Life of a boy

Its time to prepare the fields for wheat plantation and the job has fallen onto this boys shoulder

 Careful ploughing of the land

 Working hard with much concentration in his face

Green paddy fields, sloping terraced hills and a farmer tilling land with a pair of oxen is an everyday thing in rural Nepal. This photo of mine would be so much representative of the rural life if only the person manning the plough was an adult. As you can see clearly, its not. Its a boy, hardly 11. I have preserved these photos over the months because in it I see the story of a life of a boy and the stories of so many other boys like him whose stories I think needs to be told.

He is a shy bony boy. He lives in the village where I was born and is a distant cousin of mine. According to what others have told me (as I visit my village only occasionally, he like most children do not talk to me out of shyness), he wakes up very early in the morning and sets about doing household or farm work. This particular morning, when I was returning from some landscape shoots across the hill (click this link if u want to check out the results), he already had finished tilling two bottom patches of field and was rounding off this last one as well.

Now, I have never ploughed a field with oxen and I don’t know for sure how much strength it requires. But looking at those two heavy beasts, the wooden plough and the depth it has to penetrate for good tilling, I’m sure I couldn’t do even one round of that before I ran out of all my energy. As I stood there and watched him, he did around 6 rounds of that field. I looked at his small frame, his painfully thin hands and even as I wondered how could this boy be driving this plough, I took notice of his determined jaws and the way he was intent on getting his job done. I saw someone become of age, mentally and physically both, long before it was due. As I stood there watching him, I could not help but compare his life with my own and much as I hate this, I again found myself comparing life of privileged children in cities with life of the boys and girls of my village. I hated the whole world then and how its so unfair. I looked at myself, one girl who could only talk big and do nothing. I looked at him, who did not talk but did things too big for his age without question.

I may weave words upon words here but the truth is not going to be any better. There are thousands of boys out there like him who had to shoulder a grown up’s responsibility, ditch their childhood and substitute farm and house works for homework and reading. They do not have a choice in childhood and when they grow up they still do not have many choice. They do not get the same opportunities in learning and education and have so little exposure to the world. How will they stand a chance against their peers who have grown up in relative privilege with such a good head start on everything from education to material prosperity?

SNAP! Coming back to the story again, we have started a different kind of school in our village. Its basically a government primary school but we are trying to provide a better learning environment with sports, music, arts & crafts, sufficient teachers, English based additional text books and hopefully give those children a better exposure to the real 21st century global tech village that this world has now become. Normally Government schools do not have monthly tuition fees but since we need to support so many extra resources, we do charge around NRs. 200 (around USD 3) per student monthly. Many families are so poor that they cannot even pay half of this much. So the students here are divided into 4 categories according to which they pay either 100%, 50%, 25% or none of the total fees. Students on partial and full scholarships are being somehow supported by the school fund and donations of local community. But since the school itself has very limited resources and extra support except for the yearly Government budget barely enough to cover the teachers' salaries, we have been looking for generous sponsors/friends who would support us either in cash, kind or even morale boost by dropping in some nice words. You can visit the school's website for more info. That would be so nice of u.

The boy, Tenzing, is one of the students receiving full scholarship. Both his parents are illiterate. We have a campaign to enroll every student of our village into this school whether their parents want or can afford it or not. Here are a some more snippets into his life for you to dwell upon:

Tenzing in the middle-attending class. He shows the same concentrated expression in his face. Every wednesday the students here have a special uniform the Nepali National Dress-Daura Suruwal for boys

Smiling openly at last...the song in which the boys are dancing is being played on the cell phone of the teacher. A loudspeaker is used for upping the volume level. The school has to make do with so few resources. No wonder dance rehearsals are difficult to manage. The loudspeaker gets rotated into groups in turn for dance practice.