Schools and Trees and Education, Oh My!

Yesterday was quite a holy day. We took a trip to the Mahabodhi Temple, a monument in front of the Bodhi tree that is a descendant of the real one where the Buddha attained enlightenment. It was surrounded by a village-like area with multiple levels. It had it’s own meditation park and butter lamp houses which are greenhouses filled with hundreds of enchanting burning candles for the Buddha. At the tree, hundreds of people walked around and around it, some monks and some foreigners. Some walked all day, bowing their heads in contemplation.Others like ourselves sat around it and just meditated for a while, in awe that we were meditating under the Bodhi Tree.

The Bodhi tree underwhich the Buddha achieved enlightenment

And a group of Tibetan kids sat at it and chanted in warbled yet holy speech for hours at a time. At night time clusters of soft lights lit up the entire park with a magical orange glow. Gold ribbons were tied to every tree in sight. Historic chanting filled the air everywhere you went. It was such an inspiring place that my Mom went three times.



Today we went to visit the Pragna Vihar School, the place where all your money has gone. It has amounted to 3,000 dollars which is loosely 90,000 rupees. To put it in perspective, about 50,000 rupees educates every kid in the school for a year. Today was actually a holiday, so none of the kids had to come in to school. But word that we were coming got around and almost 300 kids came to see us. Ranging from 5 years old to 15 years old, the kids were obedient and adorable in their matching red outfits. They got in line by age and sat in the dirt as if it were shiny new concrete. I was suddenly brought back to first grade.

The Mahabodhi Temple

Handing over your donations to Sister Shobha

Sister Shoba, the principal of the school announced to the kids who we were and translated how much we’d given them. They all clapped nonchalantly as if this happened all the time, but then again they were little kids. We sang them Do Re Mi and Getting To Know You and in return the 5 year olds sang to us about fish and a counting song about a princess. An equivalent to Row Row Row Your Boat or Mary Had a Little Lamb.

A few of the older teens who spoke better English asked us questions and translated to the rest. All of the boys wanted to be computer software engineers.One girl wanted to be a doctor in which we praised her with good lucks. Afterward we looked inside the homey 3 story building. With three or four classrooms on each floor, it was remarkable how they could fit 580 students into the building. Each classroom was about ¾ the size of one of mine and looked like traditional 20th century classrooms with connecting seats and decaying blackboards. Each room fit 60 kids, two times the amount of kids in my homeroom. They had one computer room that also served as a music and dance room. In my elementary school we had two music rooms, the auditorium for dance and a separate computer room stocked with 40 Macs. The contrast was mind boggling.

Another magical thing about the school was that unlike many schools, they mixed casts so that the poor kids became friends with the more working class kids and were exposed to the different lifestyles. It’s all a nonprofit school so anyone can come. They try to go to the homes of the beggar kids and ask for them to come to the school instead of beg on the streets.

Almost 300 students came on their day off to meet us!

The older girls and boys stayed a while to talk to us about graduating. There they graduated at 15 and then if they could, moved on to college, our high school. They sang some songs for us, more pop culture ones and told us a little about their movie stars and tv shows. One of the boys who sang to us was especially American-looking all the way down to the baggy, dragging jeans, hoodie sweatshirt, earphones in his ears and overly gelled hair. It was interesting how influenced these kids were from American teens, when they lived on the other side of the world and barely had any TV.

I left feeling grateful that I could be whatever I wanted to be in the future where as these kids had to be geniuses at maths (that's what they call math) and science to get places. Most of the kids didn’t speak any English at the age of 11 or 13. I already know quite a bit of Spanish at 14 to get my way through Spain.

All in all Bodhgaya has so far been an exploration of spiritual and educational values. It will be strange to leave the more suburban streets here to go to the hectic New Yorkish avenues of Delhi. It’ll be even more strange to be travelling on my birthday tomorrow instead of relaxing and celebrating. But then again, it is an adventure.

Sorry for the absence of pictures, these darn PCs are hard to master. (No offence to PC owners.)

Ciao for now,
Thai