something between a student, a nun, a man, a tourist, a visiting academic and a performing monkey. As there were grains of truth in a few of those, I couldn’t complain. I caught up with fatherly and brotherly friends of the Roman Catholic persuasion, and was warmly welcomed by the children in the hostels again. True, this was mainly due to my skills of pretending to eat imaginary head lice, killing real ones the kids brought to me, owning a watch with a button that lit up the screen, and singing my limited range of Tamil songs – but I still felt welcomed.
My lateral neck muscles reawakened to assist with at least 80% of my communication. I have considered compiling a phrase book with instructions for the head wobbles with meanings from “Yes, I’d love some more fried congealed goat’s blood with my rice” to “Thanks for asking. My diarrhoea is now painful but not inconvenient” to “Good morning. Yes I am a strange white person walking through your village” to “Mm, that was a tasty head louse”.
I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect when I began conducting interviews with hostel students. With the help of staff with translating, I collected a range of stories revealing the students’ love for their villages and families, the conditions their people live and work under, their hopes for the future and their feelings about living away from home and studying in the PEAK hostels.
A few students became upset while they were telling me about their families. Obviously, the children in the hostels love their families and miss them dearly. Talking about their father’s illness or the abuse their family has suffered through caste discrimination brought some to tears and others close. Hearing the children speak about their hopes for the future was a mixed experience for me. Nearly every young person I interviewed had grand dreams: to become a teacher, become a doctor, get a job with the government, teach and heal their people, and free them from the suffering that exists in their villages now.
The reality, however, is that while some of these students will continue their studies and maybe finish high school and maybe go on for further training and maybe have the career that they dreamed of, many of them won’t. Family needs will bring many of them back to their villages to work alongside their parents as coolies. Tradition often calls on girls to get married in their early teens, bringing their chances of formal education to an end. In school and college exams, these students are competing against students from literate families with uninterrupted schooling and more resources. Only a tiny proportion of the cost of education, particularly past the high-school level, can be met by the Dalit and Adhivasi families. So when the PEAK team put forward the idea of establishing a trust fund for the ever-growing number of students that finish primary school and are ready to go on to high school and beyond, I felt so excited at the thought that Cycle of Learning would contribute to something that would be sustainable, on-going and meet a real need for the people of the Kodai hills.
Back in New South Wales, I finished my talk and rode out of Walla Walla. A few minutes down the road, my Albury host – my godmother Maureen – pulled up in a ute and we surreptitiously hauled Bike and Trailer into the back to return to Albury in time for another round of school visits that Maureen had lined up for me. Not only is Maureen a fantastic godmother, she is also a hurricane of organisation and action.
I arrived in Albury on Monday to the reception of Maureen and her brother Philip (Mum’s cousins) and his wife Marie sitting on Maureen’s front fence cheering me in. Before I even had my gear out of Trailer, Maureen was on the phone lining up appointments with schools, church groups and newspapers. During most of the phone calls she made some sort of connection with the person on the other end of the phone – “You’re a Cunningham are you? Is your family from Corowa? Oh yes, my son Steven has been shearing in Culcairn with your father.” She gave a masterclass in networking.
Maureen is one of the people I admire most. She’s interested in everyone and everything she encounters, and if she notices any situation that needs someone to do something, she’ll be the person to do it. A few years ago she came across some newly arrived Bhutanese refugees who lived nearby and set to giving them all driving lessons. There was no one to do the church bulletin, so she taught herself how to use the computer software and now puts it together every week. When she visits her sons’ homes she’ll busy herself with cleaning out the fridge or doing some ironing (whether they want her to or not). She visits her mother in a nursing home every day and usually ends up spending a few hours feeding other residents, helping organise entertainment and popping in on people who need some company. Keep in mind Maureen’s mum is close to 100 and Maureen herself is 72. And chose to go skydiving for her 70th birthday.
On her trips to visit my family in Adelaide, Maureen starts chatting to people wherever we take her. She came down once for a wrestling competition I was in. I had spent the morning being intimidated by all the fit, muscly interstate wrestlers milling about waiting for their rounds. Within half an hour of Maureen’s arrival at the stadium, she had got to know a dozen or so of the competitors, and decided to barrack for Bill from Melbourne (one of the more handsome, less cauliflower-eared wrestlers in our vicinity) since he had the same name as her late husband. Whenever I’m in Albury with her, given she’s friends with a significant proportion of its population, a trip to the shops will involve stopping every few metres to say hello to her librarian’s daughter’s acupuncturist, or whoever it is that she knows.
I’m pretty sure if a neurologist did a scan of Maureen’s brain, the huge overdevelopment of “thinking about other people” region would be shown to have strangled out the “self-conscious” zone. She’s the sort of open woman who if conversation turns to dentists she will pull out her false tooth to give you a look, or after having a run-in with a sheep on one of her son’s farms, she’ll drop her trousers to show you the bruise she’s got on her thigh.
She is one of the best examples I know of how to live a happy life. We had a conversation once about depression. Maureen told me that while she felt really sorry for people who suffered from it, she found the whole concept completely confusing. “Why don’t they just go out and talk to people, or do something interesting … ?” Maureen has the balance right – by spending her time thinking about others and acting on their needs enthusiastically and unreservedly, she’s eliminated the parts of her thinking that cause suffering to a lot of the rest of us. Ego, insecurity, self-centredness and disconnect from others do not get a look-in on how Maureen functions.
On the way back into Albury, as we barrelled through farmland with brown crops and receding dams, I saw two figures on bikes in the distance. They looked familiarly fast and unfriendly. As we neared the cyclists with their matching panniers, my suspicions were confirmed. They were the two Danish riders who had passed me on the way to Meningie two weeks ago. Maureen wanted to stop and talk to them of course, but as my pride was still wounded, I insisted that we drive past and not disrupt them from their fast and focused cycling. Ego and social disconnect is particularly hard to rid yourself of when it comes to being ignored on the road.
With Bike and Trailer on the New South Wales coast.
Saturday 12 March
Bundeena to Sydney, New South Wales
39 kilometres – 2 hours 31 minutes
In the past few days, I came to realise that there are some things I cannot do, and some places a bike should not go. The day before, Macquarie Pass earned a place high on the list of the latter. I had a few route options to get to Sydney, but this one had nice-sounding roads and towns, and the route – on the map at least – looked easy enough. There must be better criteria for navigational decision-making but I was yet to figure it out.
I began the morning meandering down the Illawarra Highway reflecting on the students I’d spoken to in a Goulburn primary school.
