Vandana did the first camp at a village library without me, just before I got back from Kerala, but the day after I returned, it was on me to run a two-day arts camp in Shahpur. Almost sixty kids showed up, ranging from five two twenty-five years old. One of our team members, Amar Singh, showed up to the center with a pickup truck filled to the brim with children from his village.
We started the day with songs, games, and introductions, then split the kids into two grups: big kids and little kids. Activities for the day included origami, paper hats, and thumb printing art. That may not seem like much, but when you only have four pairs of scissors, one stamp pad, and plenty of chaos to go around, activities take a long while. Thanks to the adaptability of the Shahpur team as well as the enthusiastic dramatic stylings of Manju, the day was a great success. We fed them all samosas and bananas before sending them all home in the afternoon, charging the big kids with safely escorting the little kids back home again.
The second day was less of a success. We had only about thirty kids, and a lot of flopped activities. Manju was late, so I had to pull warm-up activities out of thin air, which is good fun when you don't speak a language fluently. We did play the human knot game, and the little kids did far better at that than the big ones. We were planning to make sock puppets (I made a pretty awesome puppet the night before), but only two people of the thirty brought socks, so we grabbed some paper and cut out paper snowflakes. The little kids made paper hats again too. Then we planned to do an acting workshop led by Manju, but they said they weren't interested in acting. We tried charades, but they didn't like that either. In an act of desperation, I had them all stand up and taught them the Macarena. When it doubt, do the Macarena.
We wound up having the older kids read books together in groups, and then summarize them at the end of the afternoon for everyone while the little kids used up every last scrap of waste paper in the knowledge center cutting out paper snowflakes.
On that Sunday, the arts camp came to the Khaniara knowledge center, where I taught English last fall. This time, I had Vandana with me and we settled on just a single-day camp. Again, we had about fifty kids, but this time, it was half little ones and half big kids. We also had some guests from a local handicraft NGO coming to teach origami to the kids. It turned out that one of their interns was Shweta, my bus buddy from the trip up from Delhi. This time, we planned ahead and brought the music for the Macarena. The little kids thought it was hilarious. However, the name 'Macarena,' sounds a lot like the beginning of the Hindi equivalent of “Your mama...” insults. We couldn't have anticipated that that song would set the little kids on throwing insults around like that all morning after hearing the song. Wups.
We did paper hats, snowflakes, thumb printing, and origami again. I spent most of my time with the little kids, as they were very high-maintenance. I wound up making 25 origami fish, step by step, because none of them wanted to try to learn how to fold them themselves. After seemingly never-ending cries of, “Didi! Didi! Do it for me!” with half-folded origami fish thrust into my face from all angles, I decided that I never want to become an early elementary school teacher. No thank you. I now have so much more respect for the people who are.
The third arts camp was to be in our village library in Chola, one of the highest villages in the district. As a crow flies, Chola is pretty near to Dharmshala, but it is about an hour climb straight up the mountain from the nearest road. With thunder rumbling in the clouds above, Vandana, Ritu, and I set off up the mountain for Chola. The path was an unending series of makeshift stairs cobbled together with stones. We had been climbing for about half an hour when it began to drip. That drip rapidly became a downpour. With only two umbrellas between the three of us, we were rapidly getting wet, all of our origami paper with us.
When the wind, rain, and lightning began to pick up even more, clouds surging around us, we ducked under the awning of a house beside the path, which belonged to one of the members of our Chola youth group. We sat there with another old lady, who had also ducked out of the rain with us, waiting out the storm. Soon, the lady of the house and arrived. Recognizing Ritu and Vandana, she invited us to sit inside to stay dry and served us some chai while we waited. Meanwhile, we contacted our village librarian up in Chola, who told us to go back as. The children weren't going to come in all of this rain.
Eventually, the rain did stop and we headed carefully back down the slippery, rocky path. The arts camp didn't happen, but we did manage to stop at the best little momo (Tibetan dumpling) shop in Dharmshal before all heading our separate ways and getting on with our work for the day.
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