The Sambhali Charitable Trust

I’ve been having a wonderful time in India so far, but it’s really just been sightseeing. I was hoping to spend some more time in one place, doing something other than just observation, at least for some of the trip.

So I contacted the Sambhali Charitable Trust, an organization providing education and empowerment to women and girls, with the aim of making them self-sufficient earners rather than dependent on family members.

I emailed the director to ask about doing a short unit, even though they normally have a 2 month volunteer period. N.B., look for volunteer opportunities first and book tickets after. Doing it in the other order closes doors.

So, having no experience teaching a theater camp on my own, and all my experience of co-teaching probably at least 10 years in the past, I set out to teach a theater workshop of some kind to people who have no experience of acting being an accessible and acceptable thing to do, who don’t speak the same language as me. Easy peasy.

The first week was an experience in bafflement for everyone involved: translators who didn’t translate and then took an uber away from the center in the middle of the afternoon, the women not knowing what acting is, me not know what time anything was happening, other people not knowing what I was teaching, good stuff.

Then, I don’t know if it was having enough time to actually plan, or getting used to things, or having my soul catch up to my body after all that air travel, but everything just kind of clicked. The women, at least some of them, seem to be enjoying the plays I wrote, and the ones who maybe aren’t are good sports about it. I’ve totally given up on the idea of having the children do a play and am just teaching them the lyrics to Yellow Submarine. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and they’re having a lot of fun with it.

Cross language teaching is definitely not easy; a lot of the kind of stuff I would do with English speakers, like explaining why we’re doing something, is just gone. I rely a lot more on the Indian educational standard of copying lines off the board than I’d like. But it’s been much more doable without a translator than I would have believed two weeks ago.

And some of that is that the students, adults and children, are honestly great. They’re in this center because they want to be, even if they’re not doing theater because they want to be, and that helps. They don’t always want to try new things, but nobody throws tantrums about it.

Honestly, the biggest thing holding me back was my own anxiety about not being able to deliver an appropriate product at the end. I was the only one worrying about that (at least in the class–probably I should be providing something to the trust!), and once I had something that would create a final project yet didn’t impose impossible expectations, everything kind of fell into place. No class because the power is out? No problem. I’m the only one who ever thought there was.