I thought it was about time that I sent you all an email just to show I’ve not disappeared into the black hole of Calcutta!
I’ve been in India for three weeks now? Two weeks? Well this is my third weekend anyway!
Thankfully the time has seen the threat from Swine Flu dissipate and the notion that Westerners are carriers of Swine Flu change into you’re a Westerner you should protect yourself from SF by wearing a scarf!
I think I have acclimatised to Pune’s climate – I even wear my jeans out especially in the evenings. We are having a debate on whether we should use the fan in the evenings or just keep the windows open. Shame it’s not sunny enough for sunglasses so can’t use them as a disguise against eye contact!
As well as running the Community Volunteer Programme, Sangam also runs events/sessions for Girl Guides/Scouts based around all sorts of things. We participated in the Feasts and Festivals event which celebrated Gangapati. The other participants were from the UK – both senior section and trefoil guild. We are very pleased that they have left! They were very irritating! Nothing was right for them – the food, the programme, the mosquitoes, the climate...
Today Sangam starts an Advocacy seminar on Migration and once again Sangam is full of people from all over the world. There are ladies from the Faroe Islands, Denmark, Kenya, Egypt, Mexico, Pakistan, and Ireland ... all here to develop an advocacy plan for WAGGGS on migration. I am really pleased that we are able to participate in some of their sessions and discussions as it is a very interesting topic and I think I will learn a lot!
Just a little background for those not familiar with WAGGGS – WAGGGS stands for World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts. WAGGGS have four World Centres. One of these centres is Sangam in Pune, India. The other three are in London, the Swiss Alps and Mexico.
Sangam I believe is the only of the centres of offer the community volunteer programme. Sangam runs two CVP programmes each year with maximum six volunteers.
In this programme there are five CVP’s including me. Mollie is from Shropshire in UK, Katsuko is from Japan, Sara and Linnea are from Sweden. Mollie, Katsuko and I will all be working with an organisation called Mobile Crèche. Sara and Linnea are working with Door Step School.
Mollie and I are working at the same Mobile Crèche site. It is within walking distance from Sangam – but it’s a good long walk! Our crèche site is smaller compared with Katsuko’s. The site Katsuko will be working at is where all the call centres are being built. Our site is on an apartment complex. There are sixteen mobile crèche sites in Pune as well as in Mumbai and Delhi and other cities in India. Our classroom is long and thin, it is basic – concrete walls, with corrugated iron roof. There are rails like bike rails in London which have hammocks slung between them for the babies to sleep in. We have approx 70-80 kids at our site, around 15 are babies (under two years) and 14 go to school – 12 girls and 2 boys.
Mobile Crèches base their non formal education around a theme each month. This month’s theme is soil and we have been thinking hard about how we can use soil as a basis for education. We are thinking about planting some seeds and watching them grow but we might not have the room to do this as our classroom is literally a shed in the middle of a building site.
There does seem to be some structure around their days. Starting at 10am with some gruel for breakfast. After breakfast the older children go through their school work while the younger children seem to do tactile things – like cutting paper or doing puzzles – things to help with their hand coordination. At our site the mums come at about 11.30am to feed the babies. Once this is done it is usually time for lunch. The construction site manager provides an employee to the site who does the cooking and cleaning. I am unsure if this lady has children at the crèche or not.
It seems Friday afternoon’s consist of English classes. Last Friday we taught the alphabet to the kids and it was amazing to see the three year olds be able to recite their ABC’s! They are also all quite good at roman letters which was surprising compared with some of the kids at Brownies and Rainbows/Pippins I have seen.
Mollie and I will be given a group of kids to work with each and we will either swap them over in the afternoons or teach the same things and keep the same group.
This afternoon we will be making some resources based around soil. We have a cupboard in the programme room full of resources left by other CVP’s like hand puppets and more education games.
I am really looking forward to actually starting work as the children are all very nice and seem eager to learn. I know that we probably will not make much progress with the kids as we are here for such a short period of time, but I look forward to seeing what we can achieve even if it is just a smile each day!
Apart from the excitement of work, we have spent quite a bit of time shopping and eating cake!
It seems that one of the pastimes of Westerner’s in Pune is to hunt out the best chocolate cake in Pune. It is amazing how many cafes there are! We have not tried to infamous German Bakery yet – we just usually do Barrista or others in Lane 7 Koreogan Park. German Bakery is in Lane 1 with the Osho Ashram. Osho is one of the main attractions for Westerners to Pune – and it really does give us Westerners a bad name!
I am really hoping that we can spend more time exploring Laxmi Road as it is a lot more exciting than I previously thought – and I think MG road is going to start getting boring! MG Road is the Western shopping strip of Pune whereas Laxmi Road is the traditional shopping area of Pune. Laxmi Road is where we have Swine Flu troubles so we are still avoiding the area.
All us volunteers have been out a few times together – for lunch or in the evenings. One night we went to Hard Rock Cafe – who would have thought Pune had a real HRC? It is just like a HRC in any other city I have ever been too – but Pune HRC has a speciality. When YMCA comes on all the waiters (there did not seem to be any waitresses) jump on the bar and starts the actions to the song with a Bollywood twist. It is hilarious!
We have seen quite a few Bollywood films and I know we will be seeing a lot more! The most memorable so far has been Taare Zameen Par. It translates as every child is special and it is about a dyslexic boy and his teacher and I don’t think there was a dry eye in the room it was so moving.
I would like to know what has happened to Bollywood movies, when I first started watching Bollywood films they had a certain charm – now they are as rubbish as Hollywood films,.
A few days have passed since I started writing this email – and I have lost my train of thought!
But it does mean that I have worked two days this week. Monday was interesting. We worked the morning and then went to a staff meeting in the afternoon. It was with all 16 mobile crèche sites and it was very crowded. We met the director of Mobile Crèche Pune. Exciting part of Monday was that we caught the bus into town! Buses are a lot cheaper than rickshaws but their signs are in Marathi ... so we have no idea what bus goes where!!
Today we worked for two hours in the afternoon as we had to participate in some advocacy work here at Sangam. Highlight was that we had two guest speakers – Nirmala the director of Mobile Crèche Pune and Sean – Donna World Centre Manager’s husband who is also a professor at A&T Uni Texas. The topic of discussion was migrants, and we saw a fantastic film on these guest houses in central America which cater for the migrants from central America going into the US of A. We also got a lot more background on the mobile crèches and the people who work on the construction sites.
Mollie and I also did some maths with the kids today – and it was in Marathi so we’re making some progress – just don’t start up a conversation with me just yet!
Tomorrow we have the day off as it is Wednesday – Hindi Lesson day. We’ve also got a cooking lesson at our yoga teacher’s house tomorrow evening!
I don’t think that I have mentioned already about yoga. We have a yoga teacher who comes into Sangam Monday to Saturday 7am to 7.45 am for yoga. And it is great fun. It is not yoga I have done before but it is good all the same. It feels really good to be doing yoga again!
One of the great things at Sangam is international night – and last night was no exception. We have people here from Denmark, Kenya, Canada, Egypt, Faro Islands, Mexico, Nagaland in India, and everyone’s performances were great – dancing, songs, games, and great food! Not to mention the swaps – this selection was great ... a lot of jewellery!!
And my last excitement of the week is ... Guavas. I’ve just tried them for the first time and they are delicious! They taste a bit like feijoas (same family) but are slightly sweeter. And they smell delicious when ripe. I brought four guavas for 10 rupees which is ridiculously cheap for fruit compared with the UK.
Tomorrow we are going to head to Phule Market in the old town which is the traditional fruit and veg market. Mollie and I are really missing fruit and veg, we get them here at Sangam but sometimes you just want to have more!!! We also need to purchase some bracelets as our fellow mobile crèche teachers think it is weird we don’t wear them ... just have not had the opportunity to purchase them yet!
I am trying to keep an up to date blog - www.kylieinindia.blogspot.com and it does have pics from work, and other general pics
If you click on the links for Mollie's travels and also Salininindia you will see other pictures people have taken
will write again soon – it’s post work debrief time
Kylie
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