Whack-a-Mole

Isn't he darling? We do a lot of drawing here to cement in their minds different concepts and words. For example, today for English class, 4th standard drew Spiderman standing and sitting to learn those two words.

Whack-a-Mole.

We just found out the government did not own the land "sanctioned" to us for the new school. Who owns it? Our very reasonable neighbor who lives in a big house next to the slum. His son is studying at MIT, so our neighbor "gets" Americans and we talked for a long time (in English). He offered to help us buy another piece of land in the area for the school. We'll see where that goes.

That same day (yesterday, Sunday) we found out we had royally ticked off our landlady. She was furious with us for cleaning out the room she is renting to us to serve as the office (top right). She is kicking us out entirely on Wednesday, out of the office and, it appears, out of the school. She has already hired a contractor to build a one-room apartment next to the shed for the school where preschool is help. The contractor came by today during school and very apologetically explained this to out teachers. A nice man, he looked completely stricken when he saw the school. Looks like we'll be hosting all the teaching materials in my car and teaching out under the sky for a while. We'll figure this out. Every day has been a crisis.

Last week, the gas for the stove was not working and we were about to go caveman style to cook. Then the water truck didn't show up to replenish our tank of water, so again the school lunch was in jeopardy. Kaplana called in a tanker truck and saved the day. Before that, it was our government teacher, Vijaya (more on her next post). We had a tough time integrating her. She doesn't really speak English and has a strong bias against teaching English in standards 1-5. There is a lot of pride in promoting Telegu, which they call the Italian of the East because it is rather lyrical, up and down, sounding.

Whack-a-Mole will continue, and all of the above was no surprise. These kinds of projects unravel all kinds of challenges as you get in there and tug around. Kalpana is always the angel during these crises.