Abby Hunt is from Gloucestershire, UK. She volunteered with Lattitude Global Volunteering in 2006 as an English Teacher at a small rural school for underprivileged children in Northern India. On her return, she got her degree in English Literature and Drama at the University of East Anglia.
Abby now works for Lattitude Global Volunteering, encouraging more young people to volunteer overseas and have a fantastic experience like she did.
Highlights: The overall highlight of my volunteer experience was living with my host family. They lived in rooms in the school building, underneath the classrooms, and we also had a room there, opposite the boarders' dormitory.
We would eat our meals with the family, sitting down at the end of the day to supper where we would talk about what was happening at the school and they’d ask us about our lives back home in the UK and Germany. We’d share funny stories and laugh a lot! In the holidays they took us to festivals with them and to meet their extended family.
They taught us how to make local food specialties like ‘Momos’ and had beautiful Indian outfits made especially for us. When I came to leave them, 5 months later, it felt like I was leaving my own family, we had grown so close. I was lucky enough to revisit them 3 years after my volunteer placement and am still in contact with them today.
One specific highlight of my placement was one morning when we all (the family, boarders and me and my volunteer partner) got up really early, before sunrise, and trekked up a the biggest hill in the village where we sat and watched the sunrise and the mountains of the Himalayas and Kanchenjunga appear through the clouds and below us the plains of Siliguri stretching out for miles. It was an incredible sight, far away from anything you’d typically imagine in India, so peaceful and quiet and surreal. It was so beautiful and I felt incredibly lucky to be sitting there, watching all that, fully integrated as part of the family around me, creating memories I will never forget.
Morning: Every morning we, my volunteer partner Laura and I, were woken at 5 am by the boarding children bringing us a cup of chai before they began their early morning ‘studying’. We would then go back to sleep until it was time to get up, have a shower (well, tap and bucket wash!) have breakfast and start the school day.
In the mornings I usually taught the younger classes, from Nursery and Kindergarten (3 – 5-year-olds) up to Class 2 (7-year-olds). Usually, Laura and I taught our classes separately but with Nursery and Kindergarten we joined forces, having learned early on not to be deceived by their innocent faces!
We would sometimes take them outside into the ‘playground’ (a small patch of dusty brown earth outside the back of the school building) and try to play games with them but which usually ended up with them just running around and screaming! Still, the exercise and free time were good for them, even if they didn’t learn very much!
Afternoon:In the afternoons I normally had my older classes where I was teaching English, through various means, to different age groups. In my Class 10 (where there were only 3 students!) we spent a few lessons making puppets and rehearsing the story of ‘The Three Little Pigs’ which we then performed to the school using a makeshift puppet theatre out of a school bench and a sheet! Not only was it great fun, it was a fantastic way to get them practicing their spoken English and improve their confidence in speaking.
With all my other classes I did a lot of creative work, like singing, poetry, drama and arts and crafts. It was a great way to encourage different forms of learning and to improve their spoken and written English. With my Class 3, I spent some time teaching them Clock Time. For this we made clocks with paper plates and split pins and practiced asking each other the time. Then one session, I took them into the playground and we formed a ‘Human Clock’ where they had to work together to move the ‘hands’ to the correct positions. It was a lot of fun and I think improved their learning!
Evening: The first part of our evenings was usually spent leading after school clubs. I taught the recorder on Tuesday’s after school. Before I left, my local music shop donated 6 recorders to the school which I bought out with me and presented to the school much to everyone’s delight. Teaching the recorder was quite a challenge with 6 extremely enthusiastic and excited children all blowing at once, and it felt like a great accomplishment when, at the end of term, they were able to play ‘Hot Cross Buns’ at the school show!
After our extra-curricular activities were over we would take a walk in the evenings with the 9 boarding children through the village where we would often be invited in to have chai with the villagers or would play a game of ‘dice’ that was going on. Sometimes we’d walk to the top of the village, where we could meet the Darjeeling Toy Train on its way back from Darjeeling to Siliguri and hop on it, to ride back down the mountain to the school and jump off right outside the school gate! (It is a very slow moving train!)