I’m still alive, I promise!

Hello to anyone still out there! 

My apologies for going radio silent, but good news: I’m still alive and still abroad. Many of you were likely unsurprised by my inability to keep up with blogging (my track record speaks for itself), but I really thought this time would be different.

The truth is, India is exhausting in a way I didn’t expect. I don’t mean that in a negative way (though there have been some negative moments), but in an “oh my gosh there’s so much happening and I don’t know how to process it!” kind of way. Between overstimulation, the heat, and a jam-packed schedule, I had no energy left to write, let alone fight with WordPress over formatting and uploads.

Our Fulbright program ended a week ago, and I’ve been able to reflect on every good, bad, astounding, confusing, inspiring, disheartening, and mind-blowing moment. I’m finally ready to write it all down, so if you’re still with me, I promise to give you the full scoop over the coming days!

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned! 🙂

Day 2: Salaam Baalak Trust, AI, and beyond

Today, our first stop was the Salaam Baalak Trust, an NGO that focuses on caring for and educating Delhi’s street children  (fun fact: it was founded by Zohran Mamdani’s grandmother!). We began with a street tour led by Salman, an alumnus of the program. He gave us context for why children end up on Delhi’s streets and what life is like for them.

Here are some insights:

• Children end up on the streets for the reasons you might expect (their families are homeless, they’re kicked out of their homes), but there are some that surprised me. Sometimes, children are separated from their parents during festivals or events and end up on their own. Many children, particularly those from rural areas, run away from home and come to Delhi in the hopes that they’ll have a better life. Couples may also run away from home because they are not allowed to be together due to caste differences. Salman said that one couple that passed through Salaam Baalak came to Delhi because the boy wanted to propose to his girlfriend in front of the Taj Mahal; he didn’t realize the Taj is in Agra, several hours away.
• 400 trains pass through the New Delhi train station each day. It has become a major hub for street children, who are often trafficked by gang leaders on the railway platforms. Police and railway staff work with Salaam Baalak Trust to identify children who need help. Social workers do their best to convince children to leave the streets, but if they will not agree to permanent shelter, children can at least access a daycare center at the railway station. 
• About 75% of the children on the street are boys. Girls are often not allowed out, giving them fewer opportunities to end up on the streets voluntarily or involuntarily. Prostitution, trafficking, and forced marriages are also major issues.
• According to Salman, boys on the street spend their money on two things: drugs and Bollywood movies. Food is not a concern because they can get meals easily enough from temples and charities or by stealing it from trains. Any money a child earns must be spent right away or else they risk having it stolen.
• It can be difficult to get children off the street and into SB’s shelters because they do not like following the center’s rules. They want to come and go as they please, not follow a strict schooling and training schedule. One way SB motivates children is through TV. They have a school bus with a TV that street children can watch on Fridays and Saturdays. They tell children that they can watch TV every day if they come to the shelter, and it’s a huge motivator!

The mission of Salaam Baalak Trust is to get children off the streets and give them the tools to have a better life once they age out of the program at 18. Their process includes a number of steps:

• First, SBT works to identify a child’s parents. This is the most difficult part, as most children have no idea where they come from. Counselors use drawings to help identify children’s homes (which could be as far away as Nepal or Pakistan). It can take more than a year to find a child’s family.
• Once the family is identified, the government wants Salaam Baalak to reunite the family. If a child chooses to return home, SB does home visits before and after a child is reunited with their family. The goal is to ensure that the child’s home is safe and healthy for them; if not, SB can work to have the child removed.
• If the child does not wish to return home, they are able to stay with SB in shelters (essentially boarding schools) until they are 18. 
• For the first few months, children receive informal education so the teachers and counselors can assess what students need and where they’re at. Once they’re ready, SB sends children to a private school in the area.
• Once a child in the program reaches 16-17 years old, they receive career counseling and training so they can pursue a career when they age out. At 18, they are provided with an apartment for 3-5 months. They can focus on building their future without rent, food, or transportation fees. The trust will help alumni in the future if they need it. Many students who age out of the program go into the arts; our tour guide is a Bollywood actor and has appeared in 7 films!
• Each year, the center puts on a huge play and performance. Alumni serve as the creative team, and the children perform. This is how Salman and many others discovered their love for the arts!

Salaam Baalak also has daycare centers for children who live with their parents in Delhi. The goal is to get these children into schools.

We met children in the daycare and at one of the boys shelters. We could have spent the day there interacting and playing! The boys were learning the English alphabet when we arrived; they were so diligent in copying their letters into their notebooks! We had a dance party to end our visit, but most of the older boys were too cool to join in. 

For the afternoon we visited the US-India Education Foundation (USIEF), the organization that works with Fulbright and hosts us here in India. USIEF administers Fulbright-Nehru fellowships and EducationUSA, a program that “connects India’s academic and research ecosystem with excellence at U.S. universities.” Their offices looked like a US school counselor’s office: there were college pennants and brochures everywhere.

Our first lecture was presented by Pratham Education Foundation, one of the largest NGOs in India that works in 26 Indian states. What began as a way to help students in the slums of Mumbai is now a massive organization that focuses on full communities. In addition to working in schools, Pratham helps mothers, provides vocational training, and helps people return to school.

Their presentation focused primarily on a program called Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL). Pratham says that their program can teach a child to read in just 50 days, with only 1 hour of instruction per day. Needless to say, we were skeptical. It does seem easier to go from letter recognition to word recognition in Hindi and other Indian languages (Indian languages are highly phonetic, unlike English), but I wasn’t fully convinced. Still, the team from Pratham was motivated and energetic, and I enjoyed their enthusiasm. 

Our final session was a panel on AI in Education. There were 3 Indian professors and a fourth who taught in the US for 25 years. She often served as our interpreter, connecting Indian to American education. The ideas discussed bounced around quite a bit, but here are some of the ideas I wrote down:

• Teachers are often concerned about AI eroding creativity, but creativity is a disguised form of privilege. Creativity requires emotional and physical energy; if a child is coming to school hungry, they do not have the energy to spend on creativity. 
• In the US, there are minimum standards we expect in school: electricity and some form of technology. In India, these are not givens. Teachers cannot plan to have access to electricity, let alone technology. Only 23% of Indian schools have functional internet.
• Access to technology is hugely divided along gender lines. Though the majority of Indian homes have at least one smart phone, that technology is reserved for men and boys. Many female teachers do not have access to technology or internet at home or at school; only 33% of women in India have ever used the internet.
• AI training needs to include teaching students how to ask questions. Asking the right questions is a skill that many people do not have, particularly in India. Teachers are the ultimate authority in the classroom, and questioning them is not allowed. In addition, teachers are not trained to ask questions. Saying “I don’t know” in front of a classroom will lose a teacher respect. Teachers absolutely cannot question administration. We need ot teach teachers how to ask questions so they can pass this information along to students. Otherwise, there’s little use in training students to use AI. 

We also talked a lot about the idea of digital colonization, who holds the power, who is writing what is being put out by AI. I’m still wrapping my brain around a lot of it, and I’m not sure what my role is in it. While it’s true that there are so many huge questions around AI, I also cannot ignore that my students need to learn to use it.

By the end of the day, we were all drained! I passed out pretty early at the hotel! 

Tomorrow, we visit a brand new government school, and we get in front of a classroom for the first time!

Day 1: Yes, India is HOT!

After a day of travel and a 2 hour line at passport control, the majority of our cohort arrived in Delhi. We were met with a wall of heat and solid humidity — even at midnight, the weather chose to assert its dominance. Welcome to India!

Our home in Delhi is the Imperial, a hotel built in the 1930s that famously hosted Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, and Lord Mountbatten during key Partition discussions that led to the creation of Pakistan. The hotel is beautiful and luxurious – we’re spoiled!

Day 1 consisted of free time in the morning, a few lectures in the afternoon, and a visit to Humayun’s tomb, a monument commissioned in 1556 to honor the Mughal Emperor Humayun.

In an effort not to bore you (and to keep myself from writing too much – though if you scroll, you’ll see that I failed at that), I’m going to break the day down into “quick” facts, lessons, and details:

• I took a morning walk with two of my male colleagues. They were stopped twice by supposedly well-meaning men who offered to bring us anywhere we wanted to go (in this case, a money exchange and ATM). I’m told that addressing only the men is a sign of respect. It was difficult to get them to leave us alone, but we weren’t scammed and got where we needed to go, so in the end, I’d call that a win.
• We had a lecture and discussion with Radhika Bordia, a journalist we collectively became obsessed with (we’re plotting ways to hang out with her again). Her goal was to introduce us to the caste system in India, something that is theoretically illegal today but still shapes marriage, politics, and labor in India. If you’re interested, here’s a quick rundown on caste:
  • Caste is a hierarchy system that began 3,000 years ago as a division of labor. The higher castes had the “pure” jobs and were priests, scholars, warriors, and rulers. The people from the lower castes had the less pure jobs and were merchants, farmers, laborers, and service providers. The division of society that existed outside the caste system were later known as the Untouchables and today are called the Dalit. They had the most “impure” jobs, like tanning leather. 
  • Occupation determined caste and was passed down generation to generation.
  • The Manusmriti, a Hindu religious text written in the 2nd or 3rd century CE, puts the Shudras (the lowest caste) in a subordinate position, discouraging education and property ownership. This religious sanction of caste made it harder to dismantle and deepened exclusion. The Manusmriti also says some lovely things about women: a woman must never be independent, a woman is subject first to her father, then husband, then sons, and so on…
  • British rule in India codified the caste system, making it more rigid and legally binding.
  • B.R. Ambedkar, the architect of India’s constitution, worked to reform the caste system. Born into the Dalit class himself, he understood that education is the first step to freedom. He pushed for the Dalit class to urbanize, as there is greater anonymity in cities and therefore greater chance to escape the stigma of caste. India eventually created Reservations, similar to affirmative action in the US, to provide more opportunity in education, public jobs, and representation for lower castes.
  • Today, villages and rural areas are still highly caste-segregated. Only 5-7% of marriages in India happen across castes; the rest still happen within castes. 
• Our lectures today also gave us an introduction to the education system in India:
  • In 2020, the government implemented a new National Education Policy (NEP). Its goal, among other things, was to push competency-based education, emphasize creativity, critical thinking, and problem solving, and to bring more tech integration and digital learning into the classroom (NH colleagues: sound familiar?)
  • India has about 1 million government schools (what we would call public schools). These schools offer free textbooks, uniforms, and lunches.
  • The NEP pushes for education in each state’s “mother tongue.” Though this sounds like a good idea, “mother tongue” is not defined. As a journalist, Radhika worries about the long term consequences of removing English in schools.
• From Radhika, we also learned briefly about the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a major right-wing Hindu nationalist movement that currently controls the government. They are pushing for more “traditional” education in school. As she pointed out, the problem is that for the RSS, “traditional” means Hindu, which ignores the other rich cultural, religious, and linguistic traditions in India. Our group likened it to a certain political movement in the US…
• Our visit to Humayun’s tomb was hot and sweaty, but the site was spectacular. Our tour guide, Dr. Navina Jafa, is a Fulbright alumna, and she talked about how she curates historical walks for students. She also danced for us, which was really special!
• Showers today: 2. Outfit changes: 3. 
• One last fun fact, specifically for Ashley Day: if a lizard falls on the left side of a woman, it’s considered lucky! No data yet on what happens if a lizard falls on a man or on the right side of a woman. Also no data yet on how often lizards fall from the sky…

Day 1 was a sweaty whirlwind, but I’m so excited to be on this adventure! Tomorrow, we visit our first school, so stay tuned!