I don’t think that I could have landed in a better place to volunteer than the Manjushri Di-Chen Learning Center. This monastery was built to specifically address the poverty and lack of education in Nepal; it’s nearly completely run on donations and the donations are used to sponsor more children as well as further develop the monastery with more appropriate classroom and dorm facilities for the children living and studying there. The children come from the poorest families around Nepal – areas where they live miles from the nearest school and may never have previously attended school. Once they are accepted into the Learning Center they are given a formal education that consists of: Tibetan Buddhism classes, Tibetan language, mathematics, English, and a couple of other basic courses. Although some of the younger children have just left their families and were dropped into this new environment they had a really lovely and inspiring optimism.

The boys may live at the monastery throughout all of their schooling (they go home for two months every year) and if they choose to go onto University, the monastery also pays for that tuition through donations and sponsorships. I thought it was really interesting that they aren’t required to stay with the monk life-style once they leave the monastery; many monks live most of their lives learning and studying at the monastery but revert back into the householder life-style once they graduate while others choose to continue the life-style and religious practices.

My monastery is really receptive to native English speaking volunteers – when no volunteers are present the English course are taught by a non-native…so it’s a definite plus to have volunteers teach the eight different levels of English language courses. There are roughly 40 boys living at the monastery right now and I taught all eight levels nearly every day (the Indian schooling system seems to skip the number seven and thus, so does the monastery so there are no level sevens, but there is a KG class) with between three and thirteen monks in each class. Children may stay in their given level for several years so it is not like the US system where you progress annually to a new grade-level; several of my level eight monks were preparing to enter University.

I shadowed Louise for the first week or so at the monastery and we co-taught the classes. She warned me right off about the naughty kindergartners – these guys were the youngest of the bunch and had the least command of English. Once Louise left, I really worked hard on memorizing the most important of my Nepali verbs and phrases so that they would stop ignoring me throughout anything but Dr. Seuss stories; the ones that came in handy the most were: sit down, please start writing/reading, repeat me, sit down, don’t do that, stop doing that, stop touching each other, sit down, please sit down, sit down (said in a harsher voice with emphatic hand gestures), STOP DOING THAT…and then time-out.

My first attempt at time-out actually yielded much different results than I anticipated. The KG class is huge and wrangling thirteen boys who speak very little English is even harder than you may be imagining right now – and I am really good with kids…like seriously patient and skilled at coaxing them into good behavior. These guys, though! They frustrated me to the max. One of the little boys would not stop headbutting/slapping/licking/nudging/rubbing/pestering the others as we all sat on the floor reading Are You My Mother by P.D. Eastman. I used several of my key phrases. I emphatically gestured to him that trouble was near. More key phrases. He still didn’t stop. After a point he had called me on the threats and I had to follow through or lose my credibility so I made him step away from the group (we were all gathered on a blanket on the lawn for story-time) and told him to stand in time-out for three minutes. To my surprise he then meanders about 15 feet away with his back to us,  nonchalantly grabs his ear-lobes and begins doing full squats. I don’t know if it was my  horrified amazement but one of the KGers with better English tells me “Miss, it’s ok Miss, ramro chaa” which means “it’s good.” I watched him for about 45 seconds and then couldn’t take it any longer and let him come back to the blanket.

Since that point Louise actually sent me an Indian news story about a little girl who died of dehydration/heat exhaustion because her teacher made her stand outside in the 100+ degree weather. I thought that this was a localized form of punishment at the monastery but apparently it is pretty prevalent throughout this region. After that time out I was very careful to give the KGers sitting time-outs when they misbehaved!

Each of the classes really had their own distinct group personality. The KGers always flagged me down between classes to check my pocket schedule and find out if they had class – they loved English even though they were naughty as hell. Class I and II were very studious and worked hard – they also loved English.  Class III was completely unmotivated – they had to stand and greet me with a “Good Morning, Miss” as a part of the monastery etiquette, but that is often as far as the enthusiasm went. Class IV  was easy to motivate because of a love of “Hang-man” – they were rewarded with five minutes of the game at the end of productive classes. The older boys though were really hit and miss – Class VI never wanted to participate in class and often asked me if they could use it as an independent study. Class VIII was similar but one of the monks, Lucky, was extremely motivated and sought me out at every opportunity to practice his English. He has really high hopes of getting into a University in Varanasi, India this summer so he would bring me long essays, letters, and stories to check for grammar. I worked with him a lot and really feel like I invested the most time and effort into his education -it really does help a lot when the students are interested and motivated!