As our students in Hyderabad enjoy a long three week break due to exams and Dasara holidays, the three of us fellows have migrated south to Vikravandi, a small village in Tamil Nadu. Here, we are in the course of teaching a two week workshop in partnership with Communities Rising, an organization working with local educators to provide after school enrichment programs in rural schools. It has been a pleasure to meet and work with the teachers and administrators of Communities Rising, it is clear that they know the place and the students well and they have really welcomed us into their community!

Life in Vikravandi has been a sharp contrast to the hustle and bustle we have become accustomed to in Hyderabad. We are surrounded by fields and greenery and a variety of living things, from cows to the strangest of insects. Amidst this peaceful and relatively quiet landscape, we have travelled to three separate villages and discovered three schools containing the most vivacious and energizing students. One school that was particularly interesting to teach at was the St. Peter Paul Home for Disabled Children. This school houses and educates about 60 differently abled children and orphans. Like many of our other students, none of them had ever used a camera before, so they were supremely excited by the prospect of taking pictures and being in them. What particularly struck me though was how they interacted with each other. Like other children we have met, they instinctively wanted to push and grab in order to get their hands on the prized cameras. But they also had a wonderful way of helping one another to understand. The older boys helped the younger ones, the ones that could understand more English translated for their peers, and everyone offered support and encouragement to those whose disabilities made it more difficult for them to operate the camera. It was truly inspiring to see such a close-knit community where boys and girls of all ages worked together and shared us and our cameras. Additionally, it was also fun to see how excited they were at the prospect of being able to teach us. We have been challenging ourselves to try to pick up some Tamil while here and the kids were very excited to help us. They were challenging themselves to understand us and to help us learn what they knew, offering words of encouragement like, “Akka, [your] Tamil super!” These are kids that are eager to share what they know with the world, and meeting them has certainly made my quest to teach digital storytelling feel particularly rewarding.

On our first day at Peter Paul, here are some of the photos that our enthusiastic actors and photographs came up with to tell The Extremely Brief Love Story of Mani Annan and Gopala Krishnan.

Mani gives Gopal a Flower

Gopal accepts and they get married

Mani and Gopal dance at their wedding