Small Acts

As I look back at the summer and reflect on our work in Hyderabad, its effects and effectiveness, and the notion of civic engagement itself, the question arises for me, as it has for some of our students: Are we doing anybody any good with our short terms of civic engagement? In our case, the goal to help children get better education in eight weeks surely seems a bit too ambitious!
I find myself going back to a critical scene in a Hindi movie called Taare Zameen Par (Like Stars on the Earth) that all of us in DukeEngage-Hyderabad watched together. It’s a movie that anybody working with children should see. So, we sat together—all 16 of us, we 14 in DE-Hyderabad, and Anandini (11 years) and Akshayini (7), our two daughters—with the movie playing on my computer and being projected on to the big white wall of the living room in the girls’ apartment—a poor simulation of Indian movie theaters, but effective nonetheless. Taare Zameen Par is about the relationship between Ram Shankar Nikumbh, an unorthodox art teacher, and Ishaan Awasthi, a dyslexic child who struggles to find his voice in the fast-paced, achievement-driven society of India—a society in which rote-learning and exam scores are all that matter because they are believed to ensure “good jobs.” Here is one of the pivotal scenes of the movie when the boy’s father visits Nikumbh at the residential school where the child is enrolled:

When I look at all the photographs and video clips from the 2010 summer in Hyderabad, I am struck by how physically demonstrative our Duke students and the school children were with each other—shoulder to shoulder, cheek to cheek. It is hard to see in these images at least any barrier because of language or cultural differences. Pointing to how our DE students interacted with the schoolchildren, the Math teacher at one of the schools said to me, “You know, really, they have blown the myth I had of western cultures being cold and aloof. It’s amazing how in this short time, the students and children have bonded…” Buttoning a child’s shirt, combing another’s hair, running after a kid into the street to get him back to school, not being able to eat lunch because the children had been given an inedible mid-day meal, or going to slum-houses to check why a child was absent–these are just a few undocumented signs by which Leela and I knew our Duke students and Sudeepa, our school-coordinator, cared about the children.

The many “together” pictures the children drew, the friendship bands that they tied, the phone lists they made (even making international calls) and most visible of all, their daily anticipation–all told me that the children had come to care about our Duke students too. With help from our program community partners, we are experimenting with ways in which these bonds can be nurtured better supported through technology (Skype) and letter-exchanges but also through changes in our program’s structure (e.g., by partnering each Duke student from the very start with a Hyderabad college student who has had a continuing relationship with the children).

A sense of caring comes from within, but it can also be inspired by things on the ground. Critical reflection helps the process of sifting and understanding gestures that reflect care and those that betray a lack of it. P. Sainath recounts that after the tsunami disaster of 2005, starving homeless fishermen in south India received boxes and boxes of neckties! (watch at 10:15 min) It doesn’t take much to imagine whether such donations came from closet-cleaning charity or caring. The challenge is that caring appears in many dispersed ways, verbal and nonverbal. Its signs can be subtle—but this is also true of uncaring. That is why critical reflection—candid, not self-congratulatory—becomes so important.

So, let me return to the question of whether anything was achieved in eight weeks of work. For me, the answer is in this: Even if the children may have forgotten the letters and the songs they learned, there is one assurance they got from us—that we cared. For these children, we did not represent a world that was simply a spectator to their circumstances or a give-and-go donor, but we embodied a world that cared to engage and be engaged. And that confidence will make a world of difference in their lives.

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