Colby students teach at school for poor

from The Kennebec Journal

By COLIN HICKEY

WATERVILLE -- Jordan Levinson left her New York City home three years ago to study anthropology at Colby College.

Last month she took a much longer trip in pursuit of education: She left her Colby College dorm for Kalimpong, India -- more than 7,000 miles away -- for what turned out to be an extraordinary intercultural lesson.

Levinson was one of 27 students who spent nearly three weeks at Gandhi Ashram, a K-8 school for about 250 impoverished Indians tucked in the Himalayan region between Nepal and Bhutan.

During that time they worked as teachers, but the truth is they learned far more than they taught, and came away from the experience with an appreciation for another culture that a textbook could never duplicate.

"Many of us have traveled before," Levinson said. "This (trip) sort of reinforced that desire to travel and connect with other people in other parts of the world."

Colby music professor Steven Nuss, one of the organizers of the trip, said establishing that connection, of going beyond the Mayflower Hill campus to build bridges with other communities, both near and far, has become a core objective at Colby led by the college's Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs and Civic Engagement.

Nuss is certain the bridge between Colby and Gandhi Ashram is of sturdy construction.

"We are all left, I think, with an urge to keep a focus on India," he said. "I'm struck by how none of the students I've talked to since we returned has been able to just go back to their lives."

Colby students did more than interact with people on the other side of the world. They also got a glimpse into a segment of society they seldom encounter: people who live at a subsistence level, most without running water or electric power.

The students at Gandhi Ashram, Nuss said, were chosen based on their poverty -- the poorer their families, the more likely they would gain enrollment. The school, established by a Catholic priest from Canada, was an effort to give such children an opportunity to escape poverty through education.

Colby students understood the nature of the school before they arrived. Yet once they got to know the schoolchildren and their families, they discovered that poverty did not define the people of the Kalimpong area.

"They were very poor," Colby senior Joel Biron said, "but at the same time, there was a lot of dignity."

Nuss said students learned that poverty does not describe a person in full, that a person may be poor monetarily, but rich in community.

"It had a totally different feel in this community," Nuss said of poverty, "although from our standpoint, they were desperately poor."

Poverty in one sense is a lack of opportunity. That is the case for most of the impoverished in India, especially when it comes to school. Students must achieve certain scores on standardized tests in order to pursue a higher education.

For the children of subsistence farmers, the odds of achieving such scores are minimal.

But not at Gandhi Ashram, a school that equips every student with a violin and makes music a fundamental part of the curriculum.

Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is one of the many media outlets that have visited the school to report on the remarkable nature of its mission -- the PBS report aired Aug. 19, 2005.

The late Rev. Thomas Edward McGuire, founder of Gandhi Ashram, knew music was an integral part of the local culture and seized on that to establish a connection, as well as a means of making his students stand apart from other schoolchildren.

PBS noted that 31 students have gone on to earn scholarships to attend "mainstream" schools to further their education. McGuire told PBS that his students face a social challenge fitting in at these schools, but that their violins help them, giving them confidence that they can succeed.

The Colby contingent, about a third of them music majors, felt at home in Gandhi Ashram's musical environment. The violins in this respect helped break down barriers.

Breaking down barriers is an integral part, if not a byproduct, of the civic engagement that Colby encourages. Related to that is an emphasis on interdisciplinary learning. Nuss partnered with English professor Anindyo Roy for the Gandhi Ashram project, which was open to Colby students in all disciplines.

Students received academic credit for their time in Kalimpong, but more importantly, Nuss said, they gained a greater appreciation for the struggles of fellow human beings, as well as a realization that they have the power to make a difference in the lives of those people.

"It forces you, when you get back," he said, "to ask yourself what you should do to deal with issues of poverty here."