| Blog: Straight from our projects in India's slums |
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11 November: Delhi is very smoggy and ridden with traffic. I arrived midday and drove to the hotel. Like many cities in the developing world, Delhi is rapidly expanding and over populated. 12 November: On our first full day of work, we met with the Head of one of our New Project Partners – New Opportunities for Women – and visited their centre for children, located in an urban slum. The centre has 3 room dividers which were all painted by the children and the India on 2 Wheels Challenge event participants who visited in September. The centre is an after school club for all children in the slum, designed to keep them safe and continue their education well after school has closed. The children were very animated and extremely confident. Before I arrived they’d been practising their singing and play for Universal Children’s Day so they were still quite lively from that! They go to school and then attend the centre from 2-5pm for remedial education classes in IT, English, Hindi and Maths. I also met one of the new mentors; a fantastic and motivated young man still attending school while teaching Languages and IT to the younger children at the centre. He told me he loved teaching and was interested in becoming a teacher. I just wished I remembered to bring the camera to get a shot of him! 14 November: Today I travelled to meet Parul Sheth, the Director of project partner Shaishev. I cannot begin to express my admiration for Parul. I find that every time I talk to her I often rethink my views. She’s very humble yet challenging, soft spoken yet commanding in presence and incredibly wise. It’s clear that she is respected by everyone in the community. Shaishev run one of my favourite projects, Balsena, a child rights initiative meaning ‘children’s collective’, which seeks to strengthen children’s access to their rights through a young persons’ union, the first independent children’s union in Gujarat district, India. My meeting with Parul was very enlightening. We discussed how Balsena monitor and assess progress; how they get all the children to successfully participate in the Union (something which could be utilised across other child rights projects in India) and how Childreach International’s partnership will move forward into 2011. After meeting with Parul I attended one of their child rights collective meetings to see the process involved. On this day, parents were invited to discuss the issue of child labour and the Right to Education Act and what it means for them. In exchange for attending, a snack, tea and coffee were offered along with a copy of the Child Rights and Right to Education Act so they could spread its messages to other members of their community. In Bhavnagar City, there was a clear and inspiring push towards advocating for the importance of Child Rights. 15 November: Today I journeyed to Piplaj, a slum settlement in Gujarat (see the video showing the drive to the slum and the picture at the top). Our partner, Centre for Development (CfD), run education centres, filling the gap left by the government who have so far refused to set up schools in the area. The children in the first two centres in classes1-3 were very focussed and hard working. We tried not to distract the classes as much as possible but when we entered the classroom a few of them asked the Bal Dost (teachers) and myself to move away from the blackboard so they could continue their work. Amazing! Also please take a look at my welcome into one of the classrooms, which I shot on my mobile (below). Despite having very little and poor living conditions, these children find all sorts of ways to have fun and fit in studying at the same time! To give you an idea about the conditions these incredibly resilient children
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