Fig 1: Hygiene Day excitement at READ school
I would lay in bed until the birds began to chirp and the sun began to shine through my window. Although this sounds like a storybook sentence, I indeed woke up to this every morning in the village. And mind you, the goats bleating and the dogs barking indeed compose a rhythm, far better than those classic alert sounds on your iPhone.
Fig 2: Income Generation - Handmade cards for women employment
For the most part, we had power cuts towards late night, due to which the motor wouldn’t run all night, and hence the water tank would never fill up. As a result, there was no water to bathe or brush with. We would drink Filter Coffee before getting ready for the day. Traditional south Indian food with some aromatic spices and freshly taken out coconut water would greet us at our dining table. We would quietly overeat every day and pack our bag with notepads, laptops in case we had to show videos, game materials, internet modem for our data never worked and other necessities.
Depending on the schedule for the day, we would travel to one of our schools which was 20 minutes away by car/bus or go to nearby community centers or training rooms to meet with teachers, HIV+ community members, scholarship students, and others. Our goals were well defined with a daily duties calendar that was jointly made by us and the members of the NGO we were working with, to ensure that we were not disturbing their schedule too much.
Fig 3: Teaching Hostel girls (grade 6 - college) Computer programming
On the days we interacted with grown-up community members, it was easier to continue from where we left the previous day. However, when we would go back to the school every day, we would have to give the students sufficient time to remind them our names, what we were there for and warm up that connection. We would do this by going to all the classes mostly by dancing with them. Then we would get into our meeting. For instance, when we met girls from grades 4 and 5 to give them necessary insight into menstrual health/hygiene and the stigma associated with it in Indian society, we made sure to sit down on the floor with them in a circle and tell them a little about ourselves, our names and get that same information from them. They would tell us a little bit about the animals they have at home, their siblings and what they do and so on before we would get into the discussion about the physical and emotional changes that are associated with puberty.
On days we taught them computer programming with an interactive platform called Scratch, developed by MIT, we would pause after every activity we showed, so that we could allow them to play around with what we just taught them. It was really fulfilling to see them experiment around and add sounds, special effects and get extremely happy with the same. Indeed we felt that we had accomplished our goal when students who did not have sufficient exposure to the English language or technology were able to do such a great job with this resource.
Whether or not we finished every single task that we had put down on our list for this trip, we would call our initiatives successful because we were able to bring smiles to people’s faces and generate some very positive feedback!
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