West Point School

Our school sits right on 18 Gandhi Road here in Darjeeling. You get some good views of the mountains when the clouds clear up, but mostly we’re dealing with the mist and the damp weather. The building is right on the main road, so it’s easy for people to find us, but it does get noisy with all the tourists and jeeps going past. We have students coming from all over the local hills, some of them walking quite a distance to get here. The classrooms are a bit old-fashioned and we use heaters during the cold months to keep everyone from shivering. It’s a busy place with a lot of stairs because of how the land sits. We have a small playground where the kids play football whenever it’s not raining. The staff room is usually full of tea cups and half-graded papers. We don’t have anything very modern or sleek, just the basic stuff you need to run a school. We try to keep the kids focused on their studies, though they often get distracted by what's happening outside the windows. It’s a local school for local people, and we’ve been part of the Gandhi Road scene for a long time. We just do our best to get through the syllabus every year and keep the place running. It’s hard work, but it’s home for us and we just get on with it.