Meeting Urmi Basu and visiting New Light, her shelter for trafficked women and their children:

…Visiting Loreto Sealdah and meeting Sister Cyril, traveling by bus with her students to watch them tutor in the Village Program:

…Meeting the men and women from the villages training to be teachers, and proudly displaying the curriculum materials they have diligently (and meticulously, and expertly) prepared:

Sister says they are better prepared than the teachers coming out of the universities. I do not know the university programs there, but I do know Sister. I’d lay odds that she knows of what she speaks.

…these are experiences I will never forget.

Here is where I encountered the poor and needy—and witnessed the large hearts of the Indian people. There was no condescension toward the poor. (I have no doubt that they would assure me that it is there, but it still strikes me as significant that it was not visible to me.) Sr. Cyril, as I said earlier in the blog, is the most radical educator I have ever met.

One of the girls who live at the school preparing for class:

And another. Notice the bedding rolled up and shelved in the back:

Sister sends a trunk, a “school in a box” out to remote areas where there are no schools–the villages, the brickyards, the fisheries:

Fifty percent of the population of Loreto Sealdah is poor.

Several years ago, I was a member of the curriculum committee for a school opening in Cleveland to serve the poor. To qualify for the school a family had to be at or below the poverty line. Once that pool of possible students was identified, they were tested, and those who scored highest were admitted. The goal was to choose, from among the poor, those with the greatest chance of succeeding in the school. Sr. Cyril did not test the poor–she chose the poorest of the poor to bring into the school.

Her domestic servant program, in which she asks her students to approach families who keep child domestic servants and manipulate to get them outside (“we’re starting a club for children in the neighborhood…can ___ come for an hour?”). Once they have her (usually a girl) in tow, they ask if she has enough to eat, clothes to wear, if she’s treated well, etc.… What amazes me about this program is the flight of imagination it took to empower and entrust the children with so much responsibility. We would never do that. It would never occur to us to trust our children that deeply, to depend on their ingenuity so fully. Few things help a youngster feel competent and confident more than being given real responsibility—and we are particularly bad at doing that. Sr. Cyril gets it. We need to get it. We need to raise entrusted, empowered children. We have so much to learn.

Finally, I was fortunate enough to be invited to present at the “Indo-US Conference for School Education,” at the American Center in Kolkata. There, I met I KanuPriya Jhunjhunwala, an educational consultant and Shubhra Chatterji the Director of Vikramshila, a non-profit NGO “working in the area of education with the mission of ‘making quality education a reality for all children.’” (http://www.vikramshila.org/)

KanyPriya and I struck up a conversation during the break and we knew right away that we would have to exchange contact information before we left. The program started up before we did so, we agreed to meet up at the end to trade info, and then Shubhra presented. I could hardly stay in my seat until the end of the session, I was so eager to meet this like-minded eductor.

Shubhra and KanuPriya introduced me to the Vikramshila and Naba Disha (New Directions) programs. and the extraordinary work they do with these two exceptional programs. Shubhra is the Director of Vikramshila, a multi-faceted educational support program.

Naba Disha is another social program resulting from a courageous flight of imagination that I think, at this point, is beyond our capability. Started as a supplemental education program for children in the most violent neighborhoods in the inner cities, they asked police stations to host the tutoring sessions—initially because they needed safe places for them to meet. The miraculous, unintended consequence of the program is that the police began taking a paternal interest in the program and started to bond with the children. The result—they no longer see the kids as street urchins or thugs—they know them, they have a relationship with them. The Naba Disha center I visited was housed in a building put up by the police specifically to house them. It looked like a retreat center:

The day I visited, there were children from preschool through grade 12 working with tutors (several of them visiting from Ireland). The material and the curriculum were creative and beautiful,

the room was filled with joy and energy,

and I was more in love with India than ever:

The result of the conference and the visit to Vikramshila and Naba Dishu is that KanuPriya and I are co-hosting an Indo-US online consortium to continue these conversations regarding the rich similarities and differences between the two countries. I will post here as soon as we are up and running.

Subha far left; KanuPriya on the right:

Subha and I will continue to be friends. I’m hoping she gets skype soon. We plan to write for funding to continue our work with Urmi and the issues raised in Half the Sky—getting students in the US and India to put their heads together to make both our countries and the world a better place.

I’m not happy that with each passing week all of this is further and further behind me:

indelible images like this one:

warm, engaged students:

dear friends and colleagues: