Aline in India with JRDT

On a friend’s advice, I spent five days in Manampathy Kandigai to discover and help JRDT in May 2013, during my first journey in India, 4 weeks altogether.

Chris, a long term German volunteer (you might hear of him later!), had just arrived as well, and there was different project to settle and start.

It was holiday time in India, so orphanage kids were gone away in families, and schools were shut down.

Education was still a focus point: Computing and English.

·         Computer lessons are given to children, but there is at the moment needing lot of space to that other place than the Arokiaraj family home!

A space was to be devoted for this in the nearby house, donated computers were ready to be used, but the computer room had to be installed.

So we went around a couple of times to see how to do it, a proper table and chairs would be very useful… But for now, Chris installed two of them on an old low table, struggled with cables and plugs (and power cuts as usual), and had them working!

Now, there is other problem to solve with the power instability, some software like Open Office should be added and an internet connection would be useful.

Meanwhile, I swept and tidied the little storage room, especially putting together the numerous pieces of clothes which have been given by people from Chennai, pants, dress, school skirts, shirts and sweater, coming in various sizes may dress children soon!

Along with clothes and toys and harmonium has been given too… Will they learn how to play it?

 

Chris struggling with old  computers installation

Installation completed!

 

·         An English class has been started as well with children gathered by Mrs Jose.

Taking place every morning from 10:00 to 12:00 in an open air church, we had about 20 kids (some of them didn’t come for all the class) from 5 to 13 years old (plus Daniel, 16, who came to help one day). As we did every day for attendance call, let’s name them all, beginning with girls of course:

Maria-Preethi (12), Jenifer (8), Jacklin (13), Vinitha (12), Darthy (10), Amali (13), Goel (13), Anitha (12), Harish (10), Vergis (10), Praveen (12), Jayraj (12), Balraj (9), Cyril (7), Prem (7), Praveen (10), Martin (5), Andro (13), Gokul (8), Melvin (7), Patrick (10), Dominik (8), Henry (7)

We did our best to catch the right spelling of their names but it may remain some misspelling…

The first day has been spent in getting to know each other, and their English level… which for most of them was really low.

They roughly know lots of words, but the pronunciation is often unsteady, the spelling uncertain, and there’s a big lack in sentence construction…

But how to fix all this with such a big and heterogeneous group, and no common language?

There is only one answer: let’s try and see how it may progress!

So, we worked on basic vocabulary (fruit and vegetable, body parts, clothes, animals) and try to lead them to put them in sentences, especially with action verbs.

To explain the meaning of each, we relied on pictures I draw (which were not as bad as I thought, as the recognized them, even the weird dog I made!), pointing ourselves (for body part and clothes) and mime (which made them laugh).

And music again! Chris brought his guitar, and we taught them “Old Mac Donald” (“…had a farm, e-i-e-i-o…” remember?), which was useful for the animals (and, I thought, to make the difference between “here” and “there”, but that was too hard for them}

Even with a break, with drinks and biscuits provided by JRDT, keeping them focused for two hours was a hard task! So we resorted to game to get their attention, even if the balance between interest and excitation is a fine one to find!

Raj says that an important impediment to learn is the fear of speaking… From hearing them laughing and shouting the answers, I dare to think some of them lost a bit of it.

It’s now Chris who will go on with this holiday English class (which might transform into an evening class), I wish him good luck with this nice, sweet and… exhausting kids!

 

 

Picture time is time to monkey around!

Me(Aline) and Chris with English lesions’ at R.N.Kandigai.

Don’t we look like very serious teachers?

Bye kids!

I had the opportunity to visit some others JRTD projects:

-          School toilets, in Manampathy preschool and elementary school. I must say I was surprised that it has to be provided by an independent association when I think it should be part of the school running expenses

-          Home toilets for poor families. They were very proud to show us the toilets,  

-          Gipsy community. These families live on their own, out of medicine herbs selling, birds breeding… When we went to visit, they ask for English lessons as well, which is a good thing as their educational needs are big, but Raj ask them first to prepare a space for the class to take place and call back when everything is ready… which wasn’t apparently the case while I was here!

Tomorrow I take my travel up again, heading for Mamalapuram, where I’ll try to visit Geeta’s store!

I here thank very much Raj and his lovely family to have welcomed me so warmly, and hope that JRTD will get more help and especially money to carry its numerous projects