Book Trip

Grace and I had the good job of going to Visakhapatnam a few days ago and buying a huge pile of books for the school library (which didn't really exist until we bought the books). We went to one of the best book stores in the state, "Pages." When we showed up we spoke to an employee about what we were doing and they assigned two salespeople to help us. But as the pile of books we were buying grew and grew eventually the manager of the store started helping us. The salespeople chased us around the store with plastic chairs for us to sit on when we wanted to browse a section and cups of coffee for free. We were there, just selecting books, for two hours.

The money for the books was given to us through the generous donations of two families in Iowa City who are aware of what we're doing here. We wanted it to stretch as far as it possibly could (I was keeping careful track of our running cost on a notepad and a calculator). For this reason we bought only books which are printed by Indian companies. The books they publish are no different from books published in the UK or America, except maybe for the covers, but they cost 10% or 20% of the price of those books. This let us buy a huge number of books for the money we had (it took them a half hour to ring them all up). The manager gave us a 10% discout too, which we used to add to the pile.

We were looking for books for three or so levels:
1) Picture books for the really young kids.
2) Science type books for kids in the middle
3) Simplified classics for older kids

We were worried about the first two categories because we believed color illustrations would be really expensive, but that wasn't the case at all. We bought tons of full color fairy tale type books for the kids, each one around 30 rupees (less than a dollar a piece!). For science type books we were looking for Eyewitness type books, the kind with the majority of the pages taken up by color photographs and then little facts scattered around the page with a big paragraph or explanatory text in the corner. These books were meant to be a lure for the kids, to get them so they learned to enjoy reading. We picked beautiful books full of huge photos about all sorts of topics - tanks, railroads, volcanoes, cultures of the world, monsters, human body, cats, the earth, space, etc. Our goal was the kids who had no patience for stories would start with these books and then get comfortable with reading.

The value placed on fiction here is... different from in the West. At least, it is in the region we're in. Most people don't even refer to fiction by the name "fiction." Instead they call them "Storybooks" which seems a bit derogatory to me. The value of reading fiction is seen mostly in terms of language practice, not for the actual joy of the story or the wider life lessons that can be learned from a book. I think in the west we think of reading, at least in Iowa City, as extremely important for becoming a good person. English class is where kids grapple with things like love, loyalty, death, etc, stuff that isn't really gone into during physics or chemistry. That idea is completely foreign here I think. People don't even seem to comprehend it when I explain it. Example:

Matt: It seems like people don't realize that there's more to reading fiction than just learning vocabulary.
Indian: Yes, they don't realize that you also learn sentence structure, how to present ideas...

One time I was really blunt about it with a guy here whom I talk to a lot. It went something like this:

Matt: I mean, in the west, schools really put an emphasis on reading. It's seen as helping make you into a better person.
My Man: Well, we're a developing nation. In the west people get jobs like being journalists and lawyers, but here we need engineers and science minded people. Our schools need to focus on teaching math and science. If you went to a bunch of students in the classroom and asked who they thought is the smartest in the room, they'll point to the strongest math student. That's what smart means to them.

Again, the attitude is just that here people don't have the luxury to read for "pleasure."

But that's not everyone. The manager of the bookstore, who helped us select our books, called himself an ambassador of books and made it sound like a lonely job. And the head english teacher, who we think is great, actually started crying when we showed her the books we bought. Her mother worked for Oxford University Press and, as she said, "brought home every scrap of paper with writing on it she could find." She was so happy for the books. She said kids here don't appreciate books and the reason is they don't understand the value of fiction is because they've never really experienced it, never had access to books like these. The english teacher even said most of them had never seen a book, outside of their textbooks. (Which are not like textbooks in the states. They have only paper covers, and they're printed on cheap thin paper, almost newsprint paper. They only have a few black and white drawings, no pictures.) Basically, as far as fiction, they don't know what they're missing. The english teacher also told us that when she was in 7th class (about 9 years old) her mother bought her an Oxford English Dictionary as her birthday gift and said, "Now, you will never have to ask me what a word means again," and she actually still has her dictionary.

Well, kids are not going to stay in the dark about fiction anymore. We make a formal presentation of the books to the school on Wednesday and the head English teacher has created a library period so that, for an hour a day, the kids will go and read from these books.