JSCC Student Blog

I’m going to India one day! That’s for sure!!

  I had the liberty to sit down with our very own Dr. Teri Maddox, professor of English and speech, who went to India this past May and June.  She told me a lot of great things, and she even let me take pictures! 

Dr. Maddox had been trying to apply for Rotary Fellowship so she could teach next summer when she got a call saying why wait until next year; come this year instead!  So in the middle of May she packed up and went to Hyderbad, India—the fourth largest city.  She stayed in a hostel with about 50 other women.  She said she learned a lot from them.  “I asked if any of them were married, and they just laughed at me.  They told me that they wore their wedding rings on their TOES instead of their fingers!” Dr. Maddox told me with a smile.  (By the way) It was about 115⁰ in Hyderbad during May, and the people did not have air conditioning!  None of that mattered to Dr. Maddox though.  She was there to do what she loves—teach.  Teachers are honored in India.  “I was treated like a queen,” she explained.  “Anything I needed, they did it for me.”  She was talking to some of the other teachers about Jackson State and she mentioned that most of the students work while they go to school here.  She said they just looked at her in shock and said that the only job students need is to study!!  How great would it be if we didn’t have to work right??

In India, the children go to school ELEVEN months out of the year and SIX days a week!!  By the time they are in the 3rd grade, they are learning up to FIVE LANGUAGES, then, by the 10^th grade, they are on a junior college level!! That’s MY level!!!  Anyway, the time of year that she went was their…I guess you could say…“summer break.”  I don’t know about you, but two months isn’t long enough for me, let alone ONE!!  The school she went to was called M.E.S.C.O.  It is a Muslim organization that has classes in health, education, and social concerns.  Dr. Maddox described it like a clinic almost.  Sixty-four teachers and about fifty students took time out of their “summer break” to come and listen to her and learn more about America.

 Dr. Maddox spoke about the beautiful buildings that were there.  “The iron work on their buildings was amazing.  You would have to be a millionaire in America to have something like that!” she said wide eyed.  She compared it to a “tropical paradise, like Miami or something.”

  Now, of course I had to ask her about the food.  She said it was “out of this world!”  She also said that everything was extremely spicy too, but she got around that.  She found her favorite dish called Biryani, with rice and chicken,  and she ate that the whole time she was there. 

She also commented on how clean everything was.  She said there were always people around sweeping and cleaning.   She said they are constantly washing their hands: before they pray (which is about five times a day) and before and after they eat of course (they don’t have any spoons or forks so they have to keep clean hands when they eat)…..**and just a side note:  Muslims don’t eat pork and Dr. Maddox said she didn’t even see any pigs!!…so we definitely don’t have to worry about her bringing any swine flu home with her FYI. :)

They do not waste anything either!!  They have so many people so they recycle just about every single thing they use!  She laughed when she told me about a picnic she went to where they used newspapers as plates for the food!! I think that is so crazy because we just take everything we don’t want or need and just throw it away, but it’s so bad there, they reuse EVERYTHING all the way down to using goat manure as fertilizer for their plants!!

“They have it right for a lot of things,” Dr. Maddox said.  I agree with her.  I’m thinking we all need to go to India and learn a few things from them!

On October 28^th, Dr. Maddox is going to be speaking to students and faculty and will tell more about her trip.  Go listen and see what happened!  She will be in the classroom building in room C2E1 from 12 to 12:50 p.m.