After Three Days of Teaching

This is the end of my third day of teaching at the Cambridge School in Calcutta. I have had a tremendous time teaching kids from preschool to high school and have made many great friends among the students and the faculty.

The Cambridge School is much like Ancona. It has small classes with bright students who are not afraid to question and think. Most of what I have taught has been from my lesson about juggling and algebra although I have modified it greatly for younger kids. I am really looking forward to having my students in Ancona share experiences with the students here. They would really like to do the same. Their knowledge of America is far more extensive than what we know about India. They can all tell me about Barack Obama, and, of course, Michael Jordan. Of course, there was the student who told me he thought that Chicago was a city in the state of Boston, but for the most part they are not pulling my leg. ha ha

Calcutta was, on my first trip around the city, a more prosperous looking city than Delhi, but I was told that this was just appearances. There are, indeed, some beautiful places here, and the lake where I run each day is one of them. Anya, Domonique, and Kari were happy to discover that there are malls here too. In this respect Calcutta looks like the new India that we keep hearing about.

But there are other places which we would never see in Chicago. The place where we stay is nice, and I am indeed thankful that it has air conditioning. Calcutta is very humid. When I look out my window in the morning, I see a small group of people gathering around a pump where they collect buckets of water. There is usually one or two people with soap washing up there while others are filling their buckets. Across the street is a beautiful woman in a bright yellow sari She is wearing earrings and a nose ring She is the street sweeper for these two blocks. At least once every day while I am waiting for our driver I see someone running past with his rickshaw. I have become used to seeing bicycle powered rickshaws, but to see someone running with another person seated behind me was truly an amazing thing for me. I don't see too many runners in this city, but this is clearly an example of India's distance runners.

There are many people here with servants, and this reminds me of the Philippines. There are also many people living in temporary housing -- often tents. But what I see here also are people sleeping on the street. In a country with lots of cars, lots of malls, these extremes of wealth are truly jarring. I have gotten to know just a few people on the streets. One older man with a long beard asked me if Anya, Domonique, and Kari were my "followers". If they are, they certainly haven't been showing their guru enough respect. ha ha

Sreer finds the traffic with its constant honking almost intolerable, and I am beginning to agree with him. I am amazed that I have not seen an accident yet. The air pollution here is like what I have seen in Payatas in the Manila area. You can smell it. I have now discovered that the improvements in air pollution in Delhi were a result of laws there. Natural gas is now proving to be cheaper than gasoline, but it happened because of governmental intervention. Apparently, its air pollution was really intolerable, but today it is much, much better. Dust from the dry conditions is what remains, but this is an amazing improvement over what has occurred in many Asian cities. This is something that many cities can learn from.

I have been really impressed with the quality of the newspapers here. Chicago's papers really seem to go in to so little depth compared to what I am reading here. I am finally getting some sense of what the issues are related to the Nuclear treaties, but in America I am not sure that I would have even recognized that this was an issue.

My access to the internet here has not been too good. I will hope to get pictures as soon as I can.