I’m standing at the front of a classroom, wearing jandals and a purple kurta bought for me by my host mum. There are no windows, no lights, no pencil cases on desks or texting under the table. Twenty teenage girls are staring at me, wide-eyed and silent, books open to a page on ‘everyday adverbs’. I have one phrase of Punjabi in my lexicon and a half-piece of chalk in my hand.
“Hello, my name is Bel. I am from New Zealand. It’s very nice to meet you.”
I’m met with blank faces – and at this point I realise I have no idea how to teach.
Three years ago, my friend Rhiannon and I left New Zealand with the best of intentions and a vague idea of where we were headed – to Patiala, a city in north-western India, to spend a month volunteering at an orphanage and its adjoining schools.
As earnest 19-year-olds hoping to do a bit more with our summers than R&V and selfies at Sevens, we’d signed up with a relatively new, family-run organisation that placed volunteers within five projects throughout India. Finding such a company to apply to had been a mission in itself: the travel industry is already saturated with so-called ‘voluntourism’ programmes, targeted at retirees, students, and people with both disposable income and a desire to Make A Difference.
The industry itself is often criticised for capitalising on ‘white guilt’, and “using the developing world as a playground” for the more privileged. My friend and I came across too many glossy websites advertising exorbitantly-priced programmes with photos of confident Westerners and smiling children. We were determined to have an ‘authentic’ experience, not one that came pre-packaged with a T-shirt and a lanyard.
Which was how I ended up in charge of a class of twenty, a packet of felt tips in my hand.
I struggle through my first-ever lesson, leaning heavily on the one student who speaks OK English to navigate a basic clapping game I learned in drama at intermediate. It takes the first half-hour to get the kids in a circle and the second to explain the game.
Then the bell rings and the entire school floods into the classroom, asking for my signature, my camera, reaching for my hand – one girl behind me starts plaiting my hair, and a teenage boy shouts out “Ma’am, you know Akon? You know that song, ‘Smack that all on the floor’? Can you sing it for me?’”
It’s as though Kate and Wills are in town, and I’m reminded of the fact Patiala is not a tourist destination. The schools were a place for the poorest children in the city to learn how to spell away from the slums and the tin shacks selling chewing tobacco, before leaving to marry or take over family businesses.
Rhiannon and I quickly became familiar with reaching our limits as volunteers and as teachers. There were no curriculums, no guidelines and certainly no clear-cut NCEA internals to work with. Every morning, we’d report to the principal’s office and receive our instructions for the day – from teaching music with no instruments or home economics in a maths class. Then we’d be led to a classroom and left to it for the morning. Translators were a bonus.
Annabel Hawkins in India Photo: Supplied
We’d had grand plans of sharing the knowledge that we had, of bridging the language and cultural divide with our respective backgrounds in art and theatre. But this was harder than we thought. I second-guessed myself throughout most lessons – with half a journalism degree behind me, what did I even have to offer? A pseudo-intellectual perspective on the hegemonic influence of mainstream broadcasters on public discourse?
Some of these kids were in charge of their entire household before they turned six. I’d see five-year-olds with babies on their hips, helping toddlers wash their clothes. The girls at the orphanage knew they’d been abandoned by their parents; the boys at school knew they’d have to leave soon to support their families.
To them, I was wealthy beyond belief – and of course, compared to people earning 20 cents a day, I am. But it was hard explaining that Rhiannon and I considered ourselves relatively poor when the children wondered aloud why we weren’t driven around in limousines and living in Hollywood because, after all, we could afford to fly to India.
“Bel, why you no movie star? You so rich to fly to India! You could be on movies ‘cos you so beautiful – like Shakira!”
I’d try to distract them from this paradox with nouns and verbs and drawings of snakes and cats, S’s and C’s – because I felt awkward about it myself.
Confronted with our privilege, Rhiannon and I reassured ourselves that our intentions were good, that we weren’t just privileged white girls stopping off at an orphanage to snap Facebook profile pictures of us laughing with ‘ethnic’ children (#blessed, #OpenedMyEyes) on our way to the Full Moon Party in Thailand. And we weren’t.
But we were privileged, and white, and girls. We knew that we were lucky to have accessed a level of education that many others couldn’t, and this was something we wanted to use and share. But the instant that classroom door closed, that seemed like a pretty romanticised idea, easier said than put into practice with 20 children.
Annabel Hawkins, L, with Rhiannon Josland in India Photo: Supplied
What did we do for that month, in that school? I honestly couldn’t tell you. There was a lot of frustration – about knowing I had something to offer, but not having the tools or ability to do so. About the Indian education system, and its reliance on rote learning, and the reasons that was the case.
More often than not I felt like a babysitter, there so that tired teachers could take a chai break.
So we learned to find triumph in the small things: helping a five-year-old boy talk for the first time after six months at school; introducing things we took for granted in our own childhoods, like basketballs and crayons, to kids who’d never seen them before. But in doing so, we were uncomfortably aware that we were finding exactly the misplaced sense of self-satisfaction that voluntourism is criticised for contributing to.
When we got back to New Zealand, we hadn’t bridged the gap between the developed and the developing world. We hadn’t changed lives; we hadn’t even given vaccines or built a well. We returned home with photos of us blowing bubbles with beautiful kids – evidence of our month spent do-gooding overseas.
Though we’d known we weren’t going to elevate this community from poverty – and weren’t qualified to give vaccines or build wells – it was difficult to know what impact, if any, we’d had over the month at all. And after we left, another influx of globally-minded, well-intentioned ‘voluntourists’ arrived at the school, ready to make their mark and Make A Difference. I can’t help but wonder now, three years on, whether the small feats we did achieve amounted to enough ‘good’ to make any difference.
This content is brought to you with funding assistance from New Zealand On Air.