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Published: November 16th 2009
SECMOL from afar
the campus is half hidden behind a hill. This is on our walk to the main roadI’d been wanting to do some volunteer work for a while, but it’s hard to find places that aren’t dodgy or don’t expect you to pay them a fortune for the privilege of working for them. I’d heard about an NGO/school called
SECMOL near Leh, and emailed them before I went to Leh last time (the blogs two and three blogs ago). Their webpage said that they sometimes take a week or two to reply. Just as I was leaving Leh last time, I emailed them again, as by then it was nearly two weeks. They replied that they’d got me mixed up with someone else. Apparently another “Daniel” from Australia turned up just after I emailed and they thought he was me. By the time I discovered this I was back in Delhi. I’d tried to make contact with a Hindi language school to teach me Hindi, but they didn’t reply to my email until too late (and then only to tell me that they couldn’t arrange a teacher for me until mid-December), so I decided to head back to Ladakh for two weeks.
SECMOL takes a lot of volunteers to chat to the students to help them practise
solar mirror
some of last years' students that were looking after the place when the others were away borrowed my camera and snapped a heap of photos of themselves including this one of them reflected in the concave mirrors that reflect the sun onto a solar cooker their English but also to give them an exposure to the outside world. They have theoretical English classes too but the conversation classes are supposed to be a big attraction of SECMOL. When I turned up there was only one other volunteer, a long-term volunteer who’s there for six months, but within a day or two, unexpectedly, three others turned up (one for only a couple of days).
This blog covers approximately the period Nov 1 - 7. Next week’s blog will also talk more about SECMOL and have a couple more photos of it.
As luck would have it, all the students and some of the teachers were away on a field trip to the East of Ladakh, near the Chinese line of control (the “border” is, of course, under dispute) for nearly three days, meaning I had a few days to acclimatise. I didn’t notice at first, but this time the altitude was really getting to me. I’d been a bit blasé about it because it hadn’t been a problem for me last time, but I guess it’s different when you fly in. There was one volunteer and a couple of teachers
dorms
some of the volunteer dorms at secmol there, plus a few of last year’s students who were there to keep the place running (milk the cows, cook, etc.) I had a fairly boring two days although I was able to help a few of the last year’s students with some of their studies.
SECMOL has 38 students, mostly from remote areas, who’ve failed some of part of their year 10 test. I think there’s a few from year 12 too. So most are 17 or 18. As one of the teachers explained it to me, the problem is that if you’re a Ladakhi school student you have a big test (or series of tests?) at the end of year 10 and if you fail even one subject, you can’t go on to year 11 & 12. The problem is that in the country schools, the teaching is all done in Ladakhi, but the exams are in English. So some of the kids end up having to do the test in a language they hardly speak at all. SECMOL is a place where they go to round out their education and improve their English before trying the exams again. The only downside with this great story is
library
secmol library that SECMOL doesn’t teach to the government curriculum, so I’m not sure how much it really helps the students pass their exam. It certainly rounds out their education, giving them exposure to people from all around the world, experience in various "green" technologies, leadership skills, etc. However I guess if it helps them practise their English then it’s a good thing. Ladakhi is the first language for all of them and I think they all speak fluent Hindi/Urdu too (although not all read it)
Finally, late on my third day there, they arrived back and the place was transformed from a sedate cosy little building to a buzz of teenagers eating vast amounts of food and chattering in Ladakhi. At dinner the next day one of the kids got up and gave a bit of a talk about their recent field trip. This was done in English, which I wasn’t impressed with at the time because I didn’t yet know that all the other talks at dinner time for the rest of the two weeks I was there would be in Ladakhi. They’d gone to visit a monastery. He tells us how the Lama in his wisdom prophesied that
secmol
except for the title photo, these first five photos were all taken by last year's students, with my camra. if the bus-driver drove slowly then they would have a safe journey home, which isn’t as brave as some of the prophesies of Benny Hinn but at least that one came true. The lama was apparently going to show them some holy water, but then “predicted” that someone in the crowd (not from the school) was carrying on his person a small amount of tobacco, alcohol or other drugs, which made him impure, and so the lama couldn’t uncover the holy water because he’d have to use too much of it to purify the site and then there wouldn’t be enough for the next group. The boy was impressed by this, seeing the lama’s brilliant insight as signs of something supernatural. He didn’t mention if anyone actually admitted to actually having any drugs in their possession!
Our role is mainly to chat to the kids, to help them be aware about the rest of the world, and to help them practise their English. On the first day of classes we break up into small groups and each volunteer takes one group and we introduce ourselves and get the students to introduce themselves. The aim is mainly just to get
worried
SECMOL administrator affecting a worried look the students talking in English and to give them a bit of an understanding of other cultures. Nearly all the students are from small villages, although one or two are from Leh or Kargil. Pretty much every time I hear a name I have to repeat it two or three times to get the pronunciations right which means that I’ve straightaway forgotten it. I ask them what they hope to do after they finish school. Most don’t know, or want to go to college in Leh to study anything. Many of the boys want to join the military. One or two want to be guides. Only a few want to leave Ladakh.
I try to give them an understanding of the various careers open to people who make the choice to move to a city. I tell them that I work in I.T. ... “that’s like computers” I say. Wanting to give them a more accurate idea and not just let them think that I fix people’s PCs in case any of them do decide to go into I.T. (not one kid even hinted at any interest in that, probably because the few times they’ve used computers here they
walking
us walking to the main road were little more than boring toys), I tell them that I work for a bank and that nowadays in all banks all the money is on computers, and I keep out the hackers (which I explain are criminals trying to steal the money with computers). I’m not sure if I made any sense, if they understood anything they probably think I work in a Bank (a one-room building with an ATM out the front and probably mice out the back, just near the cow) which has a PC with 100-rupee notes piled on top of it, beating away thieves with a stick. Come to think of it, that sounds like more fun than what I actually do (which since my bosses read this, I must say what I do is still quite a lot of fun, just not as much fun as hitting people with sticks).
For some reason Thursday was a day off, which gave us an opportunity to go to the festival at Thiksey. You would have seen photos of Thiksey gompa when it was empty in an earlier blog, now you can see it when it's full. Some of these photos are borrowed from
main road
standing on the main road (which is sealed) looking back the way we came other volunteers because my camera battery went flat. I just wrote about four paragraphs about it but then lost them all. Anyway, I think the festival went for two days but we were only there for about four hours. Most of what we saw, after waiting a while, was kids and monks dancing around in garish costumes and ghoulish masks. There was no speech in any language, but I guess it was mean to represent something about putting to rest evil spirits.
To get there five of us volunteers went with one "staff", a blind-from-birth lady who is supposedly staff at SECMOL but whose actual role I can't figure out (supposedly to teach Ladakhi songs and to answer the phone). She knew where to go but we didn't so it was a case of the blind leading the sighted. We walked the three kilometres or so to the "main" road, and got a bus into Leh, about 20 km. This turned out to be completely full so most of us sat on the roof. From there we got another bus out to Thiksey. This meant that to get the bus back again in the afternoon (apparently there was only
army barracks
I finally got a photo of one! one bus going back to a village closer to us) we only had about four hours at the gompa.
There seemed to be an endless procession of masks, to the constant music of horns, bugles and cymbals. The funniest part was when four kids in impressive masks were dancing around and clearly hadn't rehearsed, going off in all different directions, and a serious-looking, spectacled, young monk had to grab them one at a time and put them back into place, after which they went out of place again and threatened to crash into an adult danger in a bigger costume. The most incongruous thing was some parent who thought it'd be a good idea to let their two-year-old boy take along a toy gun, so that whenever there was a dramatic silence we'd hear a tinny voice shouting "FIRE!! ratatatatatat FIRE!! ratata...". Despite comments from the organiser the parents never took it away from him for more than a minute or two. It was even stranger when, standing almost right beneath the army officers, he pointed his gun purposefully at the monks.
It was interesting to see the Ladakhis turning out in their traditional dress. All the civilian
me
on the roof of the bus. I guess the beanie shows what I would look like if I had hair and it was blue (non-monk) organisers were dressed in the
goncha and many of the old men were too. The old women were wearing colourful woolen dresses with their hair braided. Probably about 2%!o(MISSING)f the audience, which I estimated (wildly - I couldn't even see where everyone was seated, as there were people in every nook and cranny) at about 1000, were foreign (non-Indian) tourists. There were a few people with professional-looking video cameras and still cameras.
At one point they brought out a ghoulish drawing on a sheet of paper, of an ugly man, I assume some sort of evil spirit (but not incredibly scarey). They ceremonially uncovered it and covered it up again and danced around it for a bit. Eventually they lived it up, covered, over a large cauldron on a wood fire, with incredibly long sticks. It didn't burn at first and someone must have thrown some fuel into the cauldron or the fire because a flame probably three metres high shot up and devoured the poster. About an hour later they brought out a tiny (probably 40 cm long) doll of equal ghoulishness (at first I thought it was a dead, skinned, lamb, which they covered up,
guys peeing
Ladakh is part of India after all but we had to leave before I saw what they did with that. On the way back inside the crowded bus (which is way too small for me, even if I got a seat, so actually sitting on the roof was much more comfortable) an old man asked me where I was from. I told him and then asked if he was from Leh. He told me that he lives in Leh but his village is five days' walk from Leh. He visits it once a year.
Friday was another day off. Supposedly this was because the students were preparing for the bi-monthly meeting, where they would have to present on their “responsibilities”. Since the presentations were done in groups and each only went for about five minutes, I don’t see why they needed two full days off to prepare. Anyway, about mid-morning, a bit bored, I wandered into the kitchen and the other Australian volunteer was there, the man with the strangely out-of-context bible reference (address) tattooed discretely on his wrist.
“They want us to do an Australian song tonight. You and me. We have to sing something.” he said.
“You’re joking.”
“I
Leh
downtown Leh from the roof of the bus wish I was,” he said, “can you sing?”
In reality I cannot sing and would rather perform a belly dance in a pink tutu to the tune of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” than attempt to sing in public. (Just so that no-one gets the wrong impression, I’m not meaning to suggest that the belly-dance option would be palatable to me either). Apparently he can’t sing either.
“Aren’t you a teacher?” I persisted, “you should be good at all that singing and dancing stuff.”
“That’s what I didn’t like about it” he said “that’s why I teach at a museum”.
Oh goody.
Luckily I had an album of cheesy Australian folk songs on my laptop which I’d downloaded for just such an eventuality, and one of them was “Waltzing Matilda”, the song which but for one of the most fortuitous bit of democracy since the decision that Australian Aboriginals were in fact Australians would have been our national anthem (imagine, the British had an anthem about God and King, the Americans had an anthem about their flag and wars with the British, the Spanish had an anthem with, perhaps poignantly, no words at all, the
Thiksey gompa again
this time I walkedup French had an anthem about slitting the throats of the bourgeoisie, and we Australians had an anthem about a bum whose only friend was a ram and who killed himself because the cops were after him for petty theft, with lyrics like “down came the troopers one, two, three”). So, anyway, we came up with the face-saving compromise of acting out the words while playing the music over the speaker system. This was a bit of a mess but probably somewhat funny, although the version of the song I had was so slow that there was a lot of just standing around. We roped in a few extras to be the troopers 1 2 3, the coolabah tree and the jumbuck. The director of the school helped us out by playing the squatter mounted on his thoroughbred, following the logic that the squatter is meant to be someone important. I’m not sure how amazing it was compared to the ancient Ladakhi stories performed in dance expertly by the students. Probably the students now think that Australian traditional performances involve stuffing a small boy into a hessian bag and then “drowning” yourself under a blue bedsheet; whereas in fact of course
Australian culture is a rich time-honoured tapestry of rituals such as the ritual where you jump out of the French-owned train and race home glancing at your Swiss watch, set your Japanese VCR to record an American program, then change into your Chinese-made clothes and jump into your Japanese car to grab a bite to eat at a Chinese restaurant before going on to a Irish pub with a British bartender and a Japanese TV to watch Australian men (either men in short shorts or men dressed like hospital orderlies) chasing balls.
The rest of the meeting was fine, the students all presented on their “responsibilities” in fluent Broken English and (I assume) fluent Ladakhi, with various levels of mumbling. The responsibilities are designed to basically make the students run the campus, and are changed every two months. They range from keeping the toilets functioning and neat or milking the cows, to arranging the purchasing of all the food for the cook or even account-keeping. The students seem to take these very seriously, perhaps because they are actually serious responsibilities and not just tokens. There were also some performances like the dances I already mentioned. Quite a few visitors
were there, including the local Lama who arrived fashionably late - I don’t remember how late but it was probably about three-and-a-half hours late, ie probably about one-and-a-half hours after the meeting actually started. At the end, the smiling Lama gave a presentation in Ladakhi in which he talked about the importance of learning English because it’s the universal language and is increasingly popular in India including in the parliament. He also talked about the need for teachers to respect students and how good it is that at SECMOL the teachers don’t beat the students like they do in the government schools, and that therefore the students shouldn’t be afraid to ask the teachers questions. I don’t speak Ladakhi, but this is the précis that students gave me afterwards. (Actually I can say “hello”, “thank you” and “goodbye” in Ladakhi because they’re all the same word - “Julay”; this must make it difficult to get rid of someone - in English if someone comes to give you something and you want to get rid of them you can say “hello ... thank you! Goodbye!” but in Ladakhi it’d be “julay julay julay” which might just sound like you were saying
“hello, hello, thank you” or something!)
Dinner is eaten sitting in a large rectangle in a big open room that never seems to be used for anything else, cross-legged on the carpet with a thin strip of clothes in front of us for a “table”. There’s a fair bit that goes on then in Ladakhi. I think some students have to present some of the highlights from the Ladakhi news on the radio, which they listen to immediately before dinner, and then some other people have to do some other sort of talk too. Anyway after that we all sing some Ladakhi folk song, one of which is about Prince Norzam, who back when the universe was formed on the three heads of a three-headed pidgeon visited each of the other realms and made promises to each of three princesses there, about the gifts he would give them. He then doesn’t follow through and has to listen to them berating him in Ladakhi song for three stanzas. I think the moral of the story is all men are bastards. The other song is about Padum Castle, and has lyrics which either don’t translate very well or else are really
boring. The moral of this song is that Ladakh has four seasons.
The campus tries to be environmentally-friendly. They are built near a natural spring, from where they get their drinking water. Other water comes from the Indus. Electricity comes from solar panels (it’s rarely cloudy in Ladakh!) and is stored in batteries. They have a small vegetable garden, and four cows. They recycle, and the buildings’ walls are made of rammed earth. The windows face the morning sun, so without heating the buildings stay remarkably warm all night. They have two big concave mirrors that concentrate the sun’s light onto a metal stove in the kitchen and can be used for cooking (although it looks like they still have to use a gas burner a lot. All this is run by the students, with help from the teachers of course. The campus is set a kilometre or two from a tiny village called “Phey” (pronounced with an aspirated “p” sound as in “Phnom Penh” or “shepherd”, not a “f” sound as in “phenomenology”), three kilometres off the main road and about 20 kilometres from Leh.
Anyway I’m trying to do the right thing and break this up
into two blogs, one for each week, even though of course this is a week late (by the time I post this I’ll have already left), so I’ll write more about it next week (which will probably be posted in a day or two).
In my last blog (“Hazy Recollections of Delhi”) I mentioned a newspaper and said it was called the “Hindustani Times”. In fact I meant “The Hindu”. Apparently there is a newspaper called "The Hindustani Times", at least online, but I haven't read it..
In the one before that (“The Ancient Kingdom of Ladakh”) I complained that on the T-shirts sold at Khardung La “the altitude is given in metres”. Of course what I meant was that the
elevation is given in
feet, not metres.
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Inayatullah
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Ladakh
Hello,,,,,how are you ,,i wanna know you,,,,my self Inayatullah rite now doing engineering here at DElhi,,,you did a great job,,,are u still carry this till now or what?plz reply me