The Barefoot College in Tilonia

Day ??? in India

I stayed for a few days at the Barefoot College in Tilonia. The moment my class got out of our tour bus, which was incongruous and large in the village’s dirt-packed roads, we were greeted by a tiny starving puppy. We named him The Taj Mahal in recognition of an ongoing inside joke - in our admittedly ironic attempt to make fun of other tourists, we would point at random buildings to ask "Is this the Taj Mahal? Is that the Taj Mahal?”

Maybe it’s fate that after two weeks of outright ignoring beggars, we bonded with an abandoned puppy. A small taste of empathy to counter a lifetime of Westernized opulence. A few minutes of petting a puppy before we passed around hand sanitizer and headed into the gift shop.

The Barefoot College operates on a single idea: village life has value. That is to say, illiteracy is no burden, anyone can learn by doing, and there is no need to urbanize. There are 14 different activities at the Barefoot College, including crafts, puppetry, and more. The crowning glory, I would say, is the all-women solar engineering program. Women are brought in from the poorest villages all over the world. The college gives preference to grandmothers because young men tend to demand a certificate upon completion and then get a job in a city, whereas grandmothers have roots. For six months the women train, many of them illiterate, and with no common language. The teachers are not “educated professionals” but former Barefoot students themselves. Then, the graduates return to their respective villages to set up between 50 to 100 homes with solar power.

We were there not only as guests, but also to work. First, we went on a quick tour of the facilities. The dentist, I learned, did not go to school for dentistry. She was trained for a few months by an Italian dentist and now performs basic procedures on the villagers, some of whom were born at the Barefoot College and stayed.

When we visited the night school, the village children’s teacher explained to them that the cost of my round trip plane ticket to India was the same as one of their families made in an entire year. He asked them, “why do you think the Americans came here?”

“To see our school!” one child replied.

Breakfast, lunch, and dinner were the same day after day. Roti, yoghurt, spicy cabbage, rice and curry. At first I was game to scoop up my meal with bare hands. By the last day I was eating chocolate and chips that our professors brought back from town. I never even tried to shower with a bucket.

I found out that Taj had been abandoned by his mother, then saved by a visiting Belgian woman. Once she left, we arrived. Taj would cry at night outside our rooms. Each morning his eyes were so crusted that he couldn’t open them at all. I passively watched my classmates clean him and feed him digestive cookies. I am uncomfortably certain that we only prolonged his suffering, though I hope we also gave him some comfort.

Since the start of our trip to India we had been sketching out ideas for a mural using photos of the walls of the Barefoot College. Finally it was time to paint. But eleven girls and two professors collaborating on a single mural is no easy task. Repeatedly I found myself negotiating on behalf of some of my less outspoken classmates. Over and over again, I was the one asking someone else to step back or voicing a question to the group. I felt terrible with every confrontation, especially because I was never advocating for my own ideas but I was consistently receiving the blame when anyone else disagreed.

Near the end, one of the professors asked me if I would paint some more birds. I asked the group, is it okay if I paint more birds?

“No,” said one of my classmates. “I really wanted there to be five birds.”

“Oh,” I replied. “Any particular reason?”

“Five is my favorite number.”

I certainly couldn’t argue with that. But the professor told me again privately that she thought there should be more birds. So later, I asked the group again how they felt about more birds. The same classmate said to me, “I think you’ve had your way with enough parts of this mural.”

My way… I realized quite suddenly how meaningless the mural really was. We were there for only a few days, yet permanently placed our mark on the college with about as much longterm consideration as we gave to the students in the school or the stray dogs begging for food. As we got back on the bus, I wondered if we left behind as much as we took. Taj ran after us as we drove away.