From One Extreme to Another

I'm sitting in the living room at my new residence. The home of a workaway host. Workaway.info is a website that connects people like me who are looking for volunteer opportunities with those who have them. Pooja and Manesh have a small school in the mountains around Dehradun. Today was my first day of work and the first impression that comes to mind is obedience. Compared with the last kids that I was dealing with these kids are little angels.
I thought of Ashland the whole day today. The school is located about 4,500 feet above sea level and it's Spring! The biome is quite similar to Ashland's, there are pines, oaks, rhodadendron and other species that are around our area. It feels very much like home... and well, I was missing Ashland a little bit. I was thinking about spring rains and Trilliums in the forest.
I taught English and read the script for the play that the kids will be preforming on April 8th. For my introduction I used a map to show where I was from and taught the kids to say "Where are you from?, I am from..." The school is an "English Medium School," as much as possible is taught in english. There are goverment schools in the area, in fact there is one not even a hundred feet down the road. But the education at these schools is quite poor. I can attest to this because the government schools that the kids were going to in Varanassi before coming to Saraswati Center's "Coaching," taught the kids to purely copy things and repeat whatever is said to them.
Neither the "English Medium" schools or government schools are in my opinion the way that things should be taught. Government schools teach kids nothing and "English Medium" schools impart on kids that their culture is backwards and english is sophisticated and better. Dehradun is north India's center for education, the city abounds with schools with names like "Maple Bear Canadian School," these private schools bring kids from all over North India into this city.
In Varanassi I had a room that by stretching out I could touch both sides. Now I have a huge bed and my own bathroom. I took my first hot shower in ages. The night before last I went to a men only cocktail party with Manesh, the opinions of these well-to-do Indian men was quite different than my own and many of the other Indians I have met in my travels. English words are always sprinkled in to Hindi, but in this upper strata of the population English is spoken as much as Hindi, it is really Hinglish as Pooja's daughter told me. English is used for emphasis and for emotions, as well as almost all technical talk comes in English. I find it rather funny to hear English swear words interspersed in Hindi dialogue. Since the whole family is fluent in English I have to be rather ostentatious to keep them from speaking English with me as well. I do my best but since my Hindi isn't nearly as good as their English it is quite difficult. With that said I ma proud of myself for how quickly I learned Hindi. Before I left Varanassi people would ask me how many years had I been living there rather than days or months.
I have fallen in love with India, this place is truly indescribable. The more I learn the more astounded I become. The history is like tracing the roots of a giant tree, the branches lead all across the spectrum of civilization and imagination. Every city is located on some ancient spot that has been razed and rebuilt over the centuries. When I go into the hills where the school is people are growing wheat and corn in the same way that they've been for thousands of years with almost no change. One totally random tidbit that I read which I think is absolutely ridiculous and awesome is that in the south of here, on the Deccan Plateau a tribe of people used to capture and train monitor lizards so that they could scale cliffs to attack citadels. They would tie themselves to the lizards and with their help climb the cliffs and invade the fortresses... it's like freaking Lord of the Rings. Here in India the imagination doesn't need to go far before it runs into reality.