Mr Attlee's experience teaching in Kolkata
Mr Attlee's recollection of three weeks
volunteering in Kolkata at Future Hope School
It all started with Freddie Flintoff’s ‘Field of Dreams’ BBC documentary and a game of street cricket. While on tour to Kolkata in India, Freddie’s Lancashire boys lose a game of cricket to the street children of Future Hope. They are invited back to the school, and here they meet the 400 pupils, teach a lesson and give an assembly. For Freddie’s boys, it is a truly humbling and emotional experience, and as a viewer, I was immediately struck by pupils’ fluency in English, ambition, infectious enthusiasm and the key role that sport played in their education. After 21 years of teaching at Port Regis, Cothill and most recently, Sandroyd, it dawned on me that volunteering at Future Hope was my opportunity to give something back.
I was also intrigued by Kolkata – this crumbling industrial city of the British Raj, and home to Mother Theresa, extensive slums and many street children, but at the same time, christened ‘The City of Joy’ and famous for the heart and soul of its population. The final piece of the jigsaw was having a 27 year old daughter called India and having never been there. For me, Future Hope, Kolkata & India were irresistible, and this is why, during the 3 weeks of this Easter holidays, I went to teach there.
I had a premonition of what was to come when I first arrived in Kolkata. From the airport, I was whisked off to a 7s rugby tournament – over 150 boys and girls loving and playing rugby to a high standard in the sunshine. Eating lunch of fish from the nearby pond, rice and dahl with our hands along trestle tables sharing rugby stories, and discussing favourite players – Marcus Smith was the most popular! As the guest of honour, I helped to give out the trophies as the sun set. That evening, I was invited to the ‘Little Ones’ boarding house for supper to meet the 19 orphans and street children ranging from 6 to 13 years, who were now safe and had a place to call home. They greeted me with beaming smiles, called me ‘Uncle’, and took me by the hand to show me proudly around their school. Just 8 hours into life in Kolkata, I could not have felt more at home, and this is India for you – not just an assault on the senses, but an assault also on your emotions.
It was with these ‘Little Ones’ that I spent most of my time. I would take them rowing at 5.30 every morning, escort them to swimming and rugby, help them with their homework, play cricket and chess, teach them Monopoly Deal and magic tricks (they were experts in both in just 15 minutes!), and share supper with them. Despite their harrowing backgrounds, they never dwelt in the past and I was bowled over by their boundless positivity. This is just one of their many stories:
“My family was unlucky, we faced so many problems. My father was blind and my mother had cancer. I was about 8 years old and my brother was only 3 and no one was there to help. We begged and lived in plastic shacks, we had no fixed home and no income for treatment for my mother. I remember how she suffered and I felt helpless. My parents had an argument and my mother took me away. We travelled for many hours, with no money or food. I felt very thirsty and went to the water tap to drink without asking my mother. When I returned my mother was no longer there….I waited and searched for her…for many years, while I lived and slept on the station platform. This is where Future Hope found me.”
When not with the ‘Little Ones’, I would deliver School Assemblies on ‘Kindness’ and ‘Failure being the Stepping Stones to Success’, give teacher insets and conduct writing workshops, offer interview practice and careers advice to the seniors, and work closely with the School Counsellor. While their cricket was too good, there was the opportunity to coach rugby, and it was during this time, I witnessed the healing power of sport and the passport to freedom it offers. I was lucky enough to visit a Future Hope rugby academy on the edge of the jungle some 10 hours north of Kolkata. Here girls who would traditionally be expected to work on the tea plantations, are instead winning national tournaments and travelling internationally with rugby. Their story is mirrored by the boys, whose achievement in winning the Junior Rugby World Cup is featured in the Bollywood/Hollywood film, ‘Jungle Cry’.
It was truly an incredible 3 weeks. The children at Future Hope gave me more than I could ever give them, and I learnt more than I could ever teach them. They shifted my perspectives in appreciating the ‘now/present’ is a gift and showed me the power of ambition, positivity and joy. It was also wonderful to see that Sandroyd’s fame carries at least half way across the world. Future Hope’s, Head of Rugby, Sanjay, remembered Sandroyd fondly – the Temple, Bonfire Night and the theatre – having visited some 20 years ago to tell his story of being an orphan on the streets of Kolkata and being saved by Future Hope.
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Members of the school community are very warmly invited to join Mr Attlee for his talk 'Three weeks volunteering in Kolkata at Future Hope, a school for street and slum children' on Tuesday, 16 June at 8.30am in the Reynolds' Room. Refreshments will be available.
Future Hope is a charitable organisation which provides opportunity through its homes, schools, sports and medical programmes for some of the most vulnerable children from the streets and slums of Kolkata, India. Future Hope puts society’s most vulnerable children at the centre of all that they do, and after 40 years they understand the problems and the challenges, and the solutions that dramatically and permanently change these children’s lives for the better. www.futurehope.net
Giving today’s street & slum children a better tomorrow.
