't do a full puja, but had a Brahman (a Hindu priest) salute the gods Ganesh and Shiva in our name and we came out with ashes and flowers. There are lots of Ganesh figures but the Shiva monument is just a stone.
If you buy a Ganesh figure by the roadside you take it home and worship it. Then after one or three, but an odd number, of days, you take it and immerse it in water, either by throwing it into the sea or a lake or a tank or whatever. You don't keep it at all.
Saraswati, the goddess who helps study, had a new dress, as exams are round the corner!

Many of our children come from around Hosur.
Their houses are one-room concrete shacks. A water tap is near but that also means there's always a queue there.
The majority of our children are Hindu but some are Moslem. The majority of the teachers are Hindu but some are Christian.
Teachers from the North tend to have English as their first language, in the South it's the second, or further down the line.
In the midst of all this, I wear my Indian dresses and tread delicately. A boarding school has all sorts of complicated relationships going on and 'fay said' is seen by many people as a good move.

Show >>
The team interested in the performance are working well.
We have the scenes planned and rehearsed, music rehearsed, sets, costume and makeup sampled, and on Monday we start run-throughs.
Rehearsals are taking place with thunder crashing and rain tipping down on the badminton-court (cum auditorium), but the fact that we've been rehearsing in the afternoons and the performance is morning gives us hope.
In fact the court now has netting to protect us against possible sun, that's how hopeful we are.

While I organise the show, facilities staff are organising the rest.
Parking must be controlled so that people don't go all over the flowerbeds, lawns and kitchen gardens. Porta-potties must be installed and publicised for the exact same reason.
Breakfast and lunch will be served to parents. They will also be served to children before parents come and while the speeches are going on respectively.
And I thought my part was a big deal!

We are also negotiating how to make our guest feel good without too many ceremonies which will make the whole event drag.
The guest is the elderly head of a drugs firm. They have a charitable foundation which gives free drugs to a good cause. We want to be one of the causes; both the school and the medical centre down the road. So some people want the song and the 2-kilo garland while others think a good seat and a good lunch will do the trick.

So we have this world standard school and the kids are really smart - but all our textbooks are donated.
The children come from great suffering - but they are still children and can be really bratty.
The teachers are wonderful - and they're petty.
Everyone is from India - but India has all these different ethnicities, 18 official languages, 11 official writing-scripts, and religions in all sorts of variations.

Quite how our performance is going to rise to this occasion I can't imagine.

By the way, some of you have asked about photos. Well, I tripped on a Bangalore anti-pavement and jammed my camera. I have four rolls but for prints not digital; and my best plan is to develop onto a CD and send them round the world.
But that will be back in Italy next week.

Thank you again to my sponsors, and thank you readers! Talk again next week?

4th September

I am drenched. Bangalore is running like a river.
I am running like a maniac to get everything done, before I dine at the Bangalore Club (where Winston Churchill still owes 10 rupees...) and fly home.

But we did it!!
We videoed on Friday, because the audience usually wanders around and makes a noise - but that was before 'Peaceful Kingdom'! They were rapt. 500 people, 75 minutes of performance, languages various - to breathless attention and all the right responses.

At the end various parents took the mike which was offered for talking about the school - and instead talked about the show!
They said they understood everything and thought the theme was important. War and terrorism is everywhere, but we can also also choose to co-operate.

The kids were terrific - though, well, one group stuck in a change (for the worse), but the rest of the school realised immediately it was worse and were horrified.
Smart kids - and they had learned so much in just five weeks.

So, now, kind Lalita and I have to run back to the tailors and drip on them.

I'll write again in a couple of days to tell you all the new stuff I learned; and sign off this diary.

6th September - final entry

What have I learned?

One
Don't travel Air India. You'll find some better way to travel, like crawling to India over gravel, so give Air India a miss.

Two
Theatre is so powerful. 180 children worked for 5 weeks and 500 people, from toddlers to grandparents, were enthralled. And they had plenty to say afterwards.

Three
If people ask for my help I shall give it if I can. When I need help I shall ask for it.
I suppose this is old news to readers, but it's a discovery for me!

Shanti Bhavan is now enthusiastic about having regular drama lessons for the children. Anyone who could volunteer a month of their time to do this will be very welcome. Music specialists would also be appreciated.

The school is overflowing and children are sleeping in classrooms. Plans for the next stage of dorms have been prepared but there is no money to build them. If anybody would like to help Shanti Bhavan, this is what gifts will be used for.

But now I'm moving on to organising my next project - which will be training for drama therapists in Prague, over three years, part time. The text for the course will be
online and if anyone who has read the diary would like to read that I'll send them the address.

Thank you BBC Staffordshire.
Thank you sponsors.
Thank you with all my heart - Shanti Bhavan

Fay

PS - thanks to everyone who helped me fund this trip.
I have performed with Torino English Theater (in English) and Teastorycat (in Italian-with-an-accent) and both groups donated shares of theatre ticket sales to plane ticket purchase. You've been fabulous - thanks! I hope I make it worth all your help.

HAVE YOUR SAY
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Your messages...

Fay Prendergast
Hallo Emily! All is well. The George Foundation has moved offices. They were able to keep the same phone number, because they're in the same area, but they had to change Email and it took a long time. However I have spoken to Lalita Law by phone and she is interested in your offer and today an Email from her got through! She would like you to write again and send your CV. Why don't you send a snailmail version as well as Email just to be sure? Best Wishes, Fay

Fay Prendergast
Hello Emily! You've got me worried now. I haven't had an email for over a month. I'm going to try to telephone but I have to catch somebody in the office. I'll get back to you when I hear something. Fay

Emily Potter
Hello Fay! I want to go work at the George Foundation for at least 6 months to a year. (I'm a master's student and it will be part of my program) I have emailed Lalita Law and the George Foundation several times with no answer from them. I did a search on google and found your site. Can you help me know how to get them to answer so I can volunteer? Are you still in touch with them? I can offer skills in drama, dance, creative writing, music and visual arts. I'd love to hear from you!

Marja Reunis
Hi Fay, what an experience this is!! Good luck with the performance! Ciao, Marja.

beate
Dear Fay you are great!! We wait for you in september!

Nina
Fay has asked me to forward some snippets from her letters and -- amazing -- phone calls. The first calls were from a cheap cell phone and had a remarkable similarity to talking down a hosepipe; our more recent attempt was by land line and intercom, but coincided with the experiment in preparing the coffee from Mr Torri's bar -- first batch from the two kg of real Italian espresso bean donated spur of the moment back in Turin.
So... Fay writes "Technology pretty lacking -- there is very good turn-around on laundry -- you put your clothes out at breakfast and they come back clean at supper -- but possibly damp and crumpled from their adventures being whomped against rocks.
But there are solar panels. Internet Center in Bangalore great, in Hosur a lot more marginal. And time is short -- it's the shopping run and the truck has to go back too soon. Food sounds fruit intensive -- the banana farm provides financial support for the school, there are mangos and custard apples and coconuts . Non-vegetarians get an egg a day and chicken on Sunday. There was a baby chameleon on someone's plate one day, but it was escorted out blushing an embarrassed lime green."
More later Nina