The hot season has begun–which means mangos, afternoon naps, kulfi (a kind of traditional Indian ice cream), and of course, sweltering heat. But we were surprised to learn a few days ago that the hot season in this part of India also involves occasional dust storms. I was home alone when the last one began: the relief of temporary cloud cover and the welcome, unexpected, light rain quickly turned more sinister as the wind picked up speed, thrashing trees around and beginning to lift old tires and plastic tarps off of our neighbors’ roofs. I stood in our doorway and watched as the whole landscape suddenly went red, as though we were on Mars. I shut the door against the sideways stream of rain and grit, but a few minutes later the mud-spitting wind actually lifted off a piece of our roof and carried it away! As soon as I saw daylight expanding overhead, I ran downstairs to take cover in our landlord’s room, thinking that the whole roof might be peeling back. When my husband and my presence of mind returned a couple of minutes later, we went back upstairs to salvage books, guitar, and clothes from getting soaked. I was offended after the storm when we started the work of trying to clean up the mess and a neighbor who came up to survey the damage started laughing–offended, that is, until I looked next door and realized that her roof had been split open, too! Everyone just took the storm in stride, and within a few hours most people had already climbed onto the roofs of their homes and repaired the damage. A couple of the bamboo and plastic shacks in the community would have to be rebuild from the ground up, but even this seemed to be casually accepted. The missing piece of our roof, it turned out, had flown into our neighbors’ courtyard behind us and cracked one of the boards of their wooden bed, and a couple of people had been struck by falling bricks from other houses, but fortunately no one had been killed. People here have learned to live with what they can’t control; they have a no-nonsense way of recovering from almost anything and getting on with life. When the temperature began its rapid ascent, we responded first by buying a matka, a traditional clay water pot which is just porous enough to allow water to slowly leak through and evaporate, keeping the water inside cool. For the first few days, we were dipping refreshingly cold water out of the matka and joking to our neighbors that it was a like a cheap fridge that didn’t even need electricity. Then the weather got a bit hotter and the water in the matka went warm. This week, temperatures have climbed high enough that by midday, our ceiling fan is churning down hot wind from our thin roof, and even with the windows and door open, we can sit in the shade and sweat through our clothes in a matter of minutes. Since temperatures reached 107 degrees fahrenheit a few days ago, we decided to opt for a “desert cooler” and spent yesterday afternoon rearranging our room to accommodate the new appliance: a big, aluminum box with a fan inside and a water pump to wet down panels of dried grass from which water will evaporate and be sucked into the blades to pump out a stream of cool air in whichever direction the cooler is facing. A.’s self-taught electrician skills came in handy for rigging up a way to wire the cooler into our existing electrical board and run wires across the ceiling so that the stream of slightly-damp, cool air blows directly across our bed at night. That gives me hope that I’ll be able to do more over the next couple of months than just laying around in a sweaty daze.

In spite of the mounting heat, there have been a couple of exciting things going on around here lately. The first sign of hope is that our widowed neighbor, whose husband died suddenly a couple of months back, has finally found a job! We had been helping her in a lengthy job search which had been fruitless and discouraging up until now, especially since she and her three young daughters had been struggling to eat even once a day throughout those long weeks. We were encouraged to see other poor neighbors generously sharing food with them even though there was very little to go around, but we also struggled to know our own role in helping without either creating unhealthy dependence or discouraging the rest of the community from being involved. The entire process was a cruel reminder: the poverty of the poor is often what keeps them poor; cyclical, exponential disadvantages piling on top of one another. It was hard to get our neighbor a job because she looked so poor. She looked so poor because she didn’t have a job. Wealthy prospective employers would look at her and say, “She looks too weak to do the work.” But she does harder work than cleaning floors when she’s wandering around the city on foot looking for work! I wanted to say. Or they would say, “You need to dress nicely if you’re going to work here. We like cleanliness.” But the reason that even her best suit is old and has holes in it is because she has been unemployed for two months, and she was living hand-to-mouth before that!

You aren’t very employable when you’re illiterate, slightly disabled, stand less than five-feet tall, and look obviously, desperately poor. But you also aren’t going to get any less malnourished and desperate-looking until you land a job. When I would talk and pray with her about the situation, she would tell me despairingly, “If only I had a job, then I wouldn’t be distressed anymore! Everything would be fine! God could give me a job. God just isn’t listening.”

Finally, one of the myriad connections we had tried to make for her finally came through, and she is now employed at the home of a compassionate middle-class woman who lives just a short distance away from our community and who has even bought a month’s supply of food to last the family until the first pay day.

The second recent development is so new and fragile that I hesitate to even mention it yet. We’ve met a woman who began a couple of weeks ago to create an interactive, and student-led curriculum for teaching literacy to adults and children who are fluent in Hindi but who can’t read–either due to their having never been afforded the opportunity to go to school, or due to their having been subjected to the experience of spending a few years in an Indian government school where teachers were absent more often than students, or where the teachers’ presence facilitated rote memorization and useless examinations without any learning whatsoever. I don’t have time to fully explain the blatant inadequacies of the Indian education system, and the corruption that prevents so many kids from being able to access what exists on paper as their basic right. But against that backdrop, this literacy curriculum is shockingly simple: it teaches the Hindi script phonetically rather than having students begin by memorize the names of each letter of the alphabet, it relies on simple pictures to connect letters with sounds, and it helps learners to immediately begin piecing sounds into words and words into sentences, so that instant gratification gives them confidence and propels them to continue learning. It’s also student-led, which means you barely need a teacher at all. A. and I, along with a couple of other friends, are helping out with the pilot project by trying the curriculum with some of our neighbors, and it’s been exciting to see the enthusiasm of kids and adults alike as they begin timidly and then experience unexpected success in starting to achieve something that has seemed unattainable for them for so long.

The woman behind this program is passionate and ambitious about ridding India of illiteracy, and has plans of using the curriculum on a large-scale. It remains to be seen how all of this will pan out, but for now we’re excited by the possibility of sitting down with even a few individuals in our community to guide them through the process, and then give them the chance to pass on their new-found skill to their kids, friends, relatives, and neighbors in the slum.