Base Camp 2!
`If you don’t like the weather here just wait for 5 minutes, it will change”: Quote by Huntsville resident. We have proof of this when it starts to rain in the afternoon after a morning of mandatory shades and cap gear sunshine. The water -splattered kids were of course ecstatic and my mosquitoes were especially animated swarming as they were all around us abuzz with news of a new assignment `to make our own robot’ after which they would be, hold your breath, `interviewed’. The accompanying Counselor looked harassed, happy and resigned all at the same time. Welcome to our world ,I thought. Just one mosquito was enough to put that look on our faces. The poor man had all 6 of them.
We Chaperones did our official time tabling today on the basis of the Missions that the kids start from Monday. We get to video shoot, photograph and watch their activities on a need to basis and we need to get the activities and times right before we set off on the site visits. The kids of course think we just hang around and eat. This notion is aided and abetted by the fact that we get to meet them regularly only at meal times. It also doesn’t help that we wait in the cafeteria till all of them from different groups have come and gone. Some of them are of the belief that we eat afresh with each group. I have seen them giving us knowing, envious looks each time we pass them with a tray of anything in our hands.
While the younger ones are always happy to see us and greet us with enthusiastic shouts of `Hey Ma’am’, the older ones are more studied in their approach ,post new found independence on foreign soil. There are restrained half waves and repressed smiles. There is the all pervasive demeanour of ` We know you like to feel you are still in control but we really know better! How fast they grow and…go.
We constantly walk under the giant, looming, monumental presence of the earth bound rockets and space stations. They are comforting and unsettling at the same time. We see what man is capable of doing and has done and what these same minds and the matter they create are capable of undoing. To us educators it is all the more unnerving because we already are privy to the sometimes blinding and sometimes gradual unleashing of a similar brilliance that gave birth to these magnificent machines, from these young wards who we like to think we are teaching. Truth to tell we learn how to teach them when they show us how it is they like to learn.
We adults decided we needed a fun story to tell the kids when we met them again so took a ride in the `Space Shot’ an amusement ride that takes you up about 60 ft and drops you down. We shared this news with them with a deep sense of accomplishment only to have it shattered by a 10 year old who said casually `Oh that. The one in our own Wonderla is even scarier’. Further smiles were wiped from our faces when we were told that we were `sort of missed’ and that this place was really `awesome and organized’. Compared to what I wanted to ask but from previous experience knew better than to do that for fear of hearing the answer.
After the frenetic activity of New York and Washington, for us chaperones , with the kids away most of the times, time weighs heavily here …as we are beginning to also, what with ice creams and pizzas on a daily basis and the presence of the fountain of life for every teenager anywhere in the world—the ubiquitous Coke and potato chips.
The sparrows have all migrated from India to the US. I have followed their trail for the last 15 years that I’ve been visiting this country. But I know ,like their human counterparts, this too will soon be a country they will migrate from rather than to. They may, like many, have learned to live here but their hearts are still in transit, waiting for the final destination….home, in India. Like Shreyas, one of my older kids, a young man of few words, succinctly put it when I asked him how he was holding up. `I’m not lonely Ma’am, but India is’.
Without my 37 pieces of precious cargo India certainly is. Mera Bharath hamesha Mahaan’.
Signing off for now,
hemaa narayan
June 1st, 2008 at 9:54 pm
Its nice to know that the weather is also accompanying you in your enjoyment. So, you won’t be missing much of Bangalore’s rain droplets.
As you described that the young kids were happy to see you but we are sure that they are definitely learning in their own way. Moreover , this is a great experience for each one of them. But the way a small child compared your visit to ‘Space Shot’ to one of the ride at ‘Wonder-La’ is simply amazing and innocent. It shows as if, for that kid both the things i.e. Space Shot and Wonder-La ride are equivalent.
According to yesterday’s newspaper, another Bangalorean Neela Iyengar won a NASA award for her contribution to flight safety and success of two US mission to International Space Station . Have you got an opportunity to meet her or get to know about her achievements?
June 2nd, 2008 at 5:33 am
Things are going as per the schedule. A sheer of pride accompanied with happiness to learn that Our SVM School “believe in yourself” theme of Ever admirable Principal Mam,tresurer, unit head mistresses and 37 kids are doing great at “NASA” huntsville at Alabama.
Adventure must have really worked its way during the “Horrifying” excitement at the drop zone. The “J” factor is going up the grading scale thinking of all the great fun and frolic you are having there. All the same we feel a moment of pride and joy that our SVM team has proved itself and overseas dream come true.
Here the weather is humid and hot during the day time followed by thunder showers in the evening.
With loving thoughts,
HPU Staff