ÉCLAIR – BIRTHDAY
ÉCLAIR is a street school chain functional in Ludhiana, Amritsar and Ganganagar started by us - a small group of enterprising and enthusiastic friends. Teaching can be such a fulfilling experience, especially when you have inquisitive intelligent learners on the other end. Yeah, our street kids - no our 'sweet' kids are street smart and witty! One of the days in our little school, we celebrated a common birthday of all the kids - a first-of-its-kind celebration in their lives, which they enjoyed immensely.
“Mera to kabhi saal me janam din hi nahi aata” (My birthday never comes in the year) – those innocent words said by a kid of about six who is a school dropout and one of the street kids in my street have the tactile effect of activating my tear glands. I wander in my thoughts desperately as I walk the cat back through 17 years of celebrating fun filled birthdays of mine at my place surrounded by hordes of friends, loving relatives and cousins, receiving packets of wrapped gifts - the joy of opening which came only once in a year, the day much awaited for. Funnily though, Mahesh’s birthday never came in the year. There was no such day he could call his own and celebrate. I inquired other kids in our li’l school and none of them could have the faintest memory of knowing their ‘janm-dins’.
That is when I published that experience as my facebook status and that is when the comments and ‘awwwwww….s’ started pouring in. Many of my friends opted to volunteer and we thought of celebrating a common birthday of all our school kids. We planned the party well in advance – there would be balloons, cake, music and fun with the kids. One of my friends and an enthusiastic volunteer for éclair decided to gift them handkerchiefs painted with their school’s name.
News spreads like wildfire among these kids who seem to have greater connectivity with all of their pals in poverty than even facebook can offer. They were there the next day well before time shouting something like “aaj hamara janm din hai!” (Today is our birthday!) To start with, we had the ‘balloon inflating ceremony’ where all of us, including me had nice time blowing into the balloons; (some of us blew until they burst!) Not to mention, like all other kids, they fight too and my friends did a good job solving their tussles over balls and balloons and getting them back again.
We studied about Common Property Resources (CPRs) at school – they are like community’s shared resources not owned by anyone in particular but whose benefits are enjoyed by all and people have both rights to access and usage as well as obligations in their use. A community park, community centre, village pond, open forest are all CPRs. All that they were hitherto used for was collecting fuelwood, or for supporting the landless poor (as my geography book put it). And now suddenly I have discovered they can serve another vital function as well – imparting education to kids! I teach my kids (yeah, I call my students, my kids) who have had no chance to see what a school looks like on the bench in the community park nearby.
Some of my friends ask me ‘Where did you get the kids from?’…I am in slits, haha! Living in a country of more than 1 billion population where the Birth Rate is immense, how could you miss them? They are everywhere, hordes of street children, some of them rag pickers, others working as young maids and helpers with their parents in measly conditions, who romp around the streets all day until they are strong enough to do the heavy jobs and become bread earners. I just called some of those kids whom I spotted walking barefoot on a hot summer morning. They were willing to study. Parhoge kya? I asked. Haan, they replied. And so it started. A small rudimentary classroom under the shade of the trees in a CPR! I brought the ABC chart to the park, which I had once accidently bought from a book exhibition to fill for the change that the salesperson did not have. They repeated aloud A…B…C….D...
They loved shouting the English alphabet aloud as if trumpeting their first baby step towards literacy in the neighborhood. I told them what an ‘echo’ is – when you shout aloud, your voice hits the houses nearby and it returns. They shouted louder to hear their voices echoed by the newly built posh houses around, content to discover the power of their own vocal cords. I had started the class with no intention of continuing it the next day. Distributing them the sweets at the end, I bade them goodbye… Mam ji, kal bhi aaogi? Hmmm…I paused a while before giving a vague nod saying ‘theek hai’ …. Kal hame 8 baje parhana! I couldn’t think of a reason in the world to reject that innocent invitation by a knowledge hungry kid to teach them. And that is how it kicked off.
I started teaching them every day from 8-9 in the morning. Diverse reactions came from diverse people in the locality. Some of them simply stared at the out-of-the-box thing happening in their vicinity, others enquired my mom about the class later in the evening. Not all were generous and supportive. Some people around dismissed it as mere ‘time pass’ by a teen who had nothing else to do for the holidays. I told them I had, loads of work to do, to study, but I prioritized imparting education over simply receiving it at my school. Others manufactured more stereotyped responses – “what will these kids do by learning the alphabet when they are ‘destined’ to work alongside their poor parents in menial jobs!” ‘Destiny’ – ha! Who are we to decide someone’s destiny! Others tried to make a mockery – ‘tere bache bare kharab ne’, complaining me of the little mischiefs that my students inevitably did in the evenings sometimes, which all other kids also do, in fact they have a right and age to do- naughtiness which evokes subjective responses depending on the status of the kid who is doing it. When I once asked a lady in the neighborhood to start sending her ‘little’ maid to school, she gave me a thunderstruck look (probably pondering over her plight in the house sans the maid!) People have plenty of reasons to hamper anything that is good. ‘She has no interest in studying, actually…she used to go to school in the village’, I am told by a voice which does not have an iota of truth in it.
My parents have taught me not to be disheartened by what petty people say. Optimism was making its way towards our school. As the gossip spread among housewives (inevitably the fastest mode of communication), the whole neighborhood now knew what was on. There are good people in this world too, I learnt. An old lady once interrupted us in the class to donate all the old stationery that her grandchildren must have discarded, to the enthusiastic learners in our school. Her generation is not so conservative as that of her daughter-in-law, she has an intrinsic regard for anyone who seeks knowledge and is eager to learn. Another fine day, a man in his forties who came to the park with his kids everyday for a morning walk, came with a packet of small biscuits for our kids. ‘Aap sab bache parhte ho na, is liye aap ke liye gift hai’, saying that he smiled and personally distributed the refreshments to all of them encouraging their enthusiasm and endeavour.
