How many people in my country could read English ?

Beatrijs van de Belt 30 / 1 /09

Yesterday was our last day on the building site. The school we had started building and funded looked quite impressive against the beautiful mountain side behind it.

Later that afternoon we came back to the building site one last time for the finishing ceremony. I wasn’t expecting much so I was really surprised with what happened next. Indian men dressed in beautiful robes and flowers in matching colours like yellow, red and green where dancing in a trance like way around a circle of Indian spectators. In each dancers hand was a strange traditional instrument with only one string, decorated beautifully with newspaper. They would pluck this instrument rhythmically to the banging of drums, and the playing of traditional flutes. On everyone’s head were bunches of peacock feathers. It was one of the strangest things I had ever seen.

During this dance I got talking to an Indian man beside me with very poor English. He asked me about six times had I seen a dance like this before and he was so proud of his culture when I said no. His name was Arun Mahamanda and he was able to spell it out to me in English letters ( another thing he was very proud of ). He told me he was learning English and that the two men beside him ( who were much younger then he was ) were his teachers. Later I discovered that they were the teachers that would be teaching in the school we were building. Then Arun asked me a very strange question. “How many people in my country could read English ? “ It was only then that I realised how much learning English meant to him. It was one of the most important things in his life. Us coming over to build the school had inspired him to learn English himself. Even though he hadn’t the chance to go to school when he was younger he was still making the effort to learn now.

That’s when I realised that our project was much more than just building a school building. When we come over to a remote village in India and the local Indians see us sweating and working hard to build their school it makes them realise how important education is. Later when we left the site I saw the project was in good hands.