Indian teachers adjusting to Delta

By: John Martin, Staff Writer

August 31, 2003

Nallani Sriram, Garima Malhotra and Preetika Randive have come from India to teach at Greenwood High School. GHS faculty members say the three teachers have been made to feel welcome.

It's a long way from India to the Mississippi Delta, but three new Greenwood High School teachers from the south Asian country say they feel right at home here.

Although they haven't seen much outside of Greenwood -"just the airports," said Preetika Randive - what they have seen looks a lot like India, from the flat terrain to the steamy weather.

"The climate is almost the same as Mississippi, so we're not missing it much," said Randive, 35, who is from Madhyapradesh, a region in central India.

She was the last to arrive of the Indian teachers hired over the summer to work at Greenwood High. She joined her colleagues, Garima Malhotra and Nallani Sriram, this week.

Malhotra, 27, who is from Ambala in the northern part of the country, said the hospitality of the school's staff and her special education students reminds her of her native people.

"People are very helpful at the school," she said. "The day we landed, no one made us feel like we were in some different place."

Not until it was time to eat did the foreignness of their new home truly dawn on them.

"The food is basically completely different," Malhotra said. "We are used to eating spicy, and here people eat fast food. And we are not used to that."

For Sriram, 38, who is teaching algebra and pre-calculus, eating in Mississippi has posed another problem. "I am vegetarian," he said.

Although he can't take advantage of all the catfish and hamburgers that are cooking all around him now, Sriram has been pleased with the local grocery stores' selection of vegetables, many of them used in traditional Indian dishes.

But even the cultural differences have for the most part been easy to adjust to.

Back in India, a surplus of teachers has made finding a job in education difficult. That's why aspiring teachers there are increasingly looking to the United States, where a third of new teachers leave the profession after three years, according to the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future.

The reasons why Malhotra, Randive and Sriram came are a bit different. They all had steady teaching jobs, but they were looking for a new adventure and a comparative glimpse of the two countries' education systems.

"We are here to learn about international standards, to learn about the technology taking place here so we can take that technology back to our home schools," said Sriram.

And finding a place to do that wasn't difficult. Greenwood High Principal George Noflin came to them. During his recruiting trip to India, he interviewed 85 teachers. The ones who are hired enter the United States on an H1-B visa, which was generally designated for technical workers until recent job losses in the tech sector. The visa is good for a year, after which Randive, Malhotra and Sriram hope to extend it.

The three of them are used to classes of 50 to 60 students, but the students at Greenwood High are making up for what they lack in numbers with a barrage of questions.

"They ask 101 questions about where we are from," Randive said. "They are very curious."

Malhotra rattled off a list of most-asked questions: "Where are you from? What language do you speak? How is it over there? Why do you put something on your forehead? - speaking of the dot. Why do they put clothes over their faces?"

While she, Randive and Sriram work on gradually answering all those inquiries, they hope the students learn something too.

"I think they are responding well," Sriram said. "I hope they are enjoying my teaching, and I am providing a lot of knowledge for them."