Barefoot College

Well, I'm back in civilization (which means pollution, noise, and traffic, but also access to the internet) after three days in the peaceful village of Tilonia, where I stayed on the Barefoot College campus, which is powered entirely by solar energy and meets its water needs with rooftop harvesting (my kind of place!). It was a difficult place to find, especially since the mid-day train service to the lacal station has been canceled (I had to ride on top of a jeep to cover the last 11 kms), but the Barefoot College is full of amazing sustainable Deevlopment programs. I got to meet a group of barefoot solar engineers in training, 35 rural illeterate women from seven African nations all learning together how to electrify their villages using the power of the sun. I still don't understand how they learn without any languages in common. Their motto is learn by doing. I had an opportunity to use my rudementary French with the women from Senegal and learned that they miss fish and that Indian food gives them indigestion. I also got to participate in a children's parliment, with youth from around the region discussing how to resolve issues they face in daily life, like teachers using corporal punishment unreasonably, low caste families exclusion from using the village water hand pump, and child labour, all while seated on carpets under a large tent with the entire community watching. I also visited a night school; 8 determined young ladies who after a long days work attending buffalo and goats or hawking tomatoes in the market, spend their evenings sitting on small mats around one solar powered lantern studying basic literacy in a small farm courtyard, with family members snoring in the background while sleeping on the outdoor beds and the cow continually chewing on the students' sories while they wrote on the large slate. They made me teach one segment on the spot; I told them farm animal names in English and made them guess the name in Hindi while I acted them out (they thought it hilarious to see a foreign visitor acting like a monkey). I felt like I was in Peace Corps again; the education workers really made me feel appreciated as they asked me to come back and stay with them for a month next time. It was an abrupt transition to the urban Jaipur, the Pink City, but I'm hoping I'll find its charm before I have to rush off to Delhi and the Punjab to meet up with my Indian teacher friends from the summer program I ran at UCLA in the summer of 2007.