INDIA

One friend said she was looking forward to hearing what I thought about India. I didn’t write too much about it last time, but I had to visit a second time in November, and I’m going a third time this weekend. I thought I would write just a bit more about what I have observed.

Culture – If you read the opening story you saw a small picture of the culture: one southern U.S. man using the addressing others with “sir” for an entirely different reason that a student addresses someone with “sir.” In India, a teacher is respected. Of course, a professor is respected more; education appears to be big business. Really big. With over a billion people, it’s highly competitive to get into the right schools. I read articles and saw news reports about the university/college entrance exams that students put their heart and soul into. The reason that education appears to be so big is that it is directly linked to job opportunities. Again, with such a large population (and not necessarily a large number of jobs) there is so much competition, not just at the educational level, but even at the professional level. Newspapers are filled with job “classified” sections. People often feel that how you fare or perform in secondary school and on the entrance exams can determine your life. Lately, though, there have been many for-profit universities and institutions springing up because of the demand for education. You can go to a 4-year university, a vocational school, a technical college, a training centre, etc. The list goes on. If I were prime minister, one of the biggest initiatives I would work on in order to alleviate poverty would be opening up educational access for all and job access for all.

One important job I’ve seen in India is that of a matchmaker. Just as in the paper there is the classified section advertising job opportunities, there is a separate section in the Indian newspapers for love matches. In the U.S. and on many matchmaking websites in the UK and North America, the person looking for a match, husband, or wife advertises himself or herself in the paper or online. In India, family members or a matchmaking agent usually represents young single people. In my family, we often joke about taking resumes of potential wives and conducting interviews or the difference between a potential wife on paper (her resume) and in person (same for men). Well, they still actually do it here in India. There are even matchmaking meetings, almost like speed dating but instead of the potential dates, it’s their agents. People come with photos and resumes and they get down to business. Big business. Finding a partner and wedding, in India, is like getting a job or getting a car. Again, it’s hard to paint India with one brush because there are definitely young people or celebrities in India who are pushing the envelope and widening the spectrum. But on the whole, marriage is just something you do, as it is in many countries. And finding the right partner can mean the difference between favour and acceptance of your families and good social status versus rejection by your family, family rifts, or even mediocre status. One of my good friends does not talk to her father much because she married the wrong caste. He tries, he really tries to talk to her, but it grieves him so much that he must apologise for not speaking to her. The problem with the huge drive towards weddings and marriages is the disparity between the male population and the female population.

The Underside – To explain the importance of the disparity of the male and female populations, remember that India is this dual-personality country in terms of “development.” It all depends on the context and perspective. For instance, in Africa, India is seen as another “developed” nation coming in to invest in Africa in order to reap a return; others have included the UK, the US, France, and now especially China. The G20 considers India to be at least emerging. To the Department for International Development (DfID) here, India has reached a point where the UK feels comfortable ending aid to India. This means there will no longer be any new grants to do development in India from DfID, and ongoing projects will end by 2015. But then if you look at the numbers or visit India, you’ll see that a majority of the world’s poor live in China and India. You’ll see that India has the largest class of poor people in the world. To Prime Minister Singh, his number objective is poverty alleviation; that’s a “developing” country prioritization. So it’s a mixed bag, and the society in India is highly diverse and stratified.

So when people talk about the emerging Indian giant, don’t be completely fooled. Remember that as India’s GDP grows, it does not mean inequality is decreasing. On the contrary, it is increasing. India is still a majority rural country with a roughly 60-55% rural population and a 40-45% urban population. If a majority of the “growth” isn’t happening in rural places, then there naturally is a disparity. Because of the inequality, it often reminds me of places like Brasil or South Africa who deal with relatively frequent crimes such as murders, rapes, car-jackings, muggings, etc. In India there is a sexual harassment, sexual molestation, and rape problem. Some people will disagree and say it’s concentrated in the north of India and not in the south. Some say it happens everywhere. I don’t have numbers on the relative frequency of different regions of India, but it definitely happens as the recent story of the gang-raped university student in Delhi shows us. The story is recent news, but the news is an old story in India.

One of the reasons blamed for this situation leads back to the differences in male and female population. There is a sex-selective abortion problem here, as in China. Due to the one-child rule to help curb population growth in China, not only are a group of words in the Chinese language slowly moving closer to being obsolete (uncle, aunt, brother, sister), but people will selectively abort female fetuses when they find out the gender of the child through tools like ultrasound (this also means the practice is concentrated towards populations that can afford it). The one-child rule did not create a gender preference for boys in China, but it has exacerbated that historical preference. The same is true in India, and studies have shown that the ratio of boys to girls is rising (you can think of this as gendercide). In some places like Punjab, I’ve seen it reported as high as 120-126 boys to every 100 girls.

Now the gender imbalance is not an excuse for sexual harassment. I’m just telling you some people use it as an excuse, as if the fact there aren’t enough women for every man to wive means that men can act out frustration by harassing women or raping women. Others blame clothing (which is ridiculous); some blame a woman’s lifestyles. The misogyny and specifically harassment, molestation, and rape of women in India are not specific to India. But the acceptance and apathy of the state and the shame forced on victims makes the problem very difficult in India. Of course the problem manifests on many levels of society. First, there is a type of misogyny present in society (we have it most societies); there are men that are not respecting women. Secondly, many girls and women don’t report rape because it means you have lost honour. Plus, even if you are raped you are “used,” in a sense, from the perspective of someone looking for a virgin to marry. Thirdly, many male policemen are rude, uncaring, and harassing. Some do not bother to file the report when a woman has the courage to report it. Even doctors can be unhelpful. Fourthly, even when a report is filed, it is often mishandled in court, the accused gets off, or it takes too long to even come before a judge (check out the 1972 Mathura case, the 1992 Bhanwari Devi case, the 1996 Suryanelli case, the 1991 Kunan Poshpora case, the mass rape of women from the 2002 Gujarat riots, etc.). Lastly, even if a woman has the courage to report it, a police officer sensitively and patiently investigates and files a report, and a court quickly takes the matter to trial convicting the perpetrator, the punishment is often too weak. Sexual harassment is not considered rape and so if a rapist is given a sexual harassment conviction or even if the perpetrator committed sexual harassment without raping the victim, the perpetrator’s sentence is low and will be out in a few months to torment the victim again, taking revenge. It would be really great if each of these problems could be addressed possibly through 1) better education of the value of women both in schools, at home, and in entertainment; 2) educating women about the importance of reporting rape in order to stop it and that it is not the end of your life, increasing post-rape support services (including marriage-finding support possibly); 3) including lady police officers in every location, letting women officers handle rape reports, training all officers on how to handle rape incidents and reports; 4) including women judges in city courts, and creating a separate fast track for rape, molestation, and harassment cases; 5) widening the definition of rape or increasing the punishment for molestation and harassment. I’ll be visiting India again so I’ll write more about it later. Though I focused on some of the work that has to be done, there are many things I love about the culture including Indian movies. J

ITALY

I haven’t seen many Italian movies, though. I decided I would also add a few more observations about Italy given that I visited it for a second time in 2012 because I didn’t get to see everything the first time. This time I went to the northeast and saw towns like Verona and Venice, the Disneyland of canal cities. Verona was funny because there was a house claiming to be Juliet’s house (Romeo and Juliet) and it had the famous balcony from which Juliet called out “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” There is a bronze statue of someone that is supposed to be the fictional Juliet and visitors come far and wide to place one hand on her colour-changing breast (due to the oils in people’s hands) and take a picture in that pose. It’s strange but that’s what they do.

Venice is a bit hard to describe. It really is like people tell you. There is a type of romance there, a stink there (though I didn’t smell it), a beauty there, a mystery there, and a resilience there. There really are gondolas, though they may look slightly different than you imagine. The gondola drivers don’t actually sing, but you can hire a separate opera singer to go on your gondola and sing while you float about in the Venetian canal-ways.

I wanted to share some observations, though, about the country, different from what I shared last time. The first is that there is a lot of city and regional pride in Italy. I mean people in Venice are Venetians, first, and Italians, second. That might be unfair since Venice was an actual republic before whereas other Italian cities were not. But there is definitely a regional pride in specific, regional recipes, foods, discoveries, languages, and dialects. Different cities claim to have the best pasta. “Every” city claim to have the best gelato.

The second observation is that Italy has a type of Eastern European feel. I’m not sure what I mean by that but it is poorer than France, Germany, and England. It seems to have that type of rural communal feel, of families getting together and sharing what they have, of people living their dreams, if only in their hands, but speaking it into imaginative existence. There is drama here in the simple things as if they were fantastical. And an intersection in which four cars meet can become the climax of a movie with people getting out of their cars doing various gestures (it doesn’t occur to any of them to back up). A woman might pass you in the street railing against the government as if she had no power, no voice, no ability to affect the change. It’s dazzling, simple, and strange.

The third observation is that the people there don’t care so much about appearance related to swimwear. Women in North America tend to hate men’s bikinis (often called speedos). I’ve been told this is not a cultural experience; women just don’t like seeing that. When you go to some Asian or European countries it’s quite the opposite: no one cares. It’s just normal. So now I believe it is a cultural thing with North America and the love of board shorts or trunks. If a woman grows up in a culture where men and even boys at a young age wear boys bikinis or speedos, then the woman is more likely not to care and to be used to it instead of grossed out like North American women. It was interesting to see. In Italy, I stuck out for wearing swimming trunks. It also works the other way. In North America, if a really large woman wore a bikini, a friend would tap me on the shoulder and say “No she didn’t!” In Italy, when it’s hot outside, a really large woman puts on a bikini because that’s what you do. No one says “What is she doing?” or “She looks ridiculous.” I guess it’s just normal. And I don’t mean just big women, I also mean big elderly women. I also expected bikinis to be a swimsuit that the young would wear, but I often saw elder women wearing bikinis, too. It seems to be more natural there. And more people seem not to care.

NIGER

Every time I tell someone that I was in Niger, whether on email, chat, or in person, they think I was in Nigeria. Last night, I was talking to a man from Guinea-Bissau; he told me that it’s normal. Even he remembers the first time his teacher distinguished Niger from Nigeria for him, and he was in Guinea-Bissau.

Niger was an eye-opening experience for me, as an understatement. There are 3 countries in Africa (all Francophone) that I have wanted to visit as I consider them to struggling slightly more than the others—DRC, CAR, and Niger. Niger and the CAR are both landlocked with struggling neighbours, resource-rich, and conflict-sensitive (CAR is going through conflict now and Niger had a military coup in 2010). In various development country rankings, Niger is often the penultimate country next to the DRC, both for the world and Africa. So I was intrigued to see what was going on in the country. As well, it was going to be my first visit to a Francophone African country so I would get to practice my French.

When, I arrived, I was in for a shock. Most of the country (80%) is in the Sahara desert. But the southwestern and south central portion of the country where the capital, Niamey, is located in the Sahel. The Sahel is this type of semi-arid transitional region between the green coastal areas of West Africa and the huge Sahara desert. What this means is that most of the capital where I was looked very barren to me. There were trees, yes, but there were less trees than you would find south in Nigeria. And there was sand. Lots of it. Everywhere. I begin to understand the culture that I read about during 1^st century Israeli times. Phrases like “shaking the dust off your feet” and the need to “wash another’s feet” made perfect sense. I still have dust and sand on my clothes.

I was there to visit Kristine who could no longer spend Christmas in the UK. So I went down there. It was so interesting to hear and see the commonalities with other African nations, West African Nations, and Nigeria specifically. The two countries share a few similar tribes and languages across their borders. Even some of the food is similar: I had an okra stew on rice that tasted similar to okra stews I’ve eaten growing up. The one huge difference was the French. Not being in Ghana or Nigeria, the colonial language is French with which I’m not comfortable but can fake it. The strange thing is that people thought I spoke French well. I always had to correct or interpret what they meant. I think they meant that I speak French with a French accent (not that I speak it well) which I guess sounds impressive to people who speak French with varying West African accents.

Just like Kristine’s first weekend in Niger found her as a hairdresser and photographer for a wedding, I was immediately inundated into Nigerien society. I went to a Nigerien white wedding and I went to a baby-naming ceremony. They were all quite interesting and cool. The white wedding was the same as other West African white weddings. The only difference is people came up to the seated bride and groom and took pictures and videos the entire time, even separating the bride and groom from the speaker/preacher. It was a bit hilarious. The baby-naming ceremony was cool. It was nice that they fed us dinner for breakfast (it started at 7 AM on a work day!). We had bread, chicken, and red stew (again similar food). I went to various people’s houses and was able to eat with a Tuareg family whose most charming daughter laughed at my French. I ate on the floor at another Tuareg household (luckily they had mats—it’s dusty) and the man had Kristine served me! And then he said jokingly “Isn’t Africa great!”

I also was able to go to the sand dunes, which are really peaceful and beautiful. I wish I had more time there to see the life there and how people live. One of my favourite parts of the trip deals with a USAID food security grant for a few million dollars. I helped an organization there with the economic prognosis and market analysis for the grant proposal and they won it. That grant doubled their building space, their staff, and their annual budget. So it was wonderful to attend the opening ceremony of the first food distribution in a village to the north. It’s quite amazing to see what your work actually goes to do. It was also meaningful for me because I begged to go out to the field to see our work when I worked for USAID, and I was never sent to any country. So now I was actually in the field seeing food distribution happen but through an NGO that won USAID funding. It was really interesting. Here in Niger, it really underscored to me the question of the long-term effectiveness of helping people survive in such harsh conditions. As Kristine pointed out, when you look around at that village we were in, you could never imagine that anything could grow from that ground. My faulty understanding is that this Sahel-Sahara region was inhabited by nomadic peoples (some still are semi-nomadic and pastoral) who could move around from place to place in search of water and food. But the contemporary culture of settling in one place doesn’t go so well with the barrenness of the land. Sometimes you wonder if it’s best to move people. In social work and community development, anyone will tell you, moving people from their home is the hardest thing to do. It’s often discouraged in social work; you help people where they are. So it brings up tough questions.

The trip was cut short by an accident we had with a motorcycle carrying two men. It’s a bit of a long and boring story but, strangely, I was the only person unscathed by the accident. It’s strange to experience an accident in a foreign country where you don’t know any of the local languages or the colonial language that well. I remember the moment the car impacted a sand embankment and stopped and I had a split-second thought “I wonder how we will get out of this and back to a place of rest like the house? I wonder how long it will take to look back on this and laugh? I wonder how the rest of the vacation will be?” I quickly put on my first responder and emergency hat and worked to get Kristine out of the car; she seemed to be semi/unconscious. Again, I’m skipping all the details because it’s a hard story to retell over and over again. Townspeople came out and miraculously helped and we loaded her and two other injured people and made our way to the unsanitary, roach-infested National Hospital emergency room. The funny thing is that I could tell you everything of what was said to get to that point even though I don’t speak people’s language.

Another problem arose with trying to decide what to do: they have a system where you must pay before they do any treatment or help or work or bandages, even in the emergency room! It’s a sad policy because I saw a woman who I believe was dead being taken out of the emergency room on a stretcher. In the end, it was decided that I had to go to her office to alert her staff (I handed her phone to one of the village people at the accident who was helping me and I didn’t get it back). So I had to make my way by taxi to her office. This sounds normal, but there are two problems: I don’t speak the language, and they don’t have addresses in Niger. I could only give the neighbourhood. And everything, every street, every corner looks the same—it’s just sand everywhere. Somehow I got a taxi to take me because no on wanted to go to that part of town. Finally I got the guy to take me to the right neighbourhood. He couldn’t find the location I was telling him so he dropped me off and I ran until I found the office. We then got help and got back to the hospital. Her office sent people to the site to secure the vehicle and we were able to make medical decisions. An American doctor was called in; we got X-rays revealing a fracture for Kristine in one arm. But because the Nigerien resident was treating her badly, we left. The American stitched her up and then the next day applied a plaster splint. We made sure to leave money to help the motorcyclists (imagine how many poor people have an accident and can get no emergency care because of money). They seem to be doing good and recuperating fine. Our people have been checking on them and, before leaving that night, the family of the two guys would sometimes check on us. We gave reports to the military and then we left.

We got CAT scans revealing 4 or 5 breaks in the nose but no swelling in the brain. She got stitches to close up the wounds on the arm. The next day she got a plaster splint. And on Monday, she got new X-rays that confirmed a clean fracture that had already started healing. The worse part was working with her organisation, which was more concerned about insurance, payments, lawsuits, and disciplinary action than her health. In the end, between emailing her family to mollify exacerbated emotions and trying to get internet diagnoses, we were finally able to convince her organization to do a medical evacuation, so we got her out of the country and on to her family about a week after the accident. So my Christmas was spent celebrating and my New Years was spent caring and tending.

I do hope to go back again to the country. It’s plagued by period drought and advancing desertification (the Sahel is advancing) which is not a good thing. There’s so much work that needs to be done from poverty alleviation, health care improvement, education improvement, infrastructure building, water security, etc. The economy is mostly subsistence farming and agricultural exports. Uranium is the big raw material export that I think could do a lot for the country if properly managed well. There is huge opportunity here. It’s just a challenging place to live and to develop true, integrated community. But with great challenges come great opportunities to live better stories and love well.

EDUCATION

The last time I wrote about education, I was emailed by a few people who were excited by the rise in open educational resources (OER) and massive open online courses (MOOCs). A few of my friends believe this is one reason why a free, open Internet is so important around the world. Of course, sometimes those very friends forget that an open Internet is one problem, but a more fundamental problem is Internet access at all or, even more basic, literacy. There are so many people who are cut off from the Internet today because most webpages are user-friendly for those who can read.

Still, many changes are continuing to happen. As I try to push for increased literacy work, access work, and education work through my company, I want to highlight a few new things I’ve seen recently.

Salman Khan, founder of Kahn Academy, was interviewed by Google recently. I sat down to watch it after someone sent me the 1-hour interview of Salman Khan. I had already seen his 2011 TED talk on videos in education. I really like Sal and am amazed that he left a lucrative career and job at a hedge fund to try to make these online educational videos but he really is transforming education. Two points from this interview resonate very strongly with my experience.

First, I hate lecturing. Even if I’m not simply lecturing, my least preferred way of teaching is simply introducing, telling, and explaining a new concept to students. I do it if I have to; I do it if there is not enough time to teach a better way (which always requires a greater time investment). My most preferred way is exploratory lessons, inquiry-based learning, expeditionary education, or self-guided instruction. There is still a role for a teacher but it is an altered role, and the teacher no longer leads the instruction; the student does. This is what I love in secondary education.

In higher (tertiary) education, where lecturing is expected, I still avoid it. If I was able to avoid administrative intervention, I would always make students learn the material outside of class and use “lecture-time” for problem solving, correcting misunderstandings, etc. It was always so much more effective. Of course, you need students who will actually initially learn the material or read the material outside of class.

Now if you listen to Sal talk in the interview, this is exactly what he says. The Khan Academy staff actually work with schools to implement and use Khan Academy courses in the classroom allowing students to work at their own pace. The teacher shifts her role to that of an aid or clarifier and classroom time is not used for lecture but instead for extra help, going deeper, correcting mistakes, etc. This is called flipping the classroom. This is pretty amazing to be able to do this at the secondary school level and make it work. I love it and hope they continue.

The biggest and most important notion he brought up is a horrible divide that develops at quite a young age, both at home, in school, and the community between smart kids and dumb kids. It’s a false divide, honestly.  I’ve never done social scientific research to try to prove my hypothesis, but a teacher knows. I’ve said it before: I have never had a single students, not one, who mastered the previous year and all lessons of my class up to today that then could not understand and master today’s lesson. Any trouble is almost always due to holes or gaps in knowledge (which my school would blame me for). Normally what happens is you keep going. If I’m teaching statics and a student has a gap in algebra, this is a statistics class for final year students (seniors, 12^th graders); I’m not supposed to teach something outside the scope of the course. Usually I was only allowed to go back and teach something else if a significant percentage of the class had the same gap. So you keep going. If a student fails an exam, the student should continue to work on that topic until comprehension and passing that objective, but not in school. Once the exam has been given, we move on to the next unit or chapter or module. I tried to work against this by using objective-based tracking, but even then I had to tell students to work on previously failed-objectives after school, at night, or weekends. We didn’t have time in the class. And the extra weight of it became too much for many students especially when they are behind across the board, in multiple classes/subjects.

With the teachers who use Khan Academy in schools, students can go at their own pace and they don’t continue to a succeeding topic until the pass and master the preceding one (for cumulative subjects like mathematics and science). This is really important and helps to avoid passing a student who hasn’t learned the material. All schools should move in this direction. Thankfully there have been innovative schools that have done this, like Montessori, though in the minority. The tough part about what I have said is that people don’t believe you because you haven’t done research to prove it. Khan Academy has started to do research, and they are seeing that when you fill the remediation gaps in a ‘weak’ student, “that same kid that you thought was weak 6 months ago is now the best student in the class, and we’re seeing it over and over again.” Yes. Watch the interview.

I’m such a big fan of what they are doing at Khan Academy and how they’ve grown and are going after an even bigger mission across the country and world. I’ve always wanted to work there, and would do it in a second if I had the chance.

Due to the rise in OER, much of it in the form of MOOCs, Stanford University has decided to make a bold move. Both Coursera and Udacity come from current and former Stanford University professors, so it’s no surprise that Stanford University is the first university to create a new vice provost position. On the 30^th of August, 2012, Stanford University announced the creation of its first Vice Provost for Online Learning. The Office of the Vice Provost for Online Learning (VPOL) will be part of the larger Stanford Online Initiative and shows Stanford’s commitment to online learning not just for it’s physically enrolled students but for people studying its courses from around the world. I, myself, decided to try an online course and took one from a group called TechChange.