By reaching out to eager, young students in Mumbai and Bangalore, India, ten students strived to make a difference during their summers through a service-based learning trip, the Niswarth and Teach for India organizations. These students presented their experiences with the program in Cochran Chapel, this past Friday. Rajesh Mundra, Instructor in Biology, coordinates the yearly trip to Mumbai, India. During their time abroad, Mundra works with students through the Teach for India organization, which brings university graduates to teach in urban schools. The student participants this year were Hannah Beinecke ’12, Raquel Gordon ’12, Dylan Gully ’12, Supriya Jain ’12, Matthew Lloyd Thomas ’12, John O’Brien ’12, Madeline Silva ’13, Brandon Wong ’12, Julianna Wessels ’12 and Dennis Zhou ’12. This year, five Andover teachers also attended the trip, Seth Bardo, Instructor in English, Anne Ferguson, Senior Associate Director of College Counseling, Peter Drench, Instructor of Chair of the History Department, Therese Zemlin, Instructor in Art and Peter Merrill, Instructor in German. The group helped Teach for India administers diagnostic tests to children in the Mumbai school systems. They accompanied teaching fellows into the Dharavi slum so that they could meet personally with every student and their respective families. The students were inspired by the teaching fellows’ passion and the children’s drive to learn. “[The teaching fellows] were driving change in schools. They were young, they were energetic and they were very passionate about what they were doing for their kids,” said Wong. Several of the students also mentioned the trip to Dharavi, one of Asia’s largest slums, as the most compelling moment of the trip. O’Brien recalled his shock upon entering a factory there, where an impoverished man stirred melted plastic into molds under dangerous conditions. “[A boy I met] works in an unventilated room for 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, without any safety equipment, inhaling toxic gases for a mere 200 rupees a day… how can we talk about educating the masses when men who only wish to feed their families spend ten years working in an environment where they can barely breathe?” said O’Brien. Phillips Academy students also hosted a conference for various Indian student groups to discuss education reform. Beinecke worked with students from the Akanksha Foundation to create a project that would bring education awareness to other Indian communities. “Parents would often send their children to get a job rather than go to school. We wanted to spread the message that if they went to school, later they could get a better job and make better lives for themselves,” said Beinecke. At the end of the second week, the students flew to Bangalore and visited other education-reform organizations, including the Agastya Foundation, which aims to create more hands-on, affordable Indian education. Upon returning to the United States, the students each worked on a summer project about education in India. Most of them wrote research papers discussing topics ranging from Indian education reform to electronics recycling. Gordon painted a portrait of a woman holding an idol of Ganesh, an Indian God. She hoped to convey the piety with which many of the Indian students and their families lived. “We asked [a family], ‘How do you deal with life here?’ The father said, ‘We are good people and we believe in… God and we have faith that he sees that we are good people.’ That kind of spiritual strength really spoke to me,” said Gordon. Although all the students were sad to leave Mumbai, they felt that their trip to India had motivated them to create change in their own community and beyond. “Right now, I’m not in India, I’m in Andover, Massachusetts. I can find my own ways to help my own community as I am right now,” said Wessels. Mundra said the enthusiasm of the students and various partners in India were reasons for Niswarth’s success. In particular, he greatly valued the generosity of the Cathedral School and The American School of Bombay, which allowed the students to sleep in their dance studio. “Niswarth can perhaps serve as a model for future service-learning programs around the world, and possibly be expanded to South Africa, China and New Orleans,” said Mundra. According to Mundra, Niswarth will hopefully continue next summer, and he seeking funding, perhaps an Abbot Grant, so the program can offer financial aid.
