Living in Mayapuri

Most of my previous posts in Delhi have been about me: how I live and what I do. This post is about how my boys live. The slum is called Mayapuri and, as mentioned, it is an industrial area. The atmosphere is toxic and the people live right on the railway line. The following photo shows how close the trains run to the front of the houses.
Behind the first row of houses, which are right on the train line, lies a second row of houses separated by a narrow lane. There is an open drain down the middle of the lane, but Asha has built a public toilet for use of the people here, so at least it is not raw sewerage any more, as it once was.

Most of the houses consist of a single room, about 2 x 3m, with a dirt floor. Some of them have a second storey above them, which is reached by a ladder. The roof of each house is usually tarpaulin or corrugated iron, weighted down with bricks or car tyres to stop it blowing off in the wind.

The photos above and below are not the best or the worst in the area, but just the homes of my beloved boys whom I teach.
This house belongs to Ranjan and his family. He came from Bihar with his parents when he was 7 years old, but his parents had to return to their village a few years ago, so Ranjan lives with his older sister, her husband and their children. At nights he works in a factory checking the voltage on transformers for mobile phone batteries, and during the daytime he attends university. He hopes to be an accountant. His current job pays Rs 200 per day - about $5. Ranjan is in front of his house and Mananjay (in white) is standing nearby. Mananjay and his family also came from Bihar to Delhi in search of a better life. Mananjay works as a security guard in a factory during the night, earning Rs 100 per day - about $2.50. During the day he studies at university. He is about to complete a BA, and is studying history, politics, English and Hindi. He hopes to commence a B.Ed next year and become a teacher. Mananjay, like Ranjan, is the first person in his family to go to university. This shot shows the inside of Manajay's house, which he shares with his mother, father and younger brother. The photo shows just about everything in the house.

Life in the slums of Delhi is very public - since the houses are so tiny, most people do most of their living outdoors. This photo shows an ordinary scene on an ordinary day, with women and children sitting around chatting, working (rolling up string), checking hair for lice and drying washing.

Finally, here is a photo of the area immediately outside the houses - it is part of the industrial area.
This is the street that leads to my school, which is on the left, just out of shot. The immediate area around the school is devoted to car wrecking. Hundreds of people sit in the middle of the street in wrecked cars, manually bashing the parts out of them. They work 12 hour days for Rs 200 per day (about $5). The work is dirty, dangerous and physically exhausting. As I come to the school every day, I've learnt to recognise the wrecked cars, and I would say that they are dismantled in a day or two, and replaced with new ones. There is no shortage of car wrecks in Delhi, with an average of 7 traffic fatalities per day. I have no idea how many accidents there are - I don't think anyone is counting.

Diwali in Delhi

Friday 5th November 2010 was Diwali in India. This is the Festival of Lights and is held in honour of the goddess Lakshmi. Although I have been to India several times, this was my first experience of Diwali. It was out of this world.


The preparations begin weeks in advance. In an earlier posting I wrote about attending Ram Lila, in mid-October. By late October people begin hanging festive lights on the outside of their houses and lighting little oil lamps at their doorstep. Houses are whitewashed and festive messages painted or hung on the walls. Gifts are exchanged. So it’s a lot like a western Christmas, except that being in India, it is a hundred times louder, brighter, noisier, dirtier, more fun and involves millions more people.


On the actual night of Diwali, millions of people (this is not hyperbole, I really mean millions of people) begin to let off fireworks as soon as the sun sets. This goes on unabated until well after midnight. The noise is deafening. Think of Guy Fawkes night or Queen’s Birthday or 4th of July, and multiply that by 100. The sky is constantly filled with exploding rockets and the air is totally full of the sound of explosions and the smell of gunpowder.

My flatmates and I had a meal together then just wandered around our neighbourhood in Vasant Kunj, admiring the thousands of fireworks going off hour after hour. I’ve included some photos but they really don’t capture the sheer volume of noise and light. It was awesome.

When we got back to our flat, we found that the entire flat was filled with smoke. Not from anything we had done, but just from seeping through the cracks in the walls and around the windows. This might give an idea how dense the air was outside.

So the Indian festival season starts with Navratna (the nine days when Ram Lila is performed), goes on to Diwali (5th November) then there is Nehru’s Birthday or Children’s Day on 14th November, the birthday of Guru Nanak (founder of the Sikh religion) on 16th November, Muslim Eid on 17th November and then a few more until Christmas Day on 25th December. If you can only visit India once in your life, make sure that you do in the festive season!

Planning in Delhi

As mentioned earlier, I spend the first half of my day teaching English in the slum at Mayapuri. I usually finish up at about 1pm, then catch an auto-rickshaw back to the main Asha office at RK Puram. I then spend the next 4-5 hours writing lesson plans for the use of current and future English Teaching Volunteers (ETVs).

ETVs arrive at Asha with a wide array of skills and experience. For some, the only qualification they possess is that they are native English speakers. Others are experienced in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) and have a really good idea how to adapt their previous training and experience to the situation in the slums. However, each ETV has taught as an independent unit and in the past there has rarely been any continuity of learning.

This is all about to change and Asha have employed Anjuli, a qualified and experienced English teacher , for a full year to set up an agreed curriculum and write lesson plans for the ETVs.

To kick things off, I was asked to design a curriculum for Asha, under the guidance of Anjuli. I once taught English to Vietnamese migrants in the Melbourne, Australia and had received TESOL training prior to taking that on. In June 2010 I had completed the ANU tertiary teacher training program called Pinnacle. So I combined my previous experience and training in teaching Vietnamese migrants with my recent training and experience in tertiary teaching, and designed a curriculum for slum dwellers in Delhi. Only time will tell if that was successful or not!

After drawing up the curriculum, I was asked to begin writing lesson plans. This is no small task, as the plans have to be really detailed so that the more inexperienced ETVs could just pick up the lesson plans and resources then start to teach. I gave each lesson myself to my own boys in Mayapuri, and then Jess gave the lessons to her classes at Zhakira. Following feedback from Jess and my own thoughts, the lesson plans were then suitably modified.

It’s not yet certain who will continue the lesson planning after my departure from Delhi, so we’ll just leave that in the hands of the Lord and keep ploughing on. Maybe I will have to come back to Delhi to finish that task!

Communicating in Delhi

My Hindi is very poor and largely consists of a collection of phrases to give directions to auto-rickshaw drivers or to bargain with shopkeepers. However, with a few words of Hindi, lots of English and plenty of hand waving and smiling, I can usually achieve my limited goals in communication.

Last Saturday was an exception. I was walking along our street and saw a man selling the little lamps that are used in puja (Hindu religious ceremonies). Lots of our neighbours had them in front of their houses as Diwali (the Festival of Lights) was fast approaching, so I thought I might as well buy some and do the same. I asked him how much they were, and he said 10 rupees each. 'There is also a thali for 50 rupees', he said (this whole conversation taking place in Hindi). A thali is a large metal plate and I'd actually been looking for one for our kitchen. I said I'd take the thali and handed him the 50 rupees.

To my surprise, he then put the little lamp and some oil on the thali, then started adding little piles of sugar, pepper and other things that looked like condiments, plus several yellow flowers and a strip of black cloth as well as a handful of metal screws. I turned to Jess who was with me and remarked that he must think we want the thali to do puja, so he's putting all the relevant items on it. 'Never mind', I said, 'as soon as we're home we'll toss the condiments and cloth and keep the thali and lamp'. I thanked him and started to wander home with my thali.

I'd only gone a few steps when an old lady grabbed me and pointed me to a roadside shrine. I was pushed down some steps and herded into the roadside shrine. I stood there a bit bewildered when a man in white came over and showed me what to do. I was required to pour the oil over the idol's head, place the black cloth on top, light the lamp and throw my offerings of condiments, flowers and metal screws at the idol's feet. OK, so I did all that, thinking 'well I've managed to geet rid of the things I didn't need, but I've lost my lamp. Never mind, I still have my thali'. The man in white then indicated that I needed to toss some more money next to the idol. I asked if I could take a picture, which is above, and you can see my little lamp burning near my thali.

The man then took the thali away and gave it back to the guy selling the puja ingredients! So I had intended to buy a lamp, got talked into buying a thali, but instead I walked away a total of 60 rupees poorer, with no lamp or thali, having just done puja to a Hindu idol. My Hindi communication skills need improving!

A few days later I asked my university students about this particular Hindu god - what had I actually asked for when I did puja? Apparently this particular god specialises in doing harm to one's enemies - if you want some misfortune to befall someone else, you go and do puja to his idol. I wonder who I inadvertently cursed?

Dancing in Delhi

Some of the most important features of Bollywood (i.e. Indian) films are the dance sequences. My students know many of the songs and some of the dances, and if we have time after a lesson, we will sometimes go to the computer room (next to my classroom) to logon to YouTube and play Bollywood hits. They love dancing to the tunes and imitating the movements on the screen.

My predecessor at Mayapuri, my flatmate Bec, tried to teach the kids hip hip moves. The photo above shows Bec and the boys dancing to a Bollywood song whilst watching a YouTube clip.

For my part, I've tried to teach them to dance like it's 1984 - this has created much hilarity. I tend to think that the Bollywood dance style is bit of a cross between 80's dance steps and pole dancing, with moves you wouldn't see at the church dance spectacular.

When the students complete a unit of their Englsh curriculum, there is a final test. I do something a bit 'fun' after the test, so that they don't dread them as much. The video below shows some of the boys dancing to a Bollywood song after their test. The little groover in the front, wearing a Chinese-style shirt for some reason, is called Anish. He is my least successful student and my best dancer!

The other little fellow in the front, wearing a purple and white striped hoody, is one of my less able but more enthusiastic students. When I first met him he said that his name was Rajkumar but 'you can call me Prince' and that's just what I do.

Teaching in Delhi

I have been teaching in Delhi for nearly three weeks and have not had a chance to write anything on this blog, as I've been incedibly busy. So here goes.

I teach in a slum called Mayapuri. If you go to Google Maps and search for Mayapuri Industrial Area, Delhi, India you will see where it is. If you zoom in and click on the Street View icon then move it to the dot on the railway line, you will even see a photo of the slum, which is right on the railway track.

I teach two classes, each lasting 90 minutes. The early one consists of boys aged 8-14 years. There are 17 boys on the roll and usually about 14 or 15 show up on any given day. Since the classes are not compulsory, they are under no obligation to attend, and many of them miss their English classes for weeks at a time because they need to go to work, or help support their families in some way.
The other class consists of university students, who in theory can be of either sex but in the case of Mayapuri there are anything from 3 to 8 young men in the class. The group above are my regulars. They are (L to R) Vinod, Ranjan and Mananjay.

Some of the early class are shown below. In the back row are Goutam No.1 and Goutam No.2, as they are known. The boy pointing is called Dharmveer - he is one of my most vocal students, and as one of seven children (plus two parents and a grandmother) living in a single-room slum dwelling, I guess he'd have to be vocal to get attention.
The photos show the classroom as it is. There are no chairs, no tables, no audiovisual equipment - just a whiteboard and some mats on the floor. There is one window (which is better than the schools in some slums) and the electricity is fairly reliable. There is no running water. The public toilet block which Asha has built for the slum is outside the schoolroom and the smell is, well, I think you can guess. As the schoolroom is situated in the middle of an industrial area, the din from engines and car wreckers is deafening. We can't shut the window to keep the noise and smell out, because then we'd have no light and we'd probably all suffocate in the heat! :-)

So all this might sound like a nightmare scenario for teaching. The truth is that it is incredibly fun, stimulating and uplifting to be working in this environment. All the kids are there voluntarily. They have their usual school at 12 noon - the girls go to school at 7am, which is why my class has only boys, since I teach in the morning when the girls are at regular school. As they are there voluntarily, the students are all really motivated to learn. Best of all, the English Teaching Volunteers (ETVs) like myself believe that learning should be fun, so we teach in a way that is completely different from an ordinary Indian school. There are a lot of fun activities, noise is permitted in the classroom, there are interesting worksheets to complete (as opposed to simply copying off the board which is the norm) and the teachers are highly motivated (since we are all volunteers, after all!). This all means that the classroom sees a lot of fun, as well as a lot of learning.

As part of the lesson on 'big and small' I taught the boys the song 'Thumbelina' and we made up some actions for it. To my surprise they absolutely adored singing this song every morning - we had to do it three times each morning before the class could start! The idea of 14-year-old Australian or British boys happily dancing and singing to nursery rhymes in class is impossible to imagine, but these boys love it. I've uploaded a short video below so you can see what I mean.

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Well I think that's enough for one blog. I will (hopefully)soon blog again to explain what I do with the rest of my day. In the meantime, enjoy!