Travels in India, part 1

2-14-08
Varanasi, India/ visiting Buddha's Smile School, an Amistad International project

Traveling to India with Amistad board member, Melanie Boyd, February, we landed in Delh flying to our first project visitation in  the northern city of Varanasi, one of the holiest destinations for Hindu and Buddhist pilgrims. 

Varanasi (which used to be called Benares, and before that, Kashi) is over 3,000 years old.   Some devout Hindus hope to die here or at least have their ashes scattered in the Ganges river flowing through to the Bengal Bay believing  doing so ensures moksha--instant union with the Universal Soul and thus freedom from reincarnation.

Varanasi is also one of India's most fervently politically and religiously conservative cities, and one of the poorest. It is in the state of Uttar Pradesh, considered India's poorest region. 

Ten minutes north of Varanasi is Sarnath, one of the world's most sacred sights for Buddhist pilgrims. It was here that Siddhartha Gatama (circa 563 BC to 483 BC), founder of Buddhism, gave his first sermon to his new diciples, a sermon on how to live a good life. (This is the era of Jeremiah the prophet when the Jews were in captivity in Babalonia.) 

Buddha's Smile School (BSS) is located in Sarnath near the spot where Buddah delivered this sermon. The school was named Buddha's Smile School, not because it teaches Buddhism, but because it is in proximity to this historical site. Amistad International has been the primary sponsor of this school since 2004 when BSS had only 60 students. 239 now attend this free school for the poorest of the poor children in the area.

Officially, India guarantees all children 6-14 will be able to attend school. This program is called Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan. Yet the dropout rate is about 53%. The reasons for this are many: lack of teachers, poor school facilities many lack toilets and running water), lack of desks and chairs, books, play equipment, or any sort of enrichment. India has an extremely high rate of teacher absenteeism. There is also a strong component of child labor; many parents require their children to supplement the family income. 

It took us about 12 hours in Varanasi to wonder where the women were. We saw almost none in the streets.   I asked  locals who seemed not to even understand  my question asking, "where are the women?." This was not a question they seemed to understand.  It turns out the men buy the groceries etc. so the women  have no need to go outside the home. The women are, essentially, in  purdah, or seclusion in their hovels, and dingy cramped apartments. There were one or two working at the desk in the hotel, but no women were hotel maids, waitresses, or selling in retail shops.  

Just as soon as our taxi drove us along the madness of the highway from the airport to Varanasi, John Holman (a longtime wonderful BSS volunteer from Australia) and  BSS volunteer Dana Kornberg, (who works at the Clinton Foundation in Delhi), took us to the Ghats , steep stone and concrete steps which lead from town steeply down to the Ganges river. Along the ghats are many  Hindu temples and guest houses, destination for the dying, pilgrims and tourists. The Ganges ghats are where people come to bathe, wash their clothing, and bring their dead to burn. 


The Ganges is quite low and in fact there were Save the River demonstrations that week. During monsoon season  it can rise 40-50 ft up the steep ghats and flooding the city.  India is making new dams along the Ganges, and of course Varanasi grows with more citizens, so they have a water shortage in non-monsoon seasons. The fate of a dying Ganges was the cover story on a recent National Geographic.

We hired a row boat man to take us at sunset to the ghat where they perform Puja at sunset.  At sunset, with the lights, and the flames, and song, it was all dramatic from vantage point of being on Mother Ganges.  At sunset you could see bodies wrapped in white, waiting to be burned. 

Early the next morning we went to Rajan Kaur's  Buddha's Smile school, first having a pancake breakfast served by Rajan's husband, Sukdev, who owns the Sarnath cafe, a clean (and delicious) dining destination for international students at the Buddhist Institute across the street.  At 8:30 we jumped into the the new school van (recently purchased by Geir Davidson and his Norwegian community), a brand new beautiful white Japanese van that would normally seat 12 adults. We can never thank Geir and his community enough for this gift. The students not coming in the van arrive in open auto rickshaws, and they are stuffed to the rafters in these tiny rickety vehicles.

We had the great fun of traveling that morning in the new school 'bus' van to pick up students. Very exciting for us and even more so for the children.  The kids were  thrilled  to have visitors showing up in their new school van.

We were able to meet some of the parents of the students who live in what one may think of as provisional housing. Perched right on the roadside, the homes are only lean-to's made of grass, plastic sheeting, rock, mud, and sit only feet from cars and auto rickshaws, carts and motorcycles whizzing by. Their cooking, bathing, all of life is done looking at the wheels of cars, tailpipes of buses, and bicycle rickshaw drivers' feet. The air they breath is vile.

One forward-thinking family had placed their home by a public water spigot where a large, 10X20 pool had formed, algae growing over it. No doubt a mosquito breeding pond also. This is the community's  all-purpose watering spigot for cooking, drinking and bathing, and washing clothing. The women were hanging clothes  to dry on the brick "tree saving" enclosures wrapped around saplings, part of a Varanasi, Delhi and Kolkata 'green India program" in which a huge public works program has planted millions of trees hoping to clean India's  air. The brick enclosures are needed to protect the saplings from the cows roaming everywhere one can imagine.

Three young teen girls, about 13, came over to us to shyly greet us. They don't go to Rajan's school but are either family or live near the children that do come to Buddha's Smile School. The girls were dressed in raggedy clothing and were pretty dusty looking. Rajan told me these girls are at very serious risk for prostitution. They, along with other young girls from Rajan's school, work at weddings, carrying candles atop their heads for 8-10 hours, all evening into the early AM, for only a few cents pay. The girls are  at risk for attack by predatory drunk male wedding attendees, of great concern to BSS founder/teacher, Rajan.

Rajan would like to be able to provide a training for these and other young girls in handcraft, or sewing, or other practical skill so that they don't have to work at the weddings or even worse alternatives.

Across from the spigot, there was one especially pathetic little thatch falling down lean to, about 4X5 ft in size. Rajan told me that one of her young students had lived there until the previous week when her grandmother, with whom she lived in the shack, had died. Some relative had taken the girl away to a family member in the countryside. I asked what happened to the grandmother after she died, did anyone provide the firewood for her to be burned? Rajan told me that "No, her body, like the other poor, was just dumped into the Ganges without burning." When people don't have the $2.50 USD for the wood necessary for the fire, they must give their loved one to the river. 

School started a little late that day because our presence had disrupted the normal schedule. BSS' physical layout is difficult to describe. It is a 2.5 storey warren of unplastered brick rooms, built one after another when cash has been available. Rajan and Sukdev have personally sacrificed their meager cafe earnings to do some of the building, and donors have done the rest. 

The seven classrooms are long narrow three sided rooms, open to the air, windowless, cement floored, lit by one bulb. A blackboard is on the wall at one end. Most of the children sit on the floor (desks needed). A few pieces of student artwork adorn some of the walls. There are signs hung around the school inspiring the students with  virtues. In front of the two layers of classrooms is a small courtyard about 20X20.A gate to the street closes in front of this courtyard.  The courtyard is where the children pray together en masse in the morning, asking God to bless their work. At noon, the children return to the courtyard for their one meal of the day, a large balanced hot delicious meal, which has been sponsored by the Flora Family Foundation through Amistad International for this  past year.  As of March, 2008, the French NGO,  Arche de Dolanji,  is supplying the food and we thank them so much! For most of the students this is their only meal of the day. Because of this meal, most of the children are energetic and healthy, though a few  did seem in poor health. 

One boy, the eldest child in his family,  had tried to commit suicide the day before by swallowing pesticide. His unemployed parents, often out looking for work, are often not at home. The child's despondency that his parent could not feed the family overcame him. Rajan was able to take him to the hospital in time to save his life.  He wrote a letter to  his parents before taking the poison,  begging them not to burn his school papers or school books (when they would burn his body.) Gishan's final words were "God is satisfied with my work. Don't burn my school papers."  This child, like her other students, considers school their only place of peace and happiness in their lives. 

This boy had no last name when he came to school. Rajan gave him the last name Kumar just as she does the many other students who have no last names.