Naraiyan Singh Inter College

To find us, you have to go about 25 kilometers outside the main city area of Barabanki, near Behram Ghat. We are tucked away in Gnesh Pur. It’s a bit of a trek to get out here, but that’s where the students live. This is an inter college, so we have the older kids finishing up their schooling. The surroundings are very quiet, mostly just fields and local village houses. The school building is quite old and has that classic look with high ceilings and heavy wooden doors. Sometimes the pigeons get into the rafters and make a bit of a mess, but we just sweep it up. We don't have any of those modern computer labs with hundreds of screens, just the basic stuff that’s needed for the UP board curriculum. The playground is mostly just flat dirt where the boys play cricket during the recess. It gets very cold here in the winter mornings, and you can see the fog hanging over the fields when we arrive. In the summer, it’s the opposite and the heat is quite heavy. We have a few hand pumps for water and some old desks that have names carved into them from years ago. It’s a very local place, and we do things the way they’ve always been done around here. It’s just how life is in this part of Barabanki. Most of us have been working here for years and we know the families around the village.