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A Day in the Life of Sarita & Kumkum | Print |  E-mail
Written by Chris J. Magyar   
Wednesday, 19 November 2008

Sarita Kumkum Cover Kumkum Sarita Two young women from rural India get an education of a lifetime, thanks to The Pardada Pardadi Educational Society

Two young women awoke early on an October morning, exhausted from a day of travel, and looked out the window at impenetrable fog. For Sarita Chaudhary, age 17, and Kumkum Chauhan, age 20, it must have been daunting to get no glimpse of the landscape. For the first time in their lives, the women were outside their rural village of Anoopshahr, in the northern state of India called Uttar Pradesh . Beyond the fog outside was a world they’d travelled by bus and plane and car to reach, a place as unfamiliar as possible from their dusty, agrarian home: America, California, the Santa Cruz Mountains.

And now, to make life even more interesting, they were preparing to go to high school.

Not that school itself is an unfamiliar task for Sarita and Kumkum. Unlike most women in rural India, these two are in the process of receiving a full education at the Pardada Pardadi Educational Society (PPES), a charitable boarding school started by Virender “Sam” Singh, the former CEO of DuPont South Asia. The school accepts only girls and gives them—from the age of 3 to adulthood—a basic education, while also providing vocational training and a savings account which they earn as they go. In a region where females are often treated as chattel to be sold into marriage (if not murdered at birth), PPES boasts that its graduates are the wealthiest and best-educated women in their region, an accomplishment that the school hopes will eventually close the gulf in how men and women are treated in rural Indian society.

The difference between their culture and ours does lead to some policies at PPES that seem puzzling, even demeaning to Western ears. The main training focus at the school is in textiles—the girls work from an early age to make handcrafted textiles and objects d’art from metal and wood. But PPES is anything but a sweatshop—the girls earn tremendously good wages for their region, and can carry on beyond school with the skills they learn, providing a mechanism for income in a society that generally frowns on women doing anything but unpaid household and farm labor.

And marriage, at PPES, is generally frowned upon. Most marriages in Anoopshahr are arranged at an early age, and the window for female emancipation closes on the wedding day. Graduates are encouraged to hold out for marriage, in much the same way (and for much the same reasons) that most parents in America prefer their children to hold off on having sex for as long as reasonably possible. Cultures, however, change slowly.

Breakfast

I await my first meeting with Sarita and Kumkum at the entrance to the Mount Madonna School —they are guests in the home of Sadanand Ward Mailliard, a teacher at the school. The chaperone for the girls on their trip, which will also cover Oakland and Southern California, is Jenny Steeves, a New Yorker who now lives in Delhi and works for PPES.

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Kumkum and Sarita with Mailliard
I’m standing with Steeves in the cold morning mist, and while we wait, she fills me in on some of the bare facts about Anoopshahr, and also drops an interesting bit of gossip: Kumkum is engaged to be married, having selected a boy with the help of her mother, though the implication is that she didn’t have much choice. “We’ve been joking that hopefully she’ll find a boyfriend while she’s here,” Steeves says, and the sentiment is not without precedent. Asha, another PPES student who took the trip to America (a few lucky girls are selected several times a year), called off her engagement upon return. But Kumkum comes from a conservative family with no father and only one brother, who’s 15 years old and works as a house boy for a politician. Her younger brother initially refused to allow Kumkum to come on the trip. “It was probably his way of asserting authority as the man of the house,” Steeves says.

A minivan pulls up, and our guests dismount. Both women are slight, with long brown hair and large, penetrating eyes. Sarita smiles more, and is unabashed about staring a long time at what she’s trying to understand. Kumkum is taller, and leans forward, with an attitude that she is prepared to tackle challenges. They greet me by saying, “Hello, sir.” Both have limited English, though enough to carry on partial, halting conversations.

Also emerging from the minivan is Soma Sharan, a Mount Madonna student who was adopted from an orphanage in the same region of India, though she radiates the bubbly teenager-hood of her American-born peers. She has agreed to serve as translator for the day, which is nice of her, because it happens to be her 15th birthday. She’s dressed for the occasion, and as we race forward to class one of her friends yells out, “You look like an Indian goddess today!”

“She’s a goddess everyday,” Mailliard chides, leading our pack to his classroom, where our day will begin. As an aside, Steeves points to Sarita and Kumkum in their casual jeans and shirts and says, “This is the first time I’ve seen them in non-Indian clothes.”

Soma goes her own way, and the rest of us enter Mailliard’s “Values in World Thought” class. A series of office chairs with wheeled feet are arranged in a circle, and we all take a seat, Sarita and Kumkum demurely choosing chairs toward the corner. Mailliard tells them to join the circle, and pulls Kumkum’s rolling chair, with her in it, toward the other students. The unexpected move causes it to roll over her feet. “Don’t scare them, OK?” he announces to the class. “Be nice.”

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Sarita Chaudhary
I suppose the scene is a bit frightening, in its own way. The students look like the cast of High School Musical, and they emit your typical assortment of random one-liners and little sound effects, the bleeps and regurgitations of a media-saturated generation preparing for class. There is no orientation or preamble. Steeves and I are in the dark as much as Sarita and Kumkum as the discussion begins about someone named Sandel. After a round of conversation, the students are instructed to break into groups of three and draw representations of last night’s reading. Sarita and Kumkum are lightly fought over, and wind up in separate groups.

Mailliard comes over to explain they’re engaging in the process of visual notetaking. “Often people won’t speak in large groups because they’re shy,” he explains. “But they’ll talk in groups of three, and then be more open when we move back to the larger group. Plus, in large groups you spend much of your time listening, which is boring. Engagement accelerates learning.” He says these methods of scaling large groups into intimate settings all come from corporate America. “They’re learning skills they’ll have to practice later.”

Kumkum glances over at Sarita’s group while a girl draws a cloud bubble in neon orange and yellow around the words “everyone’s ideas matter.”

Mailliard, meanwhile, has pulled up a sheaf of photographs pasted to hard black cardboard, and is showing Steeves the important people his students have met with and spoken to, including the Dalai Lama. He goes to show her a picture of them all together at the Tibetan Children’s Museum, and in his excitement, whacks Sarita on the shoulder with the cardboard. He doesn’t miss a beat, explaining that he’s prepping this group to talk to Archbishop Desmond Tutu. “So, that’s what we do.”

He comes across a picture of Mount Madonna students with the president of India, and shows it to Sarita. She smiles for him. “Do you recognize him? His face?” She nods. Meanwhile, one of the boys in her group asks, “How are we going to draw the concept of life?” Another member tells him to just write ‘life’.

Mailliard says to Steeves, “This is 180 degrees from rote learning in India. When I teach in India, it’s very hard to get the kids to interact. I’ll be curious to see if they think this is too weird.”

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Kumkum Chauhan
Group time ends, and the circle more or less reforms. Kumkum has gotten the hang of her rolling chair, and rolls it into place. The wall near her is dominated by a widescreen television with a camera mounted on top. The wall by Sarita is lined with Tibetan prayer flags. Both girls have a notepad open on their laps and a pen in hand, though they write nothing.

The discussion is philosophical in nature, and wide-ranging, at one point even touching on abortion and gay marriage in short order. They speak of pluralism, and its place in a political society. Mailliard brings the discussion around to a single question, which he presses for a yes or no answer on: “Do you have inherent obligations, or only the ones you choose?”

Students offer various responses, though some try to answer both ways and Mailliard calls them on it. One student believes there’s an inherent obligation to be financially secure. Out of the blue, Mailliard calls on Kumkum, asking if she thinks she has an inherent obligation to take care of her parents.

She says “yes” tentatively. Mailliard presses the topic, and turns it to Sarita, who hides her face. He asks Kumkum to explain the question in Hindi, but she hesitates and the class draws in its breath. “You’re pressuring her,” one student complains.

“In moments of tension come creativity,” he responds, letting another expectant pause fill the room. Then he drops the beam of attention from Kumkum. Just as he moves on, she’s looking at Sarita and about to open her mouth, but the noise of loud English discussion resumes, and she chooses not to cut through assertively.

The bell rings. While Mailliard’s class was spirited and cut-throat in demeanor, it had a certain air of discipline to it. For various uncontrollable circumstances, the next class we visit—Soma’s English class—is more of the chaotic sort. We file into a room dominated by a wide horseshoe of tables, and it’s a few chairs short of accommodating the extra people. Kumkum brings me a chair and insists that I use it, but I manage to get her seated with Sarita and Soma. Mailliard pops in to take pictures of the Indians. They smile and even, for the first time, giggle. Soma sits between them.

As if the abortion and gay marriage talk weren’t enough in the earlier class, we are reading “Oedipus Rex” aloud, just at the part where Oedipus is starting to suspect his lover is his mother. Two guys goof off with a water bottle. Kumkum looks at them askance, somewhere between curious and perturbed. The sophomores are rowdier in general, which provides something visual for Sarita to latch onto—her eyes dart from student to student.

As the discussion fumbles forward—there are not enough copies to go around, so groups are huddled around and some students have nothing to follow along with, much to the harried teacher’s chagrin—the students exert their hormones in various barely muted ways: a girl repeatedly thwaps the boys next to her with a PVC balloon, and two girls in the opposite end gossip and laugh. At least one extracurricular conversation is productive, as Soma leans into Sarita, and Kumkum and explains something about the commotion to them in Hindi.

Near the end of the period, an administrator brings in donuts and the class literally shouts a pent-up “Happy Birthday” to Soma. The birthday girl serves Sarita and Kumkum first, then walks around the room to share the bounty. The sugar fortification essentially brings an end to the class.

Lunch

“People in their village have to eat everything on their plate because food is so precious,” Steeves says to me as we watch Sarita and Kumkum enjoy a large pizza and yet more pastries with Soma and her friends. “Their part of Uttar Pradesh is agricultural. The typical family lives with a water buffalo, and they bring the animal into the house when it’s cold. And we’re talking two-room houses—one for storage, and one for sleeping.”

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Steeves with Sarita on her first grocery trip
Steeves became involved with the school through her husband, Dave Praeger, who bills himself as the world’s #2 expert on poop. He runs a website called PoopReport.com , and wrote a book called “Poop Culture: How America is Shaped by Its Grossest National Product.” This level of fame within the circles of crap (which are vaster than you might imagine), garnered him an invitation to speak at the World Toilet Summit in New Delhi.

An employee of PPES had bought the mailing list for that conference in pursuit of an angel for the school’s toilet project, which involved installing new toilets in the homes of the students—some of whom, including Kumkum, had no modern facilities at all. Of the thousands of people on the list, Praeger was the only one to respond, but when he put the call out for toilets on PoopReport.com, he was able to raise more than $17,000 for the project. (Some of the pledge effort involved getting your name on one of the toilets for a certain donation amount, which might not sound desirable to some of you, but then you probably don’t spend a lot of time reading PoopReport.com.) During the course of that effort, Steeves became friendly with the school administration, and was brought into the fold as the communications manager.

ImageEvangelizing for the school is part of her job during this trip, and she does so with an enthusiasm that is enchanting for its sincerity; this is no ordinary PR effort. Most people can’t even imagine the conditions PPES operates in, condition, which it boldly fights.

Take castes: “Every girl helps with the chores,” Steeves says. “The school is all about equality, so all children must use the same utensils, and participate in making the food. A small number have dropped out because of that, because of caste issues.”

Other than that, school is inextricably linked to work for the girls—and a career is as exotic a prospect as an education for them. Steeves says it takes several years of training and practice to get up to snuff on making the products that PPES sells. “What the older girls produce subsidizes the younger girls’ education,” she says. “We’re trying to be self-sufficient, financially, and ensure that every graduate is guaranteed a job upon leaving, if she wants it.

“I like to think of it as a roti-driven school,” she continues. “Meaning it’s based on bread. It supplies a basic education, basic skills, that will ensure they have bread in their lives. It’s all about empowerment. Even if they do get married and have kids, they can do this work from home.”

The girls finish eating and I gingerly ask if Soma is willing to pass up on birthday partying in order to translate for a sit-down interview. She readily agrees, and we wander off to a conference room in the administrative building.

This is only the first of what turned out to be several newspaper, radio, and television interviews Sarita and Kumkum gave during their stay in Santa Cruz County, and California in general; there’s nothing like touching down on American soil and being immediately bombarded by our infamous media machine. Nonetheless, we are a relentlessly, clumsily curious people, and it was time to pose some direct questions.

“It was a little scary going in,” Kumkum tells Soma of the experience going into the classroom. “But it was good to see competition going on, with the teacher asking questions and getting all the students involved.”

“The teaching style is very different from India,” Sarita adds, putting in that they go to school six days a week, but do most of their learning directly from a textbook, with little discussion. “It’s amazing the hard work and commitment people put into class here.”

They both mention that the striking differences—the ones that are apparent a mere 24 hours after getting off the airplane—are the way we live so spread apart and with our own lives and spaces, as opposed to the condensed nature of the Indian village, and the surprising equality of treatment for men and women.

When I ask about their families, Kumkum answers in English: “I have a mother who is a home worker, a father who died, one brother and sister. I am oldest. I hope to become a teacher.” Both have sisters in the school. They say that despite the school’s push for change, it has been embraced by the town, particularly because it’s free.

Sarita says usually marriage is at 15 or 16, but study helps delay that choice. “After marriage, you’re not allowed to study anymore.” She says this trip is adding fire to her idea to go to school and work. In return, they just want everyone in America to know about their school, and what a difference it makes.

When I ask what the most important event of their lives has been, they both answer without hesitation, and almost without need for translation: “This trip.”

Dinner

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Soma Sharan
“It’s fun being a translator. It’s going back to my origins, and I’m surprised how much Hindi I remember,” Soma says. She’s sitting on the carpet with her homework in front of her, a cell phone constantly buzzing with text messages, trying to pay attention to her school work and social life while also interpreting Sarita and Kumkum’s words for me. We’re at the Mailliard’s home on the Mount Madonna campus, sitting around the living room in front of a muted television that’s showing static—the plan, after the final interview, is to watch a movie with the guests—and it’s a much more relaxed atmosphere than the school. Sarita and Kumkum are in pajamas. They sit on the couch, next to a large electric massage chair that they were joyfully playing around with earlier. As I talk to Soma about her experiences, Kumkum gets up and walks across the room to a Connect Four game. She picks it up and inspects the back, then looks at Sarita, who shakes her head.

Soma was 10 when she was adopted from her orphanage in Northern India. Her hometown is much more westernized than Anoopshahr, and she was raised by westerners, and spoke German growing up. “I started talking at 14 months,” she says, laughing. Before we all sat down, she was on a cordless phone talking to her “brothers and sisters” who are still at the orphanage in India. Though not technically related, it was clear from her excited Hindi that this was a family call home for her birthday.

I ask what approach she’s taken to this very adult job of translating people’s thoughts. “I do kind of edit out the repetitiveness,” she says. “But it’s really neat to hear what they say, because that was me a while back, and it’s interesting to be on the other side and see their thoughts matching what mine were.”

Although Sarita and Kumkum are obviously more at ease in this environment, they still offer short answers to my questions. When asked the first thing they described about America to their family back home (they had made phone calls earlier), Sarita says, “That we like it here.” I start to feel a little stupid. What should we expect? What is the purpose of holding the American mirror up to these lucky and intelligent women? Why do Americans, unfailingly, always ask foreigners what they think of America?

As I’m wondering this, Steeves and Soma have wandered onto the topic of where to take the girls in L.A. There’s a trip to Disneyland planned (a place, Steeves later wrote me, “they had never heard of, but they loved anyway”), as well as a taping of the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Soma brings up Marine World, and Steeves says they have never even seen the ocean, something that is on the itinerary for the next day, on their way to Soma’s volleyball game at Soquel High School.

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The girls enjoying a volleyball game.
Sarita is opening up her first fortune cookie. She hands the fortune slip to Soma for translation. It says, “Big adventure awaits this weekend.” Kumkum opens hers, and she has the exact same phrase on her slip. Steeves encourages them to paste the slips into their diaries, which they are keeping as a school assignment. Soma explains what a fortune cookie is, and tries to impress upon the girls the unlikelihood of duplicate fortunes that are so well-suited to their circumstance, but I think they’re less amazed than the rest of us.

At school, Kumkum specializes in sewing, and Sarita in hand embroidery. The school’s official online store features cushion covers, tablecloths, placemats, napkins, purses, and assorted gift items, some of which are not what you’d expect from a rural Indian village (wine bottle cozies? an advent calendar?), but all of which are handmade by the students.

They describe their home as flat, and hot. The Ganges River runs through the area, but there are still water shortages. The tell me that there were three months of rain this year, which was very unusual, given that they didn’t happen during the normal summer rainy season. They use the feces from their water buffalo to make fuel patties for fire, which can only be done in dry months for obvious reasons. Normally they make enough to set some aside for the wet months, but this year the unexpected rain caused a shortage of dung fuel. 

Sarita describes her water buffalo as annoying. “You have to do everything for them. You have to feed them, wash them, tie them under a tree when it’s too hot.” They live for 15 or 20 years. When I ask if they name them, I get a blank stare.

When we turn to the subject of castes, Soma begins conducting a lengthy interview herself to sort it out. After several minutes of negotiations and explanations, with both girls offering numerous clarifications, she returns with the information that Kumkum is from a higher caste than Sarita, but neither one is from a particularly high up caste. “It’s not that common,” Soma relays as Sarita and Kumkum talk over her, giving more information, “but if you go to the house of a Brahman, a high caste, sometimes they won’t sit next to you, or give you food.”

I ask if the school’s insistence on ignoring caste has had any effect on Anoopshahr at large. Another long talk occurs, as Kumkum relates the story of a girl from a higher caste who refused to eat the food when a girl from the lowest caste had cooked it. The headmaster went to the girl who refused to eat, and said, “If you cut the other girl, and you cut yourself, there’s blood. If you see a difference in the blood, go ahead and refuse to eat. But if there’s no difference, then eat the food.” Apparently, that was the last incident of anyone refusing to eat in the dining hall.

I suddenly remembered the class at the beginning of the day, and the American girl in Kumkum’s group who had written and decorated the words “everyone’s ideas matter.” Even with the vast, almost incomprehensible gap between the social issues in America and the social issues in India—and, indeed, the animated talk from Sarita and Kumkum about castes was similarly passionate to the American high schoolers who were discussion abortion and gay marriage earlier—the most radical belief spreading across the globe is this notion that everyone’s ideas matter.

There’s a measure of self-congratulation about this maxim in our country. We believe, and repeat, this mantra so often that we have become deafened to other people’s ideas. Our impulsive need to spread our thoughts and way of life (instead of just sharing them) has the effect of drowning out other culture’s ideas, making them matter less. Everywhere I’ve looked since talking to Sarita and Kumkum, I see people who espouse ideas of equality as loudly as possible. The Indians’ approach—Kumkum’s reserved poise, Sarita’s unblinking stare—seemed so contradictory to their American hosts because they were employing one idea we’ve nearly forgotten about in this culture: listening.

“There’s so much more respect in India—respect for each other, and for your teachers,” Soma says. “Like today in the classroom, I was remembering how different it was to see people talking while the teacher is talking, not listening. In India, education is God, so everyone has respect for it. But here, it’s almost taken for granted.”

Maybe this Thanksgiving, instead of saying grace, we should be still and listen, to see if we can hear grace. It’s a small world between here and Anoopshahr, after all, and everyone’s ideas matter.

For more on Pardada Pardadi Educational Society, visit education4change.org . To purchase gifts made by the students, visit fromvillagetoworld.com . To read about life as New Yorkers in India by Jenny Steeves and Dave Praeger, visit Our Delhi Struggle . To donate to the sanitation project, visit poopreport.com/village .

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Nice Blog
0
Go through the blog... A trip is nicely constructed in words...and saying all the true things about PPES... I like this blog more i too belong this small town "Anoopshahr"!!!
abhishek , November 21, 2008 | url
R&D Scientist
0
Nice to read about it. I also belong to Anoopshahr, but I am not fully agree the way this article explains about Anoopshahr. Following two point are not prevalent:

1. In a region where females are often treated as chattel to be sold into marriage.

2. Most marriages in Anoopshahr are arranged at an early age, and the window for female emancipation closes on the wedding day.

Regards,
Vijay
Vijay , November 21, 2008

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