- In India monkeys are kind of like raccoons (super annoying).. and if one gets in your house you call the monkey man who brings an ape to your home. Monkeys are afraid of apes so they run away. Who knew!?!?! I didn’t. The ape is the monkey man’s pet.
-We made the morning news due to meeting with the Deputy Chief Minister of Delhi yesterday. They had our picture, which was kind of cool. It was all in Hindi though so I couldn’t tell you what it said.
- India (to me) seems by far the most tolerant society I have encountered. I’m not saying its perfect, BUT everything is emphasized on peace and part of that means accepting people of different religions. I am in New Delhi though which is a REALLY large city, so I don’t know how well this idea of peace translates to the caste system and rural India.
-We literally saw a building on fire from our bus. I’m talking several feet high FLAMES!!!!! And nobody on the street seemed to care. Nobody stopped to take pictures of it or really acknowledge it at all. A few blocks later through Delhi traffic we see the fire truck. Its stuck in traffic... no one is pulling over for it.. so it just kind of sits there. In traffic.
Otherwise today was super informative about the Indian education policy and teacher practice. We spent the morning at an elementary teacher training and learning about the new happiness curriculum (I hope to write more about that later). Then we went to the Fulbright House in Delhi, where we heard more about the education system from a Indian education researcher who spent a year at Brigham Young University. (She’s not the first person in education we’ve met here who went to BYU in America for a year). Then we hoped over to the India Gate, which is a WWI memorial of the Indians who died during the war.
ALSO, its worth mentioning that the Fulbright program here in India is the OLDEST partnership in the whole network of about 70 years. Teacher exchanges with over 350 Indian teachers have been sent to America to learn about our education system and vis-versa. “The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and is designed to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries.” Its basically a program to promote peace around the world after what happened during the World Wars. It is not surprising that India jumped on board with this as they shared with us today “we teach peace to bring peace.” Peace is very important to India.
Here’s a quick video of the day.... its little over a minute long.
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