One hour

One hour a week is all it takes to make some difference to the lives of a few children who unlike us cannot afford to buy even a pencil and notebook for their education. Recently my friend and i decided to start teaching in a government school on behalf of an NGO - Aashayein- which aims at providing basic English communication skills to such children. With the support of the NGO students are provided with pencils,notebooks,uniforms and other necessities as and when required. Volunteers were/are scarce but still a few like minded people came forward and the teaching sessions started. We all reached by 8 am on Saturday and were greeted 'GOOD MORNING MISS/SIR' by many enthusiastic and smiling faces. It was a great experience for all of us as most of us don't know the regional language (Kannada) and yet managed to keep the children engaged. The children were also excited and most of them made efforts to learn and respond to what we were teaching them.

After teaching i left the place with mixed emotions. I was happy that a few people had come forward to help and the children were also learning. But it saddened me to see that at such a tender age many children had lost their innocence. There was an incident when a boy had snatched a rupee from someone and there was a big fight for it. In some other class a boy had lost Rs 10 and was so worried about being beaten up by his father. Some children had just a scrap paper and a small bit of a pencil for writing. The school starts at 8 am but many children come by only 9 am or so but they make sure they reach school before 10 am. The reason being free lunch scheme provided by the government. The parents also send small kids along with the older ones who attended school so that those kids could be looked after while they were at work and plus all their children would get lunch too. Too many things happening in a small building with no playground or even benches for students to sit.

I hope we are able to achieve our goals set of which one of them includes increasing the number of students attending school.

Volunteers: Aprajitha, Manish, Yasoda, Deepika, Shilpa, Harish, Nadeem, Dutta, Megha, Reeba, Sucheta