Living and working

The camp already had 10 other volunteers living there, whom we met the night after our arrival, as they were on an excursion to Amritsar.
The camp itself comprises of three bedrooms, with a lad from Denmark in one, and two girls from Germany and Switzerland in the other. Mrs Grasshopper and I took the third room, with a 17 year-old girl from Glastonbury we met up with our first morning in Delhi (despite a 9 year age difference, she's became one of our good mates, sharing in Mrs Grasshoppers love of all things "hippy").

The bedrooms, like the 2 bathrooms, open onto the recreation room, a large open room covered in a carpet of foam mattresses. The shelves are lined with bookcases, stuffed with teaching books, materials, boardgames and travel books. There is also a TV, DVD player and 2 computers that provide Internet access most of the time.
The camp also has an outside row of toilets, Indian-style washrooms, and a dining room. At 2,400 meters above sea-level and in the height of the Indian winter, it's cold here. REAL cold sometimes, and there is only one heater in the recreation room, so meal-times and comfort-breaks are usually hurried affairs after sun-down!

We are by far the oldest here, with some of the volunteers coming straight from school, fully paid-up and funded by their affluent parents. So we feel a little out of place, and having booked this course from "gap-year for grown-ups", we were not really prepared for the youth-camp environment. It has seemingly condescending rules posted on walls ("clean-up day" Wednesdays, lights out at 11, tell a project executive if your not eating etc) and we have had to do simple jobs like cleaning the bathroom and toilets, as the other volunteers seemingly have not the whole time they had been there (by god did they need cleaning!).
Differences aside, they are nice enough, even some do ask us to wake them up in the morning, and one complains about public-school prefects and the "unfairness" of wearing a school uniform.

On our first morning we were shown around the different work placements. It was a jeep ride "death-race" zig-zagging up and down the mountain roads, making hairpin turns above sheer drops, crossing bridges over rocky-rivers, and speeding through streets filled with cows, people and rickshaws (amazingly never actually hitting any- occasionally just brushing them), with the horn constantly blaring, mixing a funky tune over the bollywood music that always blares from the jeeps tape-deck.

Mrs Grasshopper and I both chosen to work at the school for mentally challenged children in the mornings, and assist at the Orphanage in the afternoons. Both work placements were at the same site, run by the Rotary club some 30 minutes deathrace from our accommodation.

Working hours were nothing like we expected from the information we were given, only leaving camp at 10am, arriving about 10.30, and leaving at 12, to arrive back at camp for 12.30. The afternoons were also short, leaving camp at 4pm, arriving about4.30, only to leave again just after 5pm. Most afternoons the kids at the orphanage were doing school exams, or it was raining so we couldn't go (wtf?!), so I only actually spent two afternoons there.
1.5 hours in the morning and an hour in the afternoon was, somewhat, erm... disappointing?

The work itself though wasn't.

The first day we were introduced to the children we would be teaching for the next three weeks. The headteacher, a small attractive lady who was responsible for the 30 children and three teachers at the school, introduced herself to me, asked what I was doing in the uk, and then called one lad over. "Here is the boy you will be teaching. He is very slow, he does not like women, and he can be quite violent sometimes. But if you show him love, he will slowly respond I think".
Aged 15, stocky, with thick arms and muscular shoulders, my new mate Anuj stared at me. He looked very unimpressed with his new mentor as I smiled idiotically and chirped "namaste!". And prayed to god he would never get violent with me.

The headteacher explained she wanted me to teach him to count 1-10, write his name, and teach him fruit in english.

As it happened, Anuj never got violent with me. I soon found he needed to learn how to count 1-10 in hindi first, and that achieved, he slowly started in english. Sometimes he would lose interest, giving me a death-look before standing up and walking off. Others he would ignore the teaching aids I had bought or made, steadfastly shaking his head and complaining about the cold in Hindi.
But as one week became two, his indifferent ambling in my direction when I would first arrive became an excited walk, while flashing a sun-beam smile at me as we found somewhere to sit. Sometimes in would be in a classroom, others outside if the sun was out. I don't think I taught him much, sometimes he would recognise numbers, others not one, sometimes he would write his name, other times miss letters out.
But whenever the headteacher asked if I was making progress I would say yes, simply because he was starting to want to learn. He preferred counting, his favorite number being 3, and if he rolled a three on the dice, or got a number 3 flash-card, he would bounce with excitement and give me high-5's, keeping hold of my hand and smiling.
At 11.30 we would go to playtime in the yard. Come our final week I was giving him piggy-backs to the yard, I choking and heaving under his weight, and him screaming with excitement and happiness. He even started playing games, starting with simple catch and progressing to bowling in cricket.

Unfortunately, our time was cut short. Despite being told we would be working over christmas, we were told at the end of our second week, that there would be no more schooling. Just like in the UK, they close over christmas, only no-one told us that- in fact the opposite.

Anuj was absent on my final day at the school, and as I played with Sagar, a tiny little deaf boy who we all fell in love with, I really hoped he would get another volunteer. Looking at his work book, it appeared the only proper schooling he ever got was us volunteers. Quite strange, in a school with so many teachers, but then, that is why we were there.