The New School Year begins in The Kalimpong Hill Region Schools

Photo time in the village. This is Komalika. She is 7 years old.

Taken from further up the hill looking down on a typical hill village.

Taken on Easter Sunday. Time to relax.

Grandad. I spent the 4 day Easter school holiday with this family in a village called Merik.



Hello Friend Bloggers

Once again another academic year is commencing for the pupils of the schools in the Hill regions of West Bengal.
I think that perhaps many of the children will be happy, to be back at school and even back to living in the hostels again.
The winters in the Hill region are chilly and the majority of the children live in fairly flimsy accomodation, with toilet shed situated quite a distance from their house,no heating and just 1 electric light in their kitchen/eating room building, a one room building, which is also separate from their house.
The house itself usually consists of a front room into which you enter the house, this is the largest room and has 1 or 2 beds in it, which are used as seating during the day and for sleeping at least 3 or 4 members of the family at night. There are often, 1 or 2 small rooms ,curtained off from this main room, one for the parents or a very elderly member of the family, and if they have a second one, this will be kept for any visitor.
Most of the homes do not have any other furniture. Their few extra clothes are hung on the wall on nails. and they will use cardboard boxes to store their bits and pieces in.
The parents do not get holidays, as field work,transporting, on foot, any excess produce to Git Dubling the small market village,to sell it, or around the neighbouring villages to exchange it for other items required, still has to be done.
The children will be kept very busy looking after the younger siblings, collecting water, sticks for the cooking stove and fodder, from the surrounding woods, for the animals in the village.
They will be very unlikely to receive any food during the day, with the the meal of the day being prepared, when their mother comes home from where ever she has been working, during the day. Breakfast, which may have been eaten at 6am or even earlier, will have been a chipatti or any food left over from the evening meal.
The children will not have had much time for play or chatting to their friends during their holidays, especially the older ones.
Their life seems hard in comparison to many of our lives in the Western World,but I never heard them complaining.
However, you can maybe see why coming back to school after the 2 months Winter holiday, is quite an attractive alternative for some of the children.