Week 1! Trusses, Bio fuel & Soak Pits

We have now been at the engineering school Vigyan Ashram for a week.  We have our own room with ‘delux western style toilet’ J.  We eat with the students and as we are guests we get to sit at the table. The food is very tasty, but I do sense that in a few weeks time I may have grown tired of rice three times a day!

We have smoothed over our first few teething problems that were mostly due to confusion in translation.  We were unsure of relationships with management and the teachers but that is now much better.  We obviously want to work with the teachers as they will be the ones implementing our lessons when we leave.  Both the engineering and energy teachers have broken English, and our marahti is obviously terrible so it was tricky initially. 

At the moment our project involves creating (and teaching with the help of a translator) theoretical lessons which are based on powerpoint.  We really weren’t sure about this as the cost for projectors is very high.  However, we were constantly reassured that this was what they wanted.  The idea is that these can be easily used in other schools that share the Vigyan Ashram curriculum.  So far we have delivered a lesson on trusses complete with construction of a bamboo truss (thank you Clare Farm!).  I am helping with the ‘energy and environment’ class and managing thus far to dodge electronics!  I have delivered a lesson on biomass plants and will give one tomorrow on  soak pits and sanitation.  Abi is helping with the engineering class and so is developing ways of teaching about moments and pulleys and relating them back to the projects that the students are working on. (design of wheel barrow, seed planter etc)

There are about 50 students here including just 5 girls.  This is because it is an engineering school that is meant for school drop outs. Supposedly village girls are lucky to go to school the first time so getting a second chance is almost unheard of-last year there were none.  The students come and stay at VA for 1 year.  They work Sunday through to Friday.  They stay in one class-either food lab, energy & environment, engineering or animal husbandry for 3 months.  Then they rotate.  They all have to work around the campus, some do the biomass, some look after the cows/goats/chickens, others control the water or clean rooms.  They earn money for this that goes towards their school fees.  I think they learn a lot from this as well as from the lessons.

The name of the school was explained to us the other day by Amma-the wife of the founder of the school.  Vugyan=science and Ashram is like a temple.  So during the day the students learn about science but when in the kitchen they must treat it as an ashram.  This means no talking-it took us a while and a few strange looks until we worked this out! They also practice meditation and general thoughts and manners in the kitchen.  I think the two work very well together and we have been lucky to join them in meditation a few times already.

Yesterday we had a lovely day with the ladies who cook the meals.  They invited us to make chiptaties (which is surprisingly difficult!) and then to accompany them into the village to go to the market.  From looking at Google maps its clear to see that the village is a market town.  They have a market every Friday and the village was very busy.  It was great seeing all the exciting looking vegetables and trying to work out what on earth was going on-sometimes she gave bananas instead of money and then we left the bags of vegetables in a sweet shop-bizarre!  Me and abi treated ourselves to some overpriced apples that had been imported from chillie-they are about the same price as they were at home but the ladies were horrified at the cost!  We are rationing them now J  they then took us into a temple which was so very beautiful especially compared to the rest of the village! We followed their invites and prayed and touched our heads with ash.  Then we all hung up bells for a god-Ive yet to google it to work out what it meant!

Us making chipatits!

Today I have spent the day producing my lessons-animations take a terribly long time!  We are trying to eliminate words wherever possible however we are told they will be translated for when they use them again.