Hello, my name is Christian (short: Chris, because this is much easier for most of the children). I am 18 years old and I am from Germany. This is my first post on JRDT blog, but you may have seen me and heard of me in Aline’s post. I am doing a voluntary service in India for 1 year. Therefore I am working for JRDT in Manampathy Kandigai. I arrived on 31^st of March, stayed 1 week in Bangalore and after that came to Manampathy. I am very happy to stay together with Raj’s family and I almost feel like at home. But now I would like to tell you something about JRDT’s projects and the work I am doing here.

Do you remember the photos in Aline’s post? After I installed the 2 computers on the table in children’s home, I had some work updating these computers. Lots of things happened since 2005, when they were used last time. After that was finished, Cedrik (a volunteer from France, he will stay till the end of May) and I started a computer class for children on Monday, the 13^th of May. The participants are the between 8 and 21 years old. But that is no problem, because sometimes the elder students can help us by translating Cedrik’s and my words into Tamil. We are teaching basic computer knowledge to the children. In the first week we showed them how to work with Microsoft Word and practiced typing very much. We are planning to show them the inside of the computer and we want to teach them the use of Microsoft Excel and maybe even Microsoft PowerPoint. But in my opinion our main aim is to bring the safe use of the mouse and the keyboard to the children, because actually this is their biggest problem. We are planning to teach children’s from JRDT SISTER HOME. When this will be finished, we also want to show the children the safe use of the Internet. Raj made me to the leader of this whole computer project. I hope he will be satisfied with my work.

We also do a spoken English class for children in the afternoon. We try to teach them the basics of communication in English and basic vocabulary like fruits, vegetables, body parts, animals etc.