Susan's O&M Adventures

Today was quite a day. I'm still synthesizing, so I'll do the dinner report before I hit the heavy stuff.

Tonight, we went to a Japanese restaurant on the top floor of a hotel. It was a little patched together looking, but we wanted meat, so we stayed. I'm pretty riced out, so I took a chance and ordered garlic steak with an egg roll. Baha! The egg roll cannot possibly be accurately described with words, but I'll try. It was shaped like an egg roll, but the thing was pale and a little flat, and it tasted an awful lot like scrambled eggs. Apparently, the Indian egg roll features a literal take on the term. It appeared to be a thin layer of scrambled eggs that had been rolled up in the rough shape of an egg roll. So, we ate a little of that and laughed a lot. Then, I got my steak, and it's the best beef I've had in like... 9 days. Really, though, it tasted pretty good to be found in a country where people aren't so used to cooking cow. I mean, I'm not so good at cooking soy.

So, I was reveling in my beef victory when Melissa asked if it's okay for us to eat salad here in India since it is often washed with contaminated water, my immediate thought was, "Gosh, no! Don't eat it." Then, I looked down at my plate and found that I'd just finished off the lovely (raw) shredded cabbage that accompanied my beef. Meal fail. We'll see how that goes. :(

So, now for the real stuff. This morning, we went to a school for the blind here in Bangalore where two of the O&M students teach. It was so different from any school I've ever seen at home. It's clear the teachers there are having to make do with very little. Lots of the children were without shoes or properly fitting clothes. I just wanted to love on all the children and be their teacher. A few times, I couldn't help myself, and I stopped to tell some of the girls how beautiful they were. They don't understand English well yet, but hey, at 7 I didn't know Kannada. Heck, at 24, I can't even pronounce words I've been immersed in for a week!

In the US, vision teachers generally work one-on-one with students, but here, the 200! kids were divided into classes of about 10-15. Especially in the younger grades, children with severe visual impairments need so much direct instruction to build concepts. The school just didn't have enough personnel to fully enrich these kids.

They did however, do some cool vocational training. These kids learn traditional dance, box making with heavy machinery (yikes!), and cow milking.

We learned later in the day that low vision children are taught braille because neither large print nor magnifiers are widely available. We asked further where people get braille, and we were told that it is really only available in textbooks. So, all this time and energy is poured into teaching kids a literacy method that they will not be able to use to access information once they leave school. If they have access to a slate and stylus, then they can create braille for themselves to read, but if not, they won't have a thing to read. Without reading material, they won't be able to retain their skills, an after time, become illiterate. The school has a tiny library with braille and print books, but it is not nearly large enough to serve the needs of the 200 kids. We want to fix that. We are thinking of talking with people at the school and trying to coordinate donations of braille books from the States to the school here in Bangalore. It's just not fair that we have extra books just lying around at home when there are children who could read them here. There is more to think about and sort out. The high shipping costs are one consideration. There's more thinking and planning and collaboration that will need to happen. Today was just the gut-wrenching realization moment of how unequal access to education can be.

Speaking of, we noticed two big gaps at the school: girls and multi-disabled kids. I'll address girls first, I suppose. Of the 200 children, only about 35 were girls. However, visual impairment occurs irrespective of gender, so its occurrence is spread equally among the genders. There should have been roughly 100 girls and 100 boys at the school. Later in the afternoon, we asked our Indian friends, and they gave some reasons. First, parents are more reluctant to send a girl off to school than they are to send off a boy as boys are perceived as more capable of being so far from home. There also seems to be more shame in having a blind girl than a blind boy, so parents are more likely to keep a blind girl at home but educate blind boys, and unfortunately, blind girls, all girls really, are more likely to be euthanized as babies. In fact, families are not allowed to know the gender of the baby before he or she is born in order to reduce the number of aborted girls. If families cannot support many children, they will surely first choose a boy, so girls have less of a chance in poor, uneducated families. And blind girls, well, they seem to have little chance at all. It's absolutely heart breaking. No matter the reason, blind girls are not being offered the same chances for education. I've never had to be indignant about issues concerning the rights of women, having grown up in a post affirmative action world, but the state of women in other parts of the world is not equal to that in the US.

If all that weren't enough for the day, we also noticed the distinct lack of students with additional disabilities. Two children were pointed out to us as autistic, and though I didn't work with any of the kids, none of them seemed to have severe cognitive impairments. So, where are these kids being educated if not in schools for the blind? The answer is that they as a group, they don't seem to be educated. They are being hidden at home for fear of the karmic shame they bring their families. Many of them die as babies as the conditions that cause severe impairments often also cause infant mortality, and many of them are also euthanized, to save the family grief and shame.

So, what a note to finish up on, huh? Maybe I should have finished up on the questionable dinner report, huh? Btw, we're going back to the school, so I'm gonna get the chance to love on some kids.

How about some pictures?

Isn't she just beautiful?

This little girl is the one deaf child in the blind school. Go figure. She kept smiling and waving to us all day like we were sharing a secret. She's Lauren's new BFF.