After breakfast we walked down the hill to the small village where our host teaches in the rural Grade 1-4 government school. We walked for about 45 minutes downhill, a drop of about 2000 ft. It was a sensation our bodies could not remember, rather painful after walking just a short distance. Once down we realized we would never be able to get back up. Most of the road was asphalted but the last few hundred feet down were not. If the rain started early even our car would not have been able to take us up. Luckily our hostess had noticed this and summoned our driver down to pick us up a few hours later.
Our hostess walks the 2000 feet up and down every day, half an hour each way, six days a week. She does this on slip-on sandals and takes the very steep shortcuts between the hairpins. We concluded that with the home grown organic food and the daily walks she and others like her must live very long and healthy lives. From our high perch in Sikkim most of the rest of the world suddenly looks very rotten.
We found the 64 school kids standing in four neat rows in front of the school building, each row headed by their class captain facing them. We were received, once again, with the now familiar cream-colored scarves and a bright ‘good morning’ coming from 64 high voices. The assembly routine was repeated for our benefit as we had just missed it when we struggled in on our last legs.
There was the national anthem, followed by the pledge of allegiance (to the Indian motherland and righteous living), something in a language we did not understand and then everyone was dismissed to their respective classroom.
The headmaster, a native from a village elsewhere in Western District, who came from a family of teachers, received us in a simple office that was decorated with pictures of Ghandi, Nehru and other fathers of the nation that has so little in common with Sikkim.
After that we were given the run of the school spending quality time with each of the classes. This was a little awkward because the level of English rudimentary but the students stood up politely each time we asked a question and then stared at the ground or giggled at each other.
As soon as we pointed at something on the wall, the English alphabet, the Nepali alphabet, the numbers or a chart with letters and words, the children broke out in spontaneous, collective and rhythmic recitation of whatever we pointed at. They knew how to do that very well.
With grade 2 we sang ‘I am a little teapot,’ ‘Twinkle, Twinkle,’ and other old English favorites. Then they sang a song their teacher had surely learned in her missionary school about God who had created ‘birds, trees, fished and me and you.’ Each time they sang the work God they pointed up at the sky. They then repeated the song in Nepali still pointing at the One Up There.
In class four they spoke English a little better but they were still too shy to say much of anything that would have helped to have a conversation. And so I showed them pictures from two schools in Afghanistan. We wondered later what these kids would be telling their parents later today. Some, the teacher told us, had never even been to the town of Peling perched above their village on top of the hill from which we had descended.
When I asked the fourth graders what they wanted to become they replied with the only two professions, other than farmer, they know of: doctor or teacher. I asked if anyone wanted to be a pilot but they stared at me blankly. They didn’t know what a pilot was. There are no planes flying overhead here, where would they go? The closest airport is in another state and about 6 hours drive from here, or, a more familiar way of counting distance, at least a two-day walk. Then I realized one feature about this place – there are very few sounds of the modern world that have penetrated this far – only the car and the motorcycle and the occasional TV.
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