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The following are extracts from the diary and letters of Polly Abbott, an IVCS Project Visitor who stayed in India from January 1995 to June 1995.
January 19th 1995, Letter home on first day after arriving at Amarpurkashi (APK)
Now I am at Amarpurkashi and it’s a complete contrast to Delhi and I feel very different again. It is so peaceful and beautiful here, apart from the buses roaring past on the distant main road. I’m sharing a comfortable room with Claire and Kim.
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The project seems very well run and interesting. I think I’ll get involved in the school, but I must learn some Hindi first in order to get the most out of it. Tomorrow we are all going shopping for Indian clothes. They’ll be more suitable for the weather than Western ones, easier to wash and make us stand out less than we do already.
26th January 1995, Republic Day.
No yoga this morning but an early breakfast (bananas, biscuits and tea). Then we tagged along behind the schools’ procession through the village and across the fields to another village completely different from APK, partly because it is a long way from the main road. Apparently only 25 people in the whole village are literate. There is no school. The government’s excuse is that there is no main road.
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The children sang the national songs that they’d been practising all week at the top of their voices. They all carried the Indian flags, the ones which we had helped to make at school with felt tips and sticks and very sticky glue.
When the procession round the two villages had finished, we went back to the High School. There was a stage set up and children from the primary school and the high school performed short acts, songs, and mimes.
They were very hard to understand but you got the general drift, there was one hysterical one which some older boys did about some confusion in a barbers shop. There was a curtain that was manually pulled across the stage, it was very squeaky and I was convinced it was going to fall on top of the children. There were balloons all around that kept popping. The younger children, sitting cross-legged in the front row, got very bored and fidgety, I remember feeling exactly the same at my school shows!
29th January 1995
Some of us went round the kitchen gardens. Rameshi, who showed us, seemed to know no English except the names of the vegetables! They grow practically everything we eat here. I was very excited to see things growing that I’d only ever seen in shops before, like bananas!
1st February 1995
India so far is everything I had expected it to be and more!
APK is very rural. Half the houses are made of mud. Buffalo are tied up in front of most houses. An open sewer runs down the middle of the street. There are just over 1000 people here and most of them seem to be children! There are lots of women too, but you hardly ever see the men since they are all at work in the fields.
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The project is on the edge of the village. The building is very smart. On the roof of the high school is a beautiful terrace and we live up here. In the morning we get involved in the project. I’ve been to the primary school twice, but really without Hindi there is very little I can do. The real challenge is to do something which will last beyond our stay, like teaching English to the teachers. We are trying to devise some conversation classes. I’ve also milked the buffalo, been round the kitchen garden, helped dig up weeds at the social forestry project. We do yoga every morning, survival Hindi every day and in the evening we have discussions about religion, development issues and so on.
On returning from a wedding ceremony in a nearby village…
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We left the party in order to get back before dark. We piled back into the tractor-trailer. We had put some benches and chairs in but it was still a peculiar way to travel in our best suits and saris. As we left the village, dozens of children followed us as far as they could. They were all pushing bicycle tyres like hoops along the bumpy, muddy lane.
The sun was close to setting and the light was beautiful - another very Indian scene which I tried to take a memory photograph of.
As we got closer to the main road we passed a strange looking man in very dark clothes. He had a stick over his shoulder with two bags hanging off it. We were told he was a snake charmer. Not surprisingly, he looked very confused at seeing a tractor pulling a trailer full of westerners through a field in the middle of no where! But then he realised his opportunity and started to play his pipe. But we weren’t stopping and carried on back to APK, leaving the snake charmer looking even more confused than ever!......
Copyright ã IVCS, July 1999
