We visited the Sri Ram Vidya Mandir School which is our sister school in India. The school was founded by Baba Hari Das, the same person who inspired the founding of Mount Madonna School (MMS). The culture at SRVS felt similar but also different from MMS. 

All of the kids that I talked to acted exactly the same as kids I’ve met from the U.S. and other countries. One girl told me about how she was sad that her best friend had recently changed schools. I understood how she must have felt because no matter your culture or religion a best friend is still just as important. I related with another girl that I talked with about our love for art. We agreed that it was one of our favorite subjects in school. We talked about how fascinating it was to draw from life and how crazy it felt to watch a blank page turn into a three dimensional object. We continued to talk about school and how it impacts our lives. She told me that her biggest motivator was her god. That believing in her god brought her passion and curiosity in school work. She asked me if I believed in a god. I told her that my mother was raised Catholic and that my father was raised Jewish but had chosen not to identify with a specific religion. I said that I had religious connection with my family history but couldn’t say that I affiliated with a specific god. When she asked the question I found it interesting that she asked if I believed in “a god” versus just beloved in god. This made me think about how different our culture is in the U.S. where most people believe in one god. Whereas in India, people may choose a specific god that they worship. The way she phrased the question also made me believe that it was more open-ended. She was just asking if I believed in a higher power and not expecting me to participate in her religion. 

My schooling experience was also different from theirs in two other major ways. In India, after 10th grade, students are expected to pick a “stream” to follow; Science, Humanities, or Commerce. Once they have chosen, they take classes exclusively to apply to what they have chosen. This shocked me because of how much general education we have to take for our school system. It is crazy to me how different education systems are in different countries. Another thing that was different  was the rigidity of their school. In the morning they stood in a straight line, separated by boys and girls of each grade, and followed orders given over the speaker. The school was much more strict than schools in the United States. However,  once we went into the classrooms and saw the projects and kids all hanging out, it felt similar to Mount Madonna school.- Amelie Zands