Full House

Today was a very busy Saturday. The morning started out with middle school clubs. Once a month, we have a two hour activity with a group of middle schoolers. Some of the clubs went on a hike, learned to knit, and made Christmas cards, among other things. Beth had a club that made friendship bracelets. It was a great opportunity for the students to get out of their dorms and into a real home. Beth's club was a great success. The kids had chips to eat and soda pop to drink and made some woven bracelets and some beaded ones.

Dave's group was also very successful. Of course, anything entitled "The Play Station Club" can't be all bad. Dave went to our friend Jared's house to play Guitar Hero for two hours with a dozen middle school boys. The kids all had their Play Station Portable games with them, as well, to keep busy while waiting for their turn at the guitar. It was a fun time hanging out with kids outside of the school.

After a quick lunch at a cafe in the bazaar, we went back home to prepare for our next visitors. We invited our advisor group over for dinner and games tonight. These are the ten sixth-graders that are our homeroom in the middle school. We walked down to the dorms (quite a hike from our house) at about 5:00 pm to get the kids. Unfortunately, some of the boys were out at a soccer match that went late. We walked the other six kids up to our house, but we took turns having them blindfolded and being led by their classmates. It was a fun "trust walk" up the hill and only a few kids got led into light poles.

After we got the first six kids up to our house, we got a call that the soccer crew was back. So Dave walked all the way back down to the dorms to pick them up. This wasn't so bad, but the walk back up was hard with exuberant sixth grade boys. Beth had remained at home with the other six while cooking a feast of spaghetti, fruit salad, garlic bread, and ice cream for dessert. Our students could not stop raving about how wonderful all the food was. We just kind of looked at each other and said, "It's just spaghetti?" The boarding students really appreciate being out of the dorms for a few hours and eating something besides cafeteria food. We were glad to help because it was loads of fun.

Hopefully, we'll be able to have them all over again, soon.

Dave and Beth

Wild Things

Today ended a special week here at Woodstock. Since Monday, we have been watching videos, seeing plays, and hearing discussions about the native animals here in India. We've had distinguished scientists and experienced film-makers come in to school to share what they know about tigers, snow leopards, peacocks, and elephants. It was a crazy week for teaching, because we had lots of breaks in class time for the presentations. In spite of that, we still got a lot done in our lessons and we learned a lot about India's animals in the process.

Part of the festivities for Wildlife Week was the face-painting every lunch period. Naturally, this was organized and implemented by the middle school art teacher. Beth ended up painting a different animal each day (tigers, snow leopards, rhinoceroses , elephants, and peacocks). For the elementary school lunch, she painted about 45 kids' faces or hands. By the time the middle school kids got through the lunch line, she had some volunteers helping. Below, you can see some pictures of Beth in action and some happy customers.


Though there was little mention of monkeys from the naturalists and conservationalists, we still have them in abundance here in Mussoorie. At the end of school today, there were a few that were hanging out entirely too close to some of the middle school windows. A couple of our braver students took that opportunity to antagonize them from safely behind the window screen.

After school, we made a trip down to the bazaar to pick up some curtains that we had ordered from the fabric store. They have gone a long way to making our house feel a little more like a home. While we were walking, we met up with Zeenat. She is our Hindi tutor here at Woodstock. She is one of the Hindi teachers in the middle school this year and has been giving people lessons for a couple years. Her dad is one of the tailors in town, and she invited us up to their house for some tea. It was great to visit a family that is a little bit outside of the bubble at Woodstock, and the chai was excellent.

On our walk home, we saw some beautiful views of the sunset back across Mussoorie. As usual, the camera does not do them justice. Just the same, we thought we'd add them here.

As we were taking these pictures, we noticed a wonderful sight on the back of a scooter.

We haven't yet partaken of this resource, but we look forward to it some day in the future when we are desparately craving some American food. We hear that it's pretty close to the real thing in the states.

Dave and Beth

From A to Zoroastrian

In our first month here at Woodstock, we have discovered that it is a very unique place. Today, while sitting in the staff lounge during tea time, someone wished Dave a "Happy Navroz." In case you are not familiar with this holiday, it is the new year holiday for the Parsi population in India. Now it is entirely possible that those of you from America might not know what a Parsi is. Some of you will, no doubt, remember that Zoroastrians in India are called Parsis. This is because the Zoroastrians emigrated from Persia 1,000 years ago. Now if you don't know what a Zoroastrian is, then you should take a little trip to Wikipedia for the basic run down. This is just another example of the diversity that we have here at Woodstock School. Our students all come from very different religious, cultural, and national backgrounds. We have students that are Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Muslim, Jain, Zoroastrian, and some students that maintain no religious beliefs. This is still a Christian school, but we are being exposed to many new things along the way.

In other news, we finally got our television hooked up today. After school, we sat down and enjoyed that most Indian of programs, "My Name is Earl."

With this new distraction, hopefully we'll be able to make time for lesson planning.

Dave and Beth

Somewhere Over the Rainbow

Although it rained for almost the entire day yesterday, there were short bursts of time when the sun tried to come out. We're not sure that it came out over our house at all, but it did clear up a little bit over the hills in the distance.

If you look very closely at this first picture, you can see a very faint rainbow in the top left corner. Over time, it got even stronger and we were able to get a pretty good picture of it.

The little spot of sunshine off in the distance was the only part of our field of vision that was not cloudy and dreary. It would seem that there are some nice things about having lots of rain...every once in a while you'll get a beautiful rainbow.

Dave and Beth

The Monsoons...

Today has been a very rainy day. We first noticed the rain today when the sound woke us up at about 6:30 am. The top layer of our roof is metal, so it gets quite loud (both with rain and monkeys). In spite of the continuing rain, we decided to make a trip to te bazaar today. We usually like to get there fairly early on Saturday so that we can beat the crowds and be back here for lunch. We decided to focus on getting some dishes and some curtains in the bazaar today. Woodstock provides most of these basic things, with the expectation that you'll return them after two months. Overall it was a successful trip--even if we were soaked to the skin by the time we got home. It has been raining for about 8 hours now with only a about a half hour respite. When we returned from shopping, Dave took a quick video of the rains from our front porch. If you can imagine, this was a bit of a lull in the force of the rain. Dave was definitely glad that he picked up a larger, more appropriately sized umbrella in the bazaar today. So the moral of today's rain is that when you're planning your trip out to visit us in India, try to make it after mid-September. Everyone keeps telling us that it is going to get better, but we're not sure we believe them yet...


Dave and Beth

Independence Day!

As you may have already known, the 15th of August is Independence Day here in India. It's been 61 years since the country became free from British rule. One of the traditions here at Woodstock school is to have a flag-raising ceremony to mark the event. This was quite a bit different from the “have a barbeque and blow some stuff up” attitude at most American independence celebrations. At 9:30 this morning, the whole school gathered around the flagpole.

The event began with some singing by a choir made up of mostly Indian staff members. The first song was Vande Mataram, the national song of India. This is, of course, distinct from Jana Gana Mana, the national anthem. We’ve included a short clip of the staff singing the first song.

After this song, we had an excellent speech by a Woodstock board member that has been all over the world studying and practicing law. She asked us to think about the freedom we have and what we can do with it. After the short speech, we all watched a student raise the flag and then we sang the national anthem. We would have taken some video of that, but tradition says that one stand at attention with their arms at their side during the anthem. We had a hard enough time remembering the words. The whole occasion was very formal everyone was wearing their best clothes including us:

our friends:

and our students:

After the ceremony, we all went down to the quad area of the school. A big tarp had been pulled over it to offer some protection from the ever-present monsoon rains and there were several tables set up with food. These were local vendors from Mussoorie who had come up to the school to serve up some traditional Indian fare. It was all very tasty. These included naan—fresh from the tandoor ovens, a fried potato patty that we think is called tikki, mutton and vegetarian momos, and masala dosa.

After the festivities of the morning, we went home and took a nap. After Beth baked some cookies, we went over to our friends house to watch Lage Raho Munna Bhai. This is a movie about an underworld goon in Bombay that is visited by the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi. It sounds very bizarre, but it was very funny and very appropriate for this holiday. So while we missed some of the bombs bursting in air, it was a very nice independence celebration.

Dave and Beth

Our House

Now that we have had some time to settle into our home here in Mussoorie, we thought that we'd give you a quick tour of the place. The first stop on the tour is our living room. Right behind the photographer in the picture below is our front door. Behind Beth you can see our the corner of our refrigerator. You can also see our wood stove in front of the old fireplace. Beth is reading a guidebook on India from our bookshelf. You can't see it in this picture, but there is a door just to the left of the photographer. This heads into our computer/TV room. There is also a door in the back left corner that goes to the kitchen. And that will be the next stop on our tour...

Our kitchen is ridiculously narrow. To the right in this picture is a wall with some cupboards and shelves, but all the counter space is to the left. That is why our fridge didn't fit inside. At the end of the kitchen is another door to the outside. Dave is stealing an extra bite of the dinner that Umilla made for us tonight. Now, we'll move into our entertainment room...

The other door from the living room leads to this room. The couch in the frame is actually a bed that we put a cushion behind. The rug on the floor is a new purchase described in a previous post. You can't see it, but just to the photographer's left is our new TV standing on a dresser. We can't watch it yet because we don't have a receiver for the satellite dish. To the left of Beth is a door that goes into the bathroom...

Actually, the first room is just the sink room. This is where we ended up fitting our dryer, which just vents out the window. We were going to dry some clothes last night, but there was a monkey convention right outside that window so we waited until today.

Now we come to the bathroom proper. This is accessed through a door that was right behind Dave in the last photo. There's not much to explain here except the giant water tank on the left. This is our "geezer." We use it to heat our water for showers. One of us (usually Beth) gets up a half an hour before we want to take a shower, turns the geezer on, and then gets back into bed. When we finally get up for real, we have nice hot water to clean ourselves with. Now the final room on the tour is our bedroom which is accessed through a door just in front of the geezer...

The bedroom is also pretty self-explanatory. The "bed" is actually two twin beds pushed together. We're looking into getting a big piece of foam to unify them a little bit. Dave's feet are pointing at the other door out of the bedroom which leads back to the TV/computer room. So this portion of the house is actually a circle.

Our house is actually part of a bigger building. It was originally a really big house built in the 1840s. Now it is divided into three units so we share the building with two other families. So far, we are really happy here. We still have a ways to go making it home, but we've got a good start.

Dave and Beth

Umilla Saves the Day

Monday is one of the busiest days of the week for both of us. After our day full of middle school students, we were reminded that we had a meeting with other teachers regarding the Christian programs in the middle school. By the time we completed all of these requirements, it was about 5:30 pm. During our walk up the hill to our house, we remembered that we had not asked our ayah, Umilla, to cook us anything for dinner tonight. We were very tired and not looking forward finding something to eat. Fortunately, when we got to the kitchen, we saw that there was a warm cheesy potato and onion tuna casserole in the oven.

Umilla had decided to cook us a nice dinner without even a request from us. Having an ayah is something we should be able to get used to.

Dave and Beth

Success in the Bazaar

After completing our first week at Woodstock, we decided to make another trip into the bazaar to get some more things for our house. Going shopping here is an all-day affair. One cannot simply pull into Wal-Mart and get all of the things that one needs. Instead, our strategy is designed to allow us to carry as little as possible for as short a distance as possible. We knew we needed to pick up our clothing from the tailor, but his shop is very close to our end of the bazaar. Instead, we walked halfway through and then worked our way back picking up things as we came. We started at the grocery store which is just below this clock tower.

We picked up a few essentials that we didn’t feel like calling in an order for. After our groceries, we stopped at the stationary store and bought some note cards. We also got a chess set to make our lives a little more interesting and intellectual. From there, we went to the fabric store. We already had bought fabric for our clothes, but wanted a new rug for our cold cement floors. Then it was on to the electronics shop. This is the same store where we bought our clothes dryer and our electric oven. We got a TV so that we have something to do with students when they come over to visit (thankfully, we didn’t need to carry this ourselves because they deliver). After our TV, it was on to the used bookstore. This shop is strategically placed halfway up the big hill at the end of the bazaar. It’s a nice break from the steady climb. Here we bought a Hindi-English dictionary and a board game called “Scotland Yard.” Below you can see Beth playing the next day with our friends, the Hatches.

One nice thing about this trip to the bazaar Saturday was the weather. It was a beautifully clear day, and we got a couple of nice pictures of the Mussoorie and the surrounding hills.

Later on Saturday night, we had a welcome back dinner and dance with the middle school students. This was a very fun time of fellowship with the teachers and the students together. The food was excellently catered by a local restaurant and the kids seemed to have a lot of fun. Below you can see Dave with our friend Jared who teaches science with us in the middle school. They made sure that all the students stayed in line. The next picture is of our middle school principal, Mrs. Mark.

As always, the monkeys made an appearance. The looked on ominously from the roof of the school building before dinner. Thankfully, there were only two of them and they were not going to jump on a group of 100+ larger primates.

In the end, the dinner and dance were a great success. The kids seemed to have a great deal of fun dancing. The even pulled both of us onto the dance floor a few times. The dancing was a little different than we are used to, but it was a really good time. Hopefully we will have enough energy for the week ahead.

We miss you all and look forward to hearing from you all soon.

Dave and Beth

First Days of School

As expected, our posts are coming a little less often now that the school year has started. The kids have all arrived at Woodstock, and we are now in full swing. We are in charge of an advisory group of ten sixth graders (you can see their picture below and get an understanding of how Dave towers over them). This is a big transition year for any student and especially for the students that are new to the school. One of our duties is to help get kids organized and to help them understand the procedures here. That has proven a little bit difficult since we barely no what's going on ourselves. Today, the big event was the selection of student clubs. Every Tuesday, the middle school students have the chance to participate in clubs after school. These range from a middle school newspaper, to a board game club, to a calligraphy club. Beth has decided to sponsor an art club this year, and Dave is running a global affairs club. Both of our offerings filled up fairly quickly.


As far as teaching goes, we are both having a lot of fun. Beth has been enjoying the new challenges that come with being an English teacher, and Dave is enjoying the new challenges that come with being a middle school teacher. Overall, though, things are going great and we are really enjoying getting to know our students. Just to give you an idea of the kind of discipline problems that we have to deal with here, we've included an example of the graffiti that Beth found on her art room table today. Not quite as profanity-laced as our classrooms in Chicago.


Dave and Beth

Final Preparations

Tomorrow is the big day. We've been doing the final preparations on our rooms and getting things ready for the first day of classes. We thought we'd share a few photographs of our classrooms as we head into school tomorrow. First is Beth's room on the south side of the school. In the first picture, you can see the wonderful bulletin boards that she has in place. The one on the far right is for the Olympic reading competition that she and the other English teacher have devised. The second picture shows the rest of Beth's room. Hanging in the center of the room is a brand new projector that Beth will have access to for Power Point presentations and the like.

Dave's classroom is shown below. In the first picture, you can see the desk where all of Dave's magical lesson planning will happen. The globe in the left of the picture is a new one that the previous social studies teacher ordered before she left. Perhaps the best part about it is that it lights up at the flick of a switch. This will be very handy for getting into some in-depth geographical questions with the students. The photo to the right shows the rest of Dave's classroom. As you can see, his bulletin boards are not nearly as creative as Beth's. He has simply placed maps all over the walls. It is also important to note the rack for a projector sticking out of Dave's ceiling. If you look closely, you will see that there is not projector there. Dave's was not one of the chosen rooms to get a projector this year. Hopefully, Beth will be generous in sharing her room with the social studies classes.

After a long day of preparation, we came home to a nice warm pizza that was freshly baked by Umilla, our ayah. Someone along the way taught her a number of western recipes. So far, she has made us lasagna, quiche, and pizza and they have all been excellent. We're now hoping that we'll be able to get to bed early so that we'll have plenty of energy for our middle schoolers tomorrow.

Dave and Beth