Saturday is a half-day of schooling at St. Xavier’s, and we have an open lab for students to work on their projects. Not surprisingly, the first few in are among those who have really grasped the concept. Video and still cameras fly out of the lab, only to return at noon. The teaching team spends time boning up on the editing program that will be used. Because St. Xavier’s lab is PC-based and we can’t use our usual Mac-based editing programs we needed to learn the editing program. It’s not really much of a problem because virtually all these simpler editing programs are similar; the only difference being where the commands are located.
Interestingly, when students come to the lab they gravitate toward Miriam Thorn. She plans to be a teacher, and the students seem to realize they’ll find a natural leader in her.
After lunch, four of us decided to head for the ancient market in the old Walled City part of Ahmedabad. We arranged a motorized rickshaw ride for the trip. Four of us crammed into the back seat of what is nothing more than a golf cart with a body on it. Miriam, the smallest of us all, sat on Ashley’s lap while Carole took the middle, sort of half-standing and half-sitting, while I was busting out the left side. On the trip, Ashley held a video camera out the side, capturing the chaos of Ahmedabad traffic while I used a still camera to capture some images along the way. We had hoped for several sights, and, frankly, we saw them all. Most of all, we saw the kind of confusion and massive crowds that are the stereotype of the nation with the world’s second largest population.
I’ll write about some of the specifics of our sightseeing in a few future posts, but I’d be remiss without talking about the shopping. At one point as we walked down the street, Ashley said, “I’m in sensory overload.” I felt the same way. We were inundated with smells, sounds, touches, and sights. The market had shop or stall after shop or stall with just about everything one might want. Buddhas, dishes, padlocks, children’s toys, kites, chairs, women’s underwear, baskets, blankets, scarves, saris, (Ahmedabad is India’s textile center), food, spices, whatever one might want. And there were usually many stalls or shops devoted to whatever you might want. The photos are just two of more than 200 I snapped of traffic and the market. They give you a hint, and only a hint, of the variety we found. They cannot come close to showing the richness and diversity of the market.
And the only things we bought were 15 kites, costing a total of 45 rupees -- just a smidgen less than $1 American.
It was yet another wondrous day. And it ended with our reconvening with the rest of the team to talk about plans for next year and possible futures for this program, which has – in my view anyway – been incredibly fruitful already for students at both colleges as well as we faculty fortunate enough to be part of it. Quite tiring since, despite my talking about our breaks, involves a lot of work with planning every night (my night, for example, will be grading papers; probably not everyone’s idea of a hot Saturday night on the road) and contact with students from nine in the morning until past 4 each afternoon.
No comments:
Post a Comment