Tag Archives: Bhairahawa

Vacation India, part 1

Nepal to India, days 1–3

Our first destination in India, Goa, was a long way from our homes in Nepal. There were nine of us meeting March 28, 2003 (day 1), coming from various parts of Nepal: Bhaktapur, Rajbiraj, Biratnagar, Birtamod, Bhadrapur, and of course Birganj.

In Bhairahawa, we pose before departing

In Bhairahawa, the Goa-bound holiday makers pose for a group shot.

We were leaving Nepal overland from Bhairahawa, through Sunauli at the border, and beginning our train journey in Gorakhpur, India. After living one km from India for a year now, I was finally crossing the border and seeing what was on the other side.

In Birganj, the city in India just across the border, Raxaul, is revered with an intense hatred and disgust by people of Birganj. Folks in town always amended any praise of the beaches in Goa with statements like, Your shoes will be stolen, or, Taxi drivers may kill you in Mumbai.

Regardless, we were all excited. From Gorakhpur our first stop was Mumbai (aka Bombay), only a mere 1,700 km away, which mean three days and two nights on a single train.

From Mumbai we caught an overnight train to Goa (Maupse was the terminus), another 600 km. The round-trip journey required the use of two taxis, one jeep, five trains, several autorickshaws, and a couple of rented motorcycles.

Gorakhpur

Gorakhpur seen through the eyes of volunteers living in rough Terai towns in Nepal for the past year was better than it should have been.

Flyovers, train stations, people in lines (almost)—suddenly we were in Paris. Well, Paris through some cracked looking glass but still, it was more urban than what we had become accustomed to in Nepal.

Crowds board/exit the train in Gorakhpur

Once the train arrived, a mass of people just appeared, boarding and exiting.

What little of what we did see in Gorakhpur made us appreciate the relative peacefulness of our homes in Nepal. The train station was beyond my descriptive abilities. Signs in Hindi and confused English seemed to be composed in hopes of spreading misinformation. Indians, Nepalis, and the odd bull walked about in the hot heavy haze.

We had gotten to Gorakhpur a few hours early since we weren’t sure how long the jeep ride would take from the border (Sunauli). Just inside the terminal, the group (Andrew, Dave, Laurel, Liz, Kara, Trey, Ashley, and Tony) crashed and guarded the bags while I went to try and figure out how to confirm the tickets, find out our platform number, et cetera.

The tickets were confirmed only after I stood in two different lines and realized that the sign reading, Please form Q actually meant, Fight your way to the front.

Andrew and Liz had wandered off into Gorakhpur in hopes of calling the US Consulate to register with the US Embassy in Delhi. Kara and Dave were amusing themselves while standing guard over the bags, throwing banana peels at a bull inside the train station.

The bull began encroaching on the bags, possibly thinking, Where there are banana peels, there must be bananas.

A bull sits inside the Gorakhpur train station

Near the ticketing office, a lone bull made itself at home. David was nearly gored (by his fault).

Dave, mellow and unworried, called the bull over to him. When the bull had gotten close enough Dave stuck out his hand to pet the bull on the head.

While most might consider this behavior as strange, keep in mind that this is a feral bull that lives in a train station in Gorakhpur. Well, Dave had hardly touched the bull before it swung its head and quickly lunged forward.

Dave quickly jumped up and to the side, avoiding the bull’s half-hearted charge, amusing the locals in the terminal greatly.

A couple hours later we had gathered on the platform to wait for our train. By this time, I was reading the Times of India, Dave was smoking beedis, Andrew was speaking broken Hindi, Liz was eating goeber balls, Laurel was asleep, and Kara was being relentless harassed by one particular beggar girlchild.

This girl, perhaps 11 years old, had taken to Kara. For hours, this little girl had tailed Kara up and down the lengths of the train station. The girl would corner Kara, drop to her knees, press her forehead to Kara’s feet and then knees, cupping her hands and using the international beggar sign for food. This went on for hours and hours, Kara never budging.

Only after we had left the main building and were waiting on the platform did the girl leave. Or so we thought. While Kara was looking at magazines just before our train arrived, she was ambushed by the girl, smiling broadly as she knew it was payday.

The sun was mostly gone when our train arrived. After some initial confusion about which coupe was ours, we boarded the train and found our berth.

The first thing I noticed about the berth were the burglar bars on the windows. In an adjacent berth, we watched–no, we studied—a businessman carefully chained his briefcase to the wall. Paranoia sat in.

That night I slept on the top berth with my bags wrapped around my body. Eventually I fell asleep, though the continual stops and traffic moving through the train, not to mention to chai wallahs that never ceased to pass through the cabins, calling, Chai! Chai! Garam chai! awoke me more than once. Tony awoke to see the guy in the berth across from his getting a cup of tea at 3:00 a.m.

Then, in the middle of the night—we think we were passing through Lucknow–I awoke to a loud commotion coming from the berths below mine. Dave was yelling, I lost my glasses! Awww, $&*@#!! I lost my glasses!

In the middle of the night, while the train was stopped, someone had outside of the train had reached in through the burglar bars and tried to snatch the waist bag that Dave was using for a pillow. It had almost passed through the window when Dave was able to pull it back inside.

While Dave didn’t lose his bag, his glasses that he had stuffed in an open side pocket, had fallen out in the struggle; it was the first night of our vacation, and Dave had been blinded.

Sleepingly

Basically, train travel in India works thusly. The fanciest is first class AC, then second class AC, third class AC, second class sleeper, and then second nonreserved (also called ‘the cattle car’).

From Gorakhpur all the way to Goa, we had tickets for second class sleeper, meaning we had reserved seats/beds, but nothing else.

The two nights and three days in the train to Mumbai flew by, mainly because something bizarre was always happening. Occasionally transvestites would come by the berths, demanding money in lieu of not exposing themselves. While some may refuse the conventional beggar, others will pay heavily for the sudden luxury of not having a penis wagged about or the mutilated remains thereof.

Later, a group of Bihari vagabond minstrel children began performing a song and dance routine through the coupe. Or maybe it was a chai wallah who accidentally dropped scalding hot tea on some poor bastard’s crotch—then the shouting.

Waiting on the train station platform

In Gorakhpur, we spent a lot of time waiting for the train. Oh, the people you meet.

Time flew by with new scenery that seemed endless. We rushed off the train on to train station platforms with forgotten names, looking for food that wouldn’t make us sick like the India Rail curries.

The first night, I had the standard rice and lentils with curried veggies on the train. The next morning, before I had the chance to look out the window, I was staring at the train tracks through the whole in the bottom on the train, i.e., the toilet, vomiting last night’s meal on to the moving tracks below.

All of this was coupled with a now crippling paranoia that everything we had would be stolen from us before we even reached Mumbai. In an anonymous train station somewhere between Lucknow and Mumbai, I bought a chain like the Indian businessman’s and slept a little better the second night.

In the early morning of our last day on our first train, we were rolling through the outskirts of Mumbai when a woman dressed in less than rags and with whiter hair than I’ve ever seen busted into our berth.

In one hand, she had a plush tiger and in the other she held a large plastic Colt single-action revolver.

She sauntered up to Laurel, wide-eyed and gap-mouthed, and shoved the plush tiger a few inches from her face, squeezing it to emit a sequence of squeaks.

She then swung her other hand holding the plastic gun, pulling the trigger to rattle the gun in Laurel’s face. The woman did not smile and nor did Laurel.

After a moment, the woman walked on. We were in Mumbai.

Retrained: Revisiting Pre-Service Training

As I mentioned before, I’d been invited to the current Pre-Service Training (PST) to teach a couple classes in government schools for the new group, N/196, to observe. But observe what? The new group has lots of energy and interest in their jobs.

This could go without saying, but some groups are more casual about work. Yes, we’re volunteers for Nepal. Yes, we’re here to make a difference. Yes, I’m often more interested in taking the tea than talking pedagogy. Perhaps that’s because I don’t know that much about pedagogy.

The fact is I’m no longer certified as a teacher in the United States. Though the US government says I’m no longer qualified to teach in a US classroom, I’ve come here with the Peace Corps to train teachers.

I know that I do have a lot to offer the teachers here, but the strange dichotomy of my situation has not gone unnoticed.

Anyhow, I’d come full circle from my training. There I was, a year in-country later, helping to facilitate the N/196 PST. I felt unready to be guiding the new folks in any way, let alone into professional roles as PCVs in Nepal, but I had learned a thing or two.

Most about Nepali tea.

Back in June 2002, I went to Nepalgunj to conduct some teacher trainings. I felt intimidated being an authority amongst people who had been teaching a lot longer than me. Again, I was uneasy about teaching for people with education degrees and EFL/ESL certification.

But what did I learn from those trainings in Nepalgunj? Just look like you know what you’re doing and people will believe.

Patricia, a N/191 RPCV, was the in-charge person who’d asked me to come to PST. She asked me to prepare a lesson plan from the 4th grade curriculum to teach in two different schools to two different 4th grade classes. Details on the schools were unavailable. She was asking me to walk in and teach cold. I said yes.

Mahatma Buddha, the primary school

The first school I was to teach at was a secondary school called Mahatma Buddha, aka the Enlightened Buddha. Patricia came by the hotel the night before my first day of teaching. She bought me a beer and said, You may have to teach outdoors to 70 students. Cheers.

The school situation was going to be iffy, which relaxed me since I would have much lower expectations of what I could accomplish within the constraints.

The next day we arrived at Mahatma Buddha just before my class. As we came into the school grounds kids stopped playing and began to form a crowd. There were eight of us: Patricia, six PCTs, and I.

We were a sight to behold. I remember how overwhelmed I was when this happened the first time I visited a school in Nepal. While the PCTs slowed to a halt, stunned by the crowd surging around us, I pushing through like Indiana Jones with a machete.

I began talking to the teacher before we went to her class. I told her that I was happy and thankful to teach her 4th grade class for my friends and tried to confirm that I would be teaching as I saw her taking her stick for whacking kids. She seemed aware, but nervous. Too nervous.

Soon the bell rang and we were off to class. I sighed in relief as we walked towards a classroom. No outdoor teaching today.

After the PCTs and Patricia settled in the back of the classroom, the teacher said a few threatening words to the students. The students straightened up and sat quietly. I hung a poster on the board and asked the kids to take out their books.

They began rummaging through their bags and I started to sense that something wasn’t right, though I couldn’t put my finger on it. Everyone was digging deep in their backpacks, slow to find their books.

I wandered back to the front of the class and asked a student who was making no effort to get his book, in Nepali, Where’s your book?

He looked at me blankly, This is 5th grade.

Fuck.

Nobody had the book because I was in the wrong class. I looked at the teacher who was still glaring menacingly at the students. Patricia just put up her arms and shrugged, clearly wondering what I was going to do.

Well, I said trying to keep up my pace, I can teach this, and dove in head-first with the materials I had. I couldn’t do the writing activity without the books. Suddenly, I had to adapt my lesson plan to a different grade.

The class went well enough but I had to ask myself if I could have written the lesson plan better so that it could have been more adaptable because you can’t always rely on the students having something, like a book or pen.

As we left someone said, considering I was in the wrong class, things had gone really well and asked what I thought.

Well, I said with a smirk, it was enlightening.

Bhairahawa Secondary, the high school

The next day I was to teach at the first government school established in Bhairahawa. Patricia had made more visits to this school and felt that things would go better than the day before, but since I had the time I thought I’d go over to the school a bit early and chat with the teachers so that everyone was a little more comfortable.

I sat in the teacher’s room and met with the teacher whose 4th grade English class I’d be taking for the day. She was a nice enough woman, Manju. When she asked the helper to bring tea for me in Hindi, I saw an opportunity to practice my Hindi before my upcoming trip to India.

I told the helper, Gaaram wallah dijieh, much to the delight of the other teachers.

The other group of PCTs came just as my conversational Hindi was peaking. Soon I found myself in front of the class teaching.

It’s remarkable how easily I transferred the energy I had gathered from chatting with the other teachers into my class. Manju came to class, but sat in the back amongst the PCTs and Patricia, which created a much more relaxed environment for the students.

The class went great. The kids went insane and sand and threw up their arms and legs and hands and feet in the air on command by the end of class. The class ended on a high note with some kids frothing at the mouth with excitement.

I left with a deep sense of accomplishment. The kids were waiving goodbye and asking if I’d come again the next day to teach again.

One out of two isn’t bad, I suppose.

First impressions

Due to a glitch in the Peace Corps mechanism, I have been asked to come to the Peace Corps PST site and teach in a model class for the new folks, the PCTs, to learn from. I could fly, but I’ve decided to take a bus to Bhairahawa, where the PST is being held.

I have a plan of gradually traveling the length of the East-West Highway. On March 26, 2003, I’m going to Biratnagar for security meeting. That’ll leave just about 100 km from Biratnagar to the border, Karkharvitta, as well as a longer leg of 300 km from Nepalgunj to Mahendrenagar, which I’m considering optional.

When I get to Bhairahawa I’m going to walk into two different classes in two different schools. No, you’re right, it doesn’t sound like it should work, but it does. It’s all about expectations. And right now, mine are just to arrive in one piece.

Maha Shivaratri

I remember how my host family explained Maha Shivaratri to me a year ago when I was living in Gaidankot.

I asked how they would celebrate, and they just shook her hand, grimaced, and non-verbally said, We don’t. With a wild gesture.

It’s a gesture that might mean ‘drunk’ or ‘alcoholic’ in the United States. Basically, the hand is extended vertically and shaken, suggesting the negative. I pressed my host mother for more answers. She said, The children come out and they ask for money, Money, money, money, money!

She then imitated a small child by hunching her shoulders and sticking out her hand as if she was begging for money, saying, Dena! Dena! Dena! One rupees! One rupees!

While amusing, the tone of her voice suggested that she’d smacked a kid or two. Apparently the kids go out into the streets and stop cars and motorcycles and ask for money. Many celebrate at Shiva temples by smoking pot or ingesting marijuana ice cream until the wee hours of the morning.

Currently I’m in Narayanghat. It’s become typical that my quick overnights here turn into weekend visits. I had planned on catching a bus to Birganj in the late morning, especially since my days of teaching are more than numbered.

I’ve got a week left of regular teaching left before the school year ends. After that, it’s vacation time in India. All in all, I’ll be in Birganj for around two and half months (if even that long) before I come back to the States. I just bought my ticket this past week in Kathmandu.

Yet I’m in Narayanghat for Maha Shivaratri, walking the streets and sending emails. I remembered what my host mother told me about the kids stopping the buses. On the way to get breakfast, I passed three impromptu tolls with kids ready to get their one rupees (sic).

Across the busiest road in Nepal, young kids stretched lengths of cable across in attempts to slow vehicles so the driver could be heckled, or just to violently dismounted whomever doesn’t pay the toll.

A day long with stops to pay road-barring children didn’t appeal to me, especially considering that I had to pass three just on my way to get a muffin. Bus trips can be brutal, especially when the batteries in your Walkman are low.

So I’ll be heading back to Birganj tomorrow (Sunday). The following Saturday I’ll be back in Narayanghat for another quick overnighter on my way to Bhairahawa to do some teaching demonstrations for the new group on Tuesday.

Or maybe Wednesday with my luck.