Fire

Children here seem to have an incredible ability to adjust to new situations. Someone suddenly disappears from their life and they accept it with occasionally a few tears, then smile bravely and get on with life. They change schools, someone they know dies, they move in with their uncle or grandparents, they get sick, but still they continue to laugh and play, make new friends and teach us adults how to live. Life in India is fluid. Situations and events are completely beyond your control and leave little space for planning and predicting. Whereas in the west most pursue a secure and predictable life, where things can be neatly organised and tomorrow holds no surprises, in India the size of the population and nature of life leaves little space for this. So, you're left with little choice but to let go. Abandon your resistance and just enjoy the ride, and although it can be emotionally exhausting, frustrating and unnerving, you generally feel very much alive and have no trouble sleeping when night comes.

One afternoon last week, I was walking down to the basketball courts when I saw people running around with sticks and shouting about a fire. I ran to the side of our building and saw small fires burning on the slope next to our learning centre. Some of the students had climbed up there and were putting the fires out by hitting the flames with branches. Bobby, the accountant and one of the teachers were directing from below and co-ordinating the troops. The fire had spread from a field above us where they had been harvesting their wheat that day and just below where it was spreading was our wood store where the carpenters work. If one thing caught fire, we would be likely to lose thousands of rupees worth of wood. It has been reaching temperatures of 40 degrees recently and everything has become very dry too. After a lot of effort on the part of the kids and plenty of coughing and spluttering, they managed to get it under control.

We went down and started playing basketball and were soon joined by the most notorious class at PYDS, who had been in my bad books all week because of their unhelpful attitude and general misbehaving. I decided it would be good to have it out on the basketball court and we got stuck into a match. As I walked back up, sweating and exhausted I noticed some smoke coming from the wood store. I ran towards it and saw a burning cloth on top of a big pile of wood and quickly tried to pull it off and stamp it out. After this was under control I noticed that the fire was continuing to spread on the slope and was on its way towards us again. I shouted down to the naughty class and told them to come and help. Most of them came running with sticks and buckets and clambered up the slope to get to the fire. At one stage it was raging through a bush and was nearly twice the height of one of our students, but he managed to put it out single-handedly. Some were running around passing buckets while others were on the frontline beating it down with sticks, and within half an hour we had managed to reduce it to a pile of smoldering ashes.