Slum visit on 18th June,2006

Ok... Ill just give a glimpse of things happended this weekend.
As usual we all met at around 2 o clock in Saidapet Teachers college. We started discussing what activities to be carried that day..We initially had
Arun
Shiva
Divya
Thiagu
Mohana.

Mohana already has some prior experiences on these work so she was explaining few concepts on it..
Then that happened. It was a little pathetic event. I have explained in "Incident or Accident" -
Then
Ramya
Manoj
Karthik
Balaji
joined us...after some introduction and other fun we moved into the slum..

Last week we promised the kids to come on saturday 3 o clock.
When we entered into the slum all asked "y didnt u come akka.. we were waiting for you" - We apologized a lot.

Later we came to know that saturday all the kids wore new dress and waiting for us from 1 o clock in the place where we used to meet and have activites..So sweet on their part and so bad on our part.. :-(
But it was all only for a moment they started to come and play with us..we used to have a scout clap initially (1 2 3 1 2 3 1 .. 2 .. 3 . ).. this acts like a signal to other kids that we are starting to play..so the kids will join us...

after that we played few games... and sang few songs... last week we had 100 children and we engaged them for 2 solid hours.. this time many children were missing (all went some places...) but the enthusiasm remained in all children.. the fact i was not so effective this time is i missed my pal Hema who used to back up and also quite nervous and kind of depressed of the event mentioned in the Blog.. So it was little unmanageable..But Ramya and Balaji helped me in organising a lot.. we played "Eli -- Poonai", "Chinna paanai periya paanai". I had to engage the children for sometime .. meanwhile another half of the team was talkin with the volunteers on conducting an event called metric mela next week...

We will be having 10 stalls.. two kids will be responsible for each stall. Each stall will be responsible for a kind of metric. For example in one stall they will be having a cabbage and will enquire about the diameter of the cabbage. this would be interesting things to kids and they can also learn about metrics.. like that children will calculate the length with help of groomstick etc etc.. counting number of individual rice in a bowl etc etc...So this activity will be carried out next week Sunday and we will have regular visit on Saturday @3

Another good thing happened in this visit is that - the other side of the hand came forward came for a clap... Yes some men in the village came forward to set-up a proper structure for the children to sit and study in the tuition.. This is indeed a remarkable turn out. Thanks to Suresh and Moideen - people in the slum.. They were talking to Karthi and Balaji. They responded properly. Special thanks to them. As usual after we finished our work we all had tea there. it was a compulsion from them. they are happy in having us as their guests and give us tea on their account. Last week they gave us in Plastic cups. we told dont use plastics.. They told "we do have tumblers but dont know if u will drink in our tumblers." - Go ahead akka.. we are same... So this time we had a much relative kind treatment.. we were all made to sit in a mat .. then all were served tea.. the children didnt have to heart to leave us and go... So there were few kids with us.. :-) we had few dance and songs from the kids.. see it in manojsays.blogspot.com... All kids got the promise from us that we wont disappoint them next week... we gave all our hands to ensure it.. and then we left out from the slum... there at the end of the slum there was a kid who was playing with us now washing vessels.. she twinkled her eyes and said bye to us.. that will keep us motivated for this full weekend.. lets see what next....