I have long said that, if more people could attend Woodstock School, there would be fewer wars in the world. (The photo above, of some of my graduating class at a reunion in 2016, may give you a clue why.)
The school is now offering Scholarships for Peace. “So far recipients of the Scholarships for Peace programme have come from countries including Syria and Afghanistan, but Woodstock welcomes applications from students from any regions which are affected by war, violence and oppressive or fragile regimes.”
If you can help us find students who qualify and would be likely to thrive in an English-language learning environment, please get in touch with the school, details here.
I’m trying to remember how young I was when I first realized that, as a girl, I was more likely to be a target than boys were.
It might have been when I joined an inner-city Pittsburgh school for 5th grade. I had problems fitting in there. I was already a weird, traumatized kid, just returned to the US due to my parents’ divorce after being raised in Thailand. It’s not surprising that I was teased a lot in school. Many kids were (and still are, only now it’s called bullying.) But there’s always specific content to teasing. Let’s examine the taunts that were leveled at me.
One of the things I was teased about was my butt, which stuck out, or at least people told me it did (perhaps I was a bit sway-backed). A pop song that had been popular before I returned to the US in 1971 had a line about “Bertha Butt, one of the Butt sisters”. I had never heard the song, and was baffled (and hurt) when one of the boys in my class sang that line at me. Over and over again.
This interview took place a few months later, and was shown on a local channel this week, you can also watch it above. It was fun and, of course, I’m always happy to have an opportunity to talk about Woodstock!
I also enjoyed chatting with the evening’s other guest, Asha Sharma, author of American in Khadi: The Definitive Biography of Satyanand Stokes. Stokes was her grandfather, a fascinating character. The only American to be arrested for participating in the struggle for India’s independence, he also introduced apples to Himachal Pradesh, where they are now a major cash crop.
This is a scan of a paper map I have in storage somewhere (I hope – I need to do a better scan if I can find it again), showing part of Landour and Mussoorie, where Woodstock School is located. Click to enlarge the picture, and you’ll see that many of the homes have names, dating back to the British founders of the town who built them, usually as holiday getaways from the heat of the Indian plains. Walter Scott was popular in those days, so names were often taken from his books (which seems odd in modern India, but lends an air of quaint antiquity).
My classmate Jeet (musician and entrepreneur) wrote this song for the 30th anniversary of our class’ graduation from Woodstock School. If you ever want to understand who I am and what I’m about, start with this.
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