School in Nepal

I watch as this child gets beaten with a hard stick. The teacher has a look of distain on his dark face as he uses all of his might to slam the stick onto the little boy’s back. The children run to the back of the room and huddle together in fear they will be next. My heart sinks as I watch this happen. The little boy who was the most enthusiastic of all the students in my last class begins to tear up as he tried not to let out yelps from the beating. My hand is covering my mouth in shock. I run to the headmasters office where the two female teachers who I had just finished eating lunch with are sitting with the headmaster. With little understanding of English, Ambika tries to understand my questions. Do teachers beat students often? Is this legal in Nepal? Do you do this? Why is this happening? They begin to laugh and so does the headmaster as soon as Ambika translates one of my questions.

The English teacher walks into the office and asks me, “Did I upset you?” I tell him I have never in my life witnessed a teacher beat a student. He explains to me that is what all Nepalis teachers do here to provide punishment and consequence to the students when they misbehave. “Why was he beaten?” I demand and in response to my question he says, “Well, he was peeping into the window of the class I was teaching and it was bothersome.” I was infused with anger trying to tell myself to stay cool. I could have easily have thrown a tandrum at that point but I wanted to get at the deeper reasoning behind this. “And why was this student not sitting down in another classroom while classes were going on?”

“His teacher is absent for the day.”

This child was peeping into this teacher’s classroom because he wanted to learn having no teacher for the day and receives a beating in front of all of his classmates. As the conversation was going on without the headmaster having any understanding of our english, many students hovered around the headmaster’s door watching us speak.

“What alternatives do you suggest? You are from a literate country. Our students live here in Nepal. They are backwards, rural and poor. I will listen to you.”
I became even more frustrated that he was using words like backwards and poor after I politely suggested a few days earlier he not use these words around the students. It was obvious now why the students in class are so shy and afraid to speak. During the first few days of teaching them, they either looked directly down to the floor or cover their mouths with their hands when they whisper an answer I ask them.
“It’s called encouragement.” I said to him. These mixed feelings of hate and understanding captured my mind when talking with him. He was most likely beaten himself and was actually taught and trained how to safely beat a student when getting his teacher’s certificate. I suggested he have the student write about the situation and why the student did what he did while staying late after school. “I shall do this next time.” The greater problem is the lack of understanding between me and the people here. Without a shared language it has been extremely difficult to explain things here.

Yesterday I spent three hours after school with the beautiful silent girl whose finger was obviously very infected. I learned from her older sister she cut it while working with a shear in the fields. Two pigtails of luscious dark hair, sandals too big for her feet and a pleated uniform skirt that was held up from falling down with her hands at all times. I followed her to the market after school and brought her to the “doctor.” The doctor of this place is an old man who smokes cigarettes and hands out cough medicine to people who most likely have lung cancer (I learned this the other day after taking our grandmother who has been suffering from extremely severe coughing). With 20 people watching through the doors at this little girl, he took a needle which he didn’t even clean and brought it to her thumb. I held my breath but it was too late to take her away to treat her myself. He directed the needle into her thumb and she cried in anguish. It was gushing pus and he was holdin her down. I put my hand in front of her face and tried to get her to look at the photos on my camera. I felt sick. Crying and crying the little girl probably hated me at this point she slowly stopped at the “doctor” wrapped her thumb up in gauze. With no English I still wanted to tell her parents they must wash it every night and keep it from getting dirty so we spend an hour walking to her village. The grandparents come in from the nearby field and the grandfather almost falls to the ground from an asthma attack. It literally takes him until the time I leave their home for his breath to be normal. The mother and father bring me hot lemon tea and in translation I tell them the importance of how to care for their daughter’s infected thumb. Upon leaving he puts a precious seed in my hand with a hold for a necklace. In translation through one of the girl’s sisters, I learn it is given to a person in the hopes they will return and will have safe protection.

Today while sitting in that headmasters house, I saw her peeping through the window and her finger, black.