The schools were strictly vegan and teetotal, and raisins were the most celebratory food available, so cheer had to be found elsewhere. We suggested a Christmas play, based on the students’ favourite comic, to be held beneath a large tree at the roadside school. The script was duly written and distributed to all interns.

In the school on the hill, the envelope arrived via a six-year-old cowherd. The interns — a Finn, a Finness, and a California girl — opened it and read the Christmas Pantomime ~ Script.

The text, scrawled across tattered notebook pages, laid out the scenes. The Finness would play the queen, the Finn the king, and the California girl the warrior. “Not bad,” they said. “Oh look, she’s added a note.”

We’ll finish with a song thanking the organisation and the teachers. Lyrics are below. Tune is Country Roads. See you on the 25th!
Laura xxxxx

The warrior, the king and the queen looked at each other.
“Country Roads? Is that a song?”
“I think so, but I don’t know it. Do you?”
“Nah. Do any of us?”
“Nope.”

It was the era when going online involved a three-hour bus ride to the nearest telephone line. There could be no quick fix.

~~~

On the 25th, the interns in the roadside school were preparing the stage when the interns from the forest school traipsed in, tired yet happy. The German accepted his villainous makeup with good grace and an evil grin. The burly Canadian laughed when we showed him the dress he would be wearing as the washerwoman.

In the dwindling late afternoon light, the interns from the hilltop school emerged from the jungle trail. They wore strange smiles and kept sharing secret glances. Surrinder, the head boy of the roadside school, muttered darkly about witchcraft.

Bewitched or not, the performance went well, all eight foreigners capering their way through our hasty adaptation. Surrinder set aside his concerns about dark forces long enough to lead his peers in shouting “He’s behind you!” and “Oh no, it isn’t!” Mirth and cheer filled the circle of kerosene lamplight.

Then came time for the song. The interns from the roadside school sang their verse confidently.
Chorus.
The interns from the forest school sang their verse with gusto.
Chorus.
Then came a pause, a moment of breathless silence, and all eyes turned to the hill school trio. The Finn and Finness seemed oddly calm, but the Californian looked excited. The audience leaned forward, waiting. Suddenly, our warrior scrunched her body and choked. Surrinder’s eyes widened in terror, clearly certain that his deepest fears had come to pass. She choked a few more times. Then she laughed, restarted, and found her stride.

Boom-ts-ka-pff, boom-ts-ka-pff, boom-ts-ka-pff.

Beatboxing. She was beatboxing.
Jaws dropped all around.
The Finn King began rapping the verse.
The audience gave a round of spluttering gasps.
The Finn gave way to Queen Finness, who spun the chorus into a Nordic folk melody. King and queen took turns, trading their tunes, taking us from a midsummer haunting in the Finnish fells to a Helsinki hip-hop club. The warrior provided the beat.
The rest of us were, by now, well on the floor, awestruck and gobsmacked. When hill school interns finished, they stood over us wearing mad grins, eyes bright in the yellow light. It took us half the night to get our breaths back.

Of all the Christmases before and since, this one will forever be my favourite: the night of the beatboxing panto under kerosene lamps in tribal Jharkhand, with festive magic of an entirely unexpected kind.

“The science class is cancelled today. Take Jisoo and Jennie instead. They need adjective practice.”

(By the way, this happens a lot. I once opened the classroom door to find six quiet ESL teenagers instead of the rambunctious kindergartners for which I had the mood and materials. That was fun.)

Without no time to prepare, I scoured the bookshelf for an adjective-rich text and came across On the Banks of Plum Creek by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Chapter 8, The Straw-Stack, is fairly short and has Garth Williams’ beautiful depiction of Laura and Mary tumbling joyfully through the air against a backdrop of straw.

Would this work? Would Jisoo (age 9) and Jennie (age 10) be interested? Living high up in a condo in a modern Asian city, these Korean sisters spent much of their day in classrooms. They didn’t know what a straw-stack was or what a kid might want to do with it. The first page of The Straw-Stack, with its scythes, wheat, yokes, fiddles, ploughs, and threshing, might as well be fantasy.

Most worryingly, neither of them liked reading. Jennie had recently declared she hated books.

However, they also trusted me. They knew that I wouldn’t force anything boring on them, that I would never scold them for not knowing something, and that I would play a card game with them at the end of the lesson if they behaved. So I packed the book and their favourite game Ligretto into my teaching basket and headed into the city.

Once in class, after the sisters had expressed their displeasure at my choice of text through heavy sighs and eye-rolling, we got down to reading. We patiently ploughed through 19^th century agricultural vocabulary until we came to a very important sentence:

When Laura and Mary went up on the prairie to play, that morning, the first thing they saw was a beautiful golden straw-stack. 

Suddenly they were interested. They didn’t know what a prairie was, but that didn’t matter because girls playing outside was something they understood. When the Ingalls girls started investigating that pile of straw, the K-girls became curious. And when Pa scolded his girls for sliding down the straw-stack, my girls were intrigued.

But that was only a foretaste of the drama to come because Laura and Mary return to the straw-stack the next day and simply can’t resist playing with it again. Jisoo and Jennie could relate. Resisting temptation is difficult, whether it’s playing in forbidden straw or cheating at Ligretto. They were rapt, their faces a mix of horror and anticipation as their eyes tracked the words on the page.

Then they brushed every bit of straw off their dresses, they picked every bit out of their hair, and they went quietly into the dugout.

Jisoo and Jennie were quiet, too.

When Pa came from the hay-field that night, Mary was busily setting the table for supper. Laura was behind the door, busy with the box of paper dolls.

Jisoo and Jennie were completely still.

“Laura,” Pa said, dreadfully, “come here.”

They were hooked.

Neither Jisoo nor Jennie started that day expecting to love a passage, especially not one about farm girls who played with paper dolls. But they sank into it as each emotional beat was given the time to breathe and unfold in their minds. Reading the chapter, they compared Laura and Mary’s world to their own, finding alignment in what it means to break rules and face consequences.

They saw themselves in these sisters, in these universal childhood moments – the thrill of doing something naughty, the desire to lead one’s sibling astray, the dread of facing an angry parent.

Looking back, I’m struck by how quickly we dismiss today’s kids as having no patience for books. Yes, a lot of my students spend too much time on screens. Yes, they groan when I pull Island of the Blue Dolphins out of my teaching basket. But here were two girls, completely absorbed in a story written 80 years ago about a world they’d never known. All it took was finding the right story – one that spoke to their hearts.