My niece (Beth) and her boyfriend (Patrick) have been traveling in India for 2 months with one more month to go before they come home. Their first stop was the nothern village of Bir where they volunteered teaching English to young Buddhist monks. Today they are leaving Delhi where they volunteered to work with kids who are the poorest of the poor.
In The Beginning:
Beth describes the school where she and Patrick are working. "We are greeted by 55-58 (I think today we had 62) VERY small faces staring up at us. By small I mean the kids are aged 2.5 to maybe 7? GOOD MOOOENING!
Yesterday I walked to the "big market" and bought some nursery rhyme books, some phoenics books and some "encyclopedias" I tried to base a lesson on them today……tried. No books, no pencils, no chaulkboard, no chairs, no desks…….and headlice."
Upon Leaving:
"We tried to have them just draw and we would label the things they drew. But they didn’t know how to come up with something to draw. We gave the example of the school……. and once they got it they filled in details. But to draw something on their own…… anything. A pig, a dog, a chicken. Nope.
But we had a breakthrough when we came up with the exercise of writting: Aa is for: Then drawing an apple, an ant, an axe, an arrow and writting the word beside it. From then on it was smooth sailing. Each day we did four letters. They would draw and copy and bring it to us and show us so they could get a check mark! On day two of this new found favorite they started to embellish… add details. Add eyelashes to that eye! Add eyebrows! And at the end of the day they would fight over who got to come up to the front to read the new words and spell them out. Aa is for apple A-P-P-L-E!
Sure, maybe we didnt teach them rocket science, but those kids now know the concept of drawing, how to form letters and common shapes, the letters of the alphabet and most of the sounds they make etc. Yes, we had difficulties like a shortage of words that start with "Ii" besides those concerning Ice… what’s ice?"
We don’t have any photos from Beth yet but the above are all from Delhi slums where approximately 52% of Delhi’s 20 million people live.
Photos from TrekEarth – Learning about the world through photography.