July 2 & 3

Friday July 2nd

My experience really started on the Friday (2nd) as I was shown around the rest of the centres, learnt a lot about the project and got involved with some classes.

Before Anou started the project she suffered the loss of both her parents and was not in a good way - she visited a healer who healed her and the project started when she saw a boy called Manu who has cerebral palsy and mental retardation. All the children were throwing stones at him and he was left to his own devices by the rest of his family. Anou saw this boy and wished she could do something to help. Her healer said to set up a centre and that is where the project starts. As a result of this, every morning she visits the healer and is blessed. The healer even blessed me, putting a white dot on my forehead!

We left for the centre after seeing the healer and I spent my morning with the "special class" for children with disabilities. The children all have different disabilities and help each other where they can, it really does feel like a small family, which compared to Manu's previous experience was very good to see. I helped one boy with his spellings, and after 8 attempts he successfully managed to copy the word elephant from one side of the page to another. The look on his face when I told him it was right was brilliant. We also did some basic addition, where I found explaining how to carry the 1 very difficult given that they have very little English - we got there in the end though!

The temperature was over 40 degrees so sitting upstairs in the sun was very uncomfortable especially when a hot curry was given to me for lunch - I promptly went extremely red and caused a few laughs! Everything here seems to have so much chilli in it!

I will be starting my teaching on Monday, so to get an idea of how English is taught here I went to one of the primary centres to observe a class. The boys and girls were so excited when I walked in, like they had never seen a white person before, all standing up and shouting "namaste" which is used when greeting someone at any time of the day. I joined the English speaking class in one corner of the room, where they were learning opposites and basic adjectives. They are all so keen to learn, not like kids in the UK, no backchat, no need to discipline them, they just love to learn. The centre itself is situated right in the middle of a slum, with no sanitation or anything, where they make their houses out of any scraps that they can find - it really was a shocking sight, and even more shocking to hear that the land is not theirs and if the government want the land they can destroy everything that is there instantly. Apparently, this is happening a lot at the moment, with India preparing for the commonwealth games in October, as the government wants to build impressive buildings to impress the other nations - clearly at the expense of a lot of the poor people of India.

The evening was spent playing a game called Jungle Speed after dinner, which is essentially a game of matching and speed - and I got owned every single time - quite embarrassing really! But we did go to a huge cake shop afterwards, which kind of made up for it!


Saturday July 3rd

Another early start and even hotter weather! We visited the healer as usual in the morning and then went on to the centre where I did some yoga exercises in the special class (again I was awful at this!) and then did some more maths. Another of the volunteers from England was keen to get a football game going for some of the kids at the centre in the slum that we visited, and had even brought kit and balls over to India with him. We travelled over to the slum where they said they knew of a pitch on which we could play - it turned out we were playing football on an old railway line in 46 degree heat with lads who did not know the rules of football and did not know enough English to understand our explanations! Despite this they really enjoyed it, both the secondary and primary students, and they loved the kits. The game did end up being a bit scrappy with everyone tackling people on their own team, all chasing the ball anywhere it went and catching it when it went in the air - but it was a good laugh. It is now Saturday afternoon and it is my time off, so I am going for a sleep! Will update again soon x