The Dark Art of Poverty

A troupe of Merasi rehearse in the Thar Desert

Poverty is a dehumanizing state. It is not simply the lack of money, but the total absence of choice, opportunity and hope. The shadowy reality of poverty is that it assigns people negative value; individuals are defined exclusively by their deficits.

On the surface, the Merasi (musicians) live in expansive poverty. Yet valuing a community based on what they are not is a fundamentally disrespectful approach to change. Human substance does not reside in what we are not, but in what we are. And the Merasi are many, many things.

The Merasi are a community of musicians who narrate the folk culture of their Indian desert landscape in ancient song systems. They stir chai (tea), lay bricks, horns, inhale in rhythm. Music is the beginning, middle and end, and as the global hand of modernization sweeps across India, that music is on the cusp of extinction.

The Merasi School exists solely to support community-driven change. While the world calls the Merasi ‘Manganiyar,’ meaning beggar, the Merasi define themselves by their artistic prosperity rather than their social poverty.

Through daily academic and music classes, we supports the development of creative minds, hearts and hands capable of social transformation. There is no poverty at The Merasi School, only the loud, relentless rhythm of possibility.

Six Degrees of Connection

Sahju & Akram work through a complicated rhythm

If my neighbor Sarah from rural Algeria can connect to Kevin Bacon in less than six degrees, than there's no reason why we cannot link the realization of two desires into one coherent mission. The Merasi community wants to both preserve their 37-generation old musical legacy and create a reality unobstructed by discrimination. When we put our heads together to shape a curriculum that met both objectives, we discovered that these artistic and social ambitions don't just go hand-in-hand, they are downright inseparable.

Rhythm is as fundamental to the Merasi as food and water. "We cry in rhythm," they say. Children are rocked to sleep in five-beat patterns and a lone dholak (drum) is never without a player for long. Art is life; yet life for the Merasi is the art of survival. Enter education, an academic map that navigates students from a futile, reactive fight against crippling marginalization to a proactive, empowered reformation of art and justice in the contemporary world. It's a bumpy road; we've a lot along the way. But every hand that reaches out in the darkness makes a powerful difference. Click here to find out what you can do.

The Splatter Method of Discovery

Neelu wears her heart and smarts on her sleeve.

Not too long ago, Anne Lamott wrote a terrific book called Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. There are mounds of wisdoms packed into these pages, but the piece that lodged right into my brain is that any project, from folding a paper airplane to painting the Sistine Chapel, starts with a first fold, first brushstroke, first step.

I just got off the phone with Sarwar after an extended chat about education for toddlers. As I hash over our discussion, no clear narrative arc emerges, but rather a Jackson Pollock splatter of ideas, each bubbling and steaming with various degrees of possibilities. And this is how most innovations are launched in our desert classroom.

A chorus of pint-sized voices launches itself out of the peanut-gallery and into the spotlight: we want to learn how to use computers, our students say. So we began discussions about the whys and whats of computer literacy, got a few generous souls to donate some laptops and started one of the most popular pieces of our programming.

The method is that ANY idea is possible as long as you have the ears to listen, the heart to believe and the feet to take the first step. Of course many ideas do some serious shape-shifting en route to realization: The Merasi School Garden, a great dream of Afreen and Akram's, never fully materialized due to poor sunlight and soil quality. But what emerged in place of a flower bed was a plot of land for recess, home to kite construction and flying, chalkboard painting and elaborate paste and coloring projects.

Speaking from the podium at Stanford, Steve Jobs spoke about connecting the dots retrospectively. After we plunge passionately into our idea-realization, Sarwar and I work fiercely to distill replicable patterns and practices from our pilot projects and test runs and thus curricula emerge. But first, we swim in the alphabet soup, with the faith that there are enough vowels and consonants for the right words to rise to the top.

The Joy Crisis

There are large, powerful schools of American educational theory that state bluntly: Our schools are in a state of CRISIS. This bold pronouncement is usually backed up by mountains of data amounting to spelling the word 'CRISIS' with flashing red lights while the theme from Schindler's List plays on repeat. And it's not without merit. One in three students will never graduate from high school and rural and urban schools across the country have become 8am-3pm dumping grounds from poor students who aren't developing the schools to meet basic literacy and math standards.

Yasmine, Mongilal & Seema Get Their Joy On

This depressing shovel is one way to dig into the issue of education. At The Merasi School, we have tried another approach. The Merasi have enough pre-determined obstacles in their path - living on .25 cents a day, being born without birth certificates, assigned the social worth of pollution- that we'd get plenty of nowhere by focusing on what education they don't have.

So we turned the tables and decided to focus on what they can do, have and be with education. By shifting from a framework of deficits to a framework of assets, the possibilities explode infront of the students like cherry blossoms in the DC spring. In its best form, education nurtures the raw potential that each student brings into the classroom and ripens it into its fullest expression. It is a fundamentally hopeful undertaking. It's something to be -- to use a word rarely associated with America's public schools -- joyful about it.

Most absolutely, the American educational institution is in need of serious attention. But it will not sustainably emerge from painting headlines with terrifying statistics about underperforming schools. Rather, I think that constructive change will be the product of families, educators and students developing bone-deep excitement about what can and must exist inside the classroom.

Nipping Brain Drain in the Bud

The Merasi School is remarkable. But, in truth, there's nothing remarkable about that. Every person, work of architecture, afterschool program and fingerpainting on the fridge is worth making a remark about. Remarkability has a few different shades to it, though, and that's where Sarwar and I are particularly attentive.

Part of what distinguishes The Merasi School is that it offers kids an opportunity to explore worlds of knowledge, databases of information and patterns of thought that were previously locked far away from their inquiring minds. With this new influx of ideas and stimulus, the world becomes a bit more colorful and expansive and, ideally accessible. Which is part of what we're trying to do.

The other side of that equation, though, is that once an individual begins to see the scope of the world beyond their own and develops the educational capacities to influence and shape that world, the classic brain drain question emerges: Why should they stay home? What is to keep them from going off to bigger, brighter more open cities where caste doesn't dictate social interaction and they can be valued for the quality of their heart and mind?

Here's what makes The Merasi School remarkable: The music. The Merasi have a precious, gorgeous artistic legacy woven into the narrative fabric of Jaisalmer and Rajasthan. The songs are the oral history of a culture that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world. The rhythms and beats the students learn in music class with teacher Karim Khan are situated in a particular landscape. With education, our little ones are honing the fine, constructive skills to shift the heart and soul of that landscape.

It's not a flawless plan. Perhaps some students will get a taste of broader worlds and never look back. Yet many are already showing signs of sinking their heels further into their communities. As they do that, they each contribute to the expansion of the hope and possibility in their own backyard.

Fitzgerald Visits The Merasi School

Over coffee with a friend the other night, I was reminded of an excellent old F. Scott Fitzgerald quote that lay in my battered moleskin journal. "The test of first rate intelligence," Fitzgerald bellowed from the pages of a 1936 Esquire, "is to hold two opposing views in one's mind at the same time and still function. One should be able to see that things are hopeless, yet be determined to make them otherwise."

Rasul Khan looks to what's beyond

It's a mighty mouthful that is sticky and awkward to chew, but paves the blueprints and cornerstones of our work out in Rajasthan. Caste barrels down on our little ones, bringing them into this world without a birth certificate, forcing them to live on less than 25 cents a day and robbing them of their right to participate in a society begging for justice-fueled change. But caste is far from everything. It is one reality in a world of many.

Caste is neighbored by an unbelievably musical legacy that can be found in no other pocket of the globe. It is an artistic heritage that enables students to stare defiantly and compassionately in the face of all the crushing forces telling them they are worthless and say, as Rasul Khan did, "I'll be an engineer" or Fridah Khan, "I will be a very, very good teacher."

Rasul and Fridah know the world is not a warm place for them. Yet they also know that they have the capacity to rewire this reality towards a habitat of justice and hope. The music and the education go hand-in-hand, as necessary as having both a heart and a mind. And so we move forward, supported by the backbone of Folk Arts Rajasthan, our parent non-profit, with these two realities in our hands, functioning with both the weight of reality and hope.

If you see a turtle on a fencepost...

FIRST and foremost: HAPPY 2009 to you and yours! May it be a year brimming with merriment and peace.

SECOND and just as foremost: Bill Clinton used to say that if you see a turtle sitting on a fencepost, it was there for a purpose. It did not drop from the sky or get swept up in a mighty gust of wind that placed it square on top of the fence. The turtle was there because something or someone intentionally put it there. Intentionality is a great word and one that I've become quite fond of through this Merasi School work.

Sarwar and I agree that The Merasi School is an intentional educational undertaking: each slice of programming is fueled with purpose and drive. And yet, there's something missing to that little equation, that undescribed x-factor that happens when your intended plans aren't unfolding as they should and expectations are dropping like flies on the roadside.







With this picture, for example, my plan was to get the kids to spell out 'THE MERASI SCHOOL' on the slates. But, as we primed and preened for the shot, what emerged was the discovery that Mr. Ali, the strapping lad in the center and a new student as of that day, didn't know how to spell 'MERASI.' And so a lesson instruced by his fellow slate-holders ensued.

But that's just one, bite-sized example of immediate reality or needs trumping intentions. Poverty, as we've talked about before, is a fickle master who will take your intentions and crush them like a two-ton stone crushes a china vase. Our intentions are well-founded and I used to think that reality gets in the way of my placing the turtle on the fence.

But what I'm slowing starting to believe is that I need to create more room for reality in the crafting of our intentions. Reality and all the baggage, packages and beautiful complications that come with, are powerful indicators of why the path from turtle in pond to turtle on fence is much more windy, precarious and beautiful than we originally bargained for.