My first days in the principal's office were unnerving. When bells rang for recess or lunch break, children running out of the second-story classrooms and down the stairs made the building shake and buck like Bluenose in a squall. To save us all from a common grave, I had to decree dashing was out, leisurely strolling was in. Also no bursting out of classrooms all at once like a volley of buckshot, one class at a time, at a funereal pace, please. People talk about opera singers shattering wine glasses with their high C's. Once in classroom 6-B, my rendition of "she dwelt among the untrodden ways" knocked out the back wall of the classroom. Suddenly I found myself staring in incredulity at the naked mountainside. I also found myself staring at unoccupied desks. Never had so many children escaped through so narrow a door in so short a time. They thundered down the stairs like the charge of the light brigade so rocking the whole building that I thought they would join Wordsorth's little friend in her grave -"and oh, the difference to me!"

Slow learner though I am, it was beginning to dawn on me that it was build or perish. But since building was impossible, I decide to gamble on the perish bit. It was at the end of the school year that December that I learned the school building was not so shaky as the kind of education we were giving.

I had taken the graduating boys down to the Balasan Valley for three days of prayer and reflection about their 'choice of life'. This was before I fully realized that in life the poor don't do what they choose, they do what they can. Among their many deprivations is not having the freedom to become what they would like to become. Their 'freedom' consists in having a job, any kind of a job. While strolling along the riverbank with a very intelligent young lad, I asked him did he plan to go to college. No, his father couldn't afford to send him. Did he plan to help his farmer on the farm? Surprised, and a bit annoyed I thought, he answered: "no. I've been ten years in school and I know nothing about cows, or fodder grasses, or seeds or vegetables. I was taught nothing about any of those things. My younger brother who hasn't gone to school knows all about farming. He's helping dad and will be taking over from him." 'What are you going to do, then?' I asked. I'm going to Calcutta and hunt for a job. In my mind's eye, I saw him living in a sweaty shack in Calcutta's sea of slums, another anonymous village emigrant with little knowledge and no skills, eking out a miserable, inhuman existence in squalor and hopelessness.