July 16th

Today was supposed to be 2nd and 3rd class, but a bit of confusion upstairs meant I had 2nd and 4th class in the morning with the boys. It was the same old story with the 2nd class boys messing around and chatting, but I have kind of accepted that will happen now! The worrying thing was that after 3 days of doing similar things they still did not seem to know what to say. I am thinking it may be more beneficial for them to play word games and try to build their vocabulary first, then the speaking may come more easily at a later stage. With the 4th class boys, they had done the market scene to death after seeing them for several days in a row, so we just did a quiz game instead on the board, which they seemed to enjoy. I also asked some of them to draw family members on the board to see whether I could use drawing as a teaching tool in my lesson plans, and unlike the 2nd class earlier in the week, they did draw well without asking me to draw something for them to copy. The market activity worked well but I think they may be a little bored of it so I may try to have a few days with them trying doing word games and using drawing as another learning method. I was thinking of getting them to draw and talk to me about what they are doing – we shall see how it works/doesn’t work.

I had a very interesting chat over lunch with Dharmendra (man who runs the Women Centre) about some of the gender bias issues that I have discussed in other blogs. The solution that the centre has found to this is a very interesting one and has had a lot of success. Boys pay 1 rupee a day, and girls go free. If they did not have to pay at all, there would be serious issues with attendance and support by parents, and parents may just send their sons, and by the sounds of it this was the issue that did occur. However, if they charged for boys sons and daughters, the chances are they would just send their sons. But the system as it is, means that the parents must pay for their sons, and seeing as they are paying 1 rupee a day, they might as well educate as many of their children as possible for this money, and even the daughters are sent. The success of this scheme can be seen by the numbers of boys and girls enrolled in the school. There are 98 primary students in total and 55 of these are girls. Whether this kind of scheme would work on a larger scale we do not know, but it does seem quite promising.

We left the centre at 3.30 (an hour early) because the man that is designing the website for the Last Donation (see one of my previous blogs) was coming to discuss any ideas/concerns with Anou, so Dharmendra and I joined them, along with Nina who used to be a volunteer here and still has very close ties with the organisation. For me this idea of a Last Donation is a very interesting one and is rather unique when you look at it. So many charities ask for a few pounds a month, but you do not really know what it is used for and many would say that much of this is lost in admin. However, the Last Donation, is a scheme that is to be set up to finance the Planet Why project (see the project why website and a previous blog on this). Planet Why is going to be a sustainable and green guesthouse, which will provide employment and training to many of the young people in the project and their communities. The idea of the Last Donation, is that with just one donation (provided there are enough of them) this project can be built and once it is built it will generate enough revenue to support itself and the project will not be so reliant on the continuing support of funders as it is today. Any donations will go directly into creating this tangible guesthouse that can provide such support and hope to so many people for years to come. The fact that it will be self sustaining is the big thing for me and why I think it is something very worthwhile supporting – the longer time goes on the more and more people will be helped and supported by just one single donation. We had a good brainstorm and one of the things I feel I could support them with is making links with universities and development societies within universities, and to hold conferences at universities as well as fund raising days. We are still at the planning stage on that but I am confident it could really help this project get off its feet.