Work Hard, Play Hard

I just realized that I’ve written about almost everything else except the details of my project. The project area I chose to focus on is education because of the significant impact that education can have on shaping a person’s life. I’ve spent the past week interacting with kids, parents, and other volunteers from various slums where Sewa Sahyog projects currently run trying to understand the current views and problems faced in slums related to education.

Kids grow up seeing that finding ways to get money quick leads to less stress. So the concept of education being an investment that will lead to greater financial stability later is not explained. One major way that Sewa Sahyog is working to keep kids in school is through abhyasikas. Abhyasikas (study centers) are run by older students from the slums and volunteers every day of the week. It provides a good environment for the kids away from the distractions in their homes so they can focus on their homework and spend time with other kids.

It’s been so much fun going to visit various abhyasikas and interact with the kids and teachers. We’ve been going to Ram Nagar to teach English the past couple mornings and while we teach them how to have a basic conversation in English and sing the song “head, shoulders, knees, and toes…” to learn body parts, I’m pretty sure they secretly giggle at our silly sounding American accents. They all come running up to us with their notebooks and pencils ready to learn, but kid’s attention spans can only last so long. We’ve played chess, carom, badminton, and cricket with them and I noticed that my skills in all of these are clearly not up to their level. We visited Jay Prakash Nagar and Ekta Nagar after that and played some of the same games. I think I’m going to be really good at chess and carom by the end of the summer :) Cricket on the other hand is something that might take me a lifetime to get good at. But baseball is something a bit more familiar and we taught the boys at Ram Nagar how to play baseball with a cricket bat and ball.

Today we got to go to an event part of the schoolkit drive currently going on to provide basic school supplies for the upcoming year. The volunteers were all from IT companies in Pune who helped to pack notebooks, pencils, crayons, and drawing books into backpacks for the kids. The assembly lines we formed worked so well that in a few hours hundreds of backpacks were ready to be distributed to the slums. It was fun to work with everyone but it made me even happier thinking about the smiles on the kids faces when they got their backpacks filled with school supplies getting ready to work hard this school year.