Imagine This

                                                                                                                                                                                                                 - Mani (Early Child Care & Curriculum Support)

The following is a story created by Ambu...a child we lost to relocation, a child who pushed us to think alternately....

There was a tree. An ice-cream tree! 

On it sat a leopard eating ice-creams. Next to that tree was another tree. A chocolate tree... 

Not any chocolate, but a butter chocolate tree. 

On this tree sat a dog. Along came a boy. He was on his way somewhere. 

The leopard decided to join him. He got down from the tree and sat on the boy’s head. 

The dog climbed down his tree and sat on the leopard’s head. The boy walked on with the leopard and the dog on his head. On their way they saw a cow. She wanted to join them and sat on the dog’s head. 

The boy realised it was getting too late so he started running. As he ran the animals fell off one by one.  First the cow, then the dog and finally the leopard. 

The boy continued on his way.

Musings of a Volunteer

                                                                                                                                                                                                          - Narayan Mandyam (Volunteer)  

          I was in between jobs and had a clear few weeks before my new assignment. I had pottered about for a week at home, when I got a call from my dear friend Mani, who is a part of ‘Gubbachi’ team. She wanted me to ‘volunteer’ for a Summer Camp with the Government School in Kodathi. The Summer Camp for the Government School children was anchored by the Gubbachi team. I had no idea what ‘volunteering’ meant here, but I thought that this would be better than reading books at home!

       My volunteering was scheduled for 4 days, between May 3 to May 6. Given my years of corporate servitude background, off I went with my laptop bag on Day 1 to meet my “boss” Somya. I cannot recollect, but I might have even asked Somya for a ‘Job Description’ of a volunteer. In my corporate experience, I like to be prepared and avoid surprises. I would later learn that surprises are a part of a daily life in Gubbachi.

         I reached a bit early on that date and met Deyone, Preethy, Nomita, Rizwan and Somya; and some of the facilitators. I understood that the summer camp was being conducted for about forty children spread over two classes. Both the classes had two sessions, each, with a snack break fit in between.  

           I started spending time with the children and fancied that I was pretty liked by them. The penny dropped on day 2, after I realized that the only charm I had with the kids was my “Olympus” point and shoot camera. They loved being photographed.  Who knows, maybe there is an actor or a photographer hidden amongst them!

         Over the four days, I met some fantastic facilitators, who had taken time off to teach the children. From a 16 year young Rohit Rao to experienced teachers like Nomita, Supriya, Samvartika and Harshita; each of the facilitator was trying to engage the high energy kids in multiple ways.

The summer camp was very actively attended by the children who did several fun activities, interspersed with learning activities as well. Younger children loved the clay workshops, art work and sports. The older children worked on colours, word ‘Bingo’ and basic English prepositions. What were commonly adored by both the classes were the drawing and storytelling sessions.  The children made personal connections with some of the facilitators and wondered when the facilitators would return.  During my observations, I also realized that some of the children from the Government School, were behind the learning curve, as compared to other schools. With all the investment that everyone is making, hopefully this should turn around.

          Did you ask what I was really doing at the school? Apart from eating the yummy buns during the snack break, I realized that there was a completely different universe, outside of spreadsheets and cubicles. It was amazing to see the children being completely trusting and how they could bond with someone whom they had met only for a few hours. I also realized that handling twenty extremely boisterous children requires tremendous patience. Teachers around the world – please take a bow.

Thank you Gubbachi team for giving me an opportunity to be a part of your efforts.

I am hoping to return to the summer camp before my new innings in a corporate booth. 

Our Preparedness

                                                                                                                         - Deyone (Centre Co-ordinator and Facilitator)  
Most children at GUBBACHI are unschooled or schooled sporadically. We seem to have sorted out the problem of generating a need in the children to come and engage in the learning experience. A lot of thought and planning goes into the whys, hows and whats of facilitating literacy and numeracy. It is evolving. The core guiding principle of GUBBACHI (every child is unique and is valued), makes this process of evolving curriculum a constant in our lives.

Most children are able to sit and listen to instructions of the facilitators and respond to it positively; if we can say, they conform to our curriculum and lesson plans. But there are also those children who don’t see any meaning in the activity of “learning” as we define it. These are the children who are at the risk of dropping out of the bridge program...possibly out of education for life.

We soon identified some of the demons that the children are fighting:

-                   some are unable or hesitant to express themselves because of lack of vocabulary or fear of failure or not being accepted.  

-                   some have under-developed fine motor skills; hence they are not able to hold the pencil or pen and write as other children of their age.

-                   And some children are not finding the pedagogy and content interesting enough to learn.

         Having zeroed in on the problem we decided to get cracking

         We now have a bridge to the bridge. 

         We have an initial 3 week program for children when they join the centre. It has mainly three parts: expressing oneself, introduction to numeracy and building vocabulary and phonemic awareness.

Expressing oneself: Children are given opportunities to communicate with adults and peers around them in a non-threatening way. For example, they are asked to sketch whatever they like for an hour. Most of them use one or twoA4 sized paper per session. Once done with their sketching they sit in a circle and share what they have drawn with the facilitator and peers. In the first week it is free drawing.  Later they are asked to draw about their day or home or their daily walk to school. Not judging the children for the drawing gives them a feeling of being accepted as they are and their expressions. At the end of 3^rd week children who were not ready to talk, open up and start sharing their drawings ...and experiences.

 Numeracy: Our numeracy session are very simple. We sit near the school gate and count the number of vehicles passing by. Students learn to count till 10 and then we again start from 1. We count the number of leaves on the plants. Realise it is a lot. We see patterns in leaves and walk in straight lines and become conscious of the ‘right side’ and ‘left side’ while exploring the campus.

Building vocabulary and phonemic awareness: We follow the noun awareness route. Children name the things around them. For many children it is a new idea to split one word into separate sounds and for some others surprising to realise that a sentence is made up of separate words and not a single piece of long word with some tune.

       We are gaining confidence in our beliefs as more and more children begin to decode alphabets into sounds and then words and then some meaning…a meaning that might overlap with what others also understand … but often unique to them. We are also gaining confidence that if we stay true to compassion more simple solutions will emerge for a complex problems.

Morning stories

                                                                                                 - Preethy Rao (Teacher & Curriculum Support) At Gubbachi, every morning starts in a circle –teachers and students share and reconnect sitting in a circle. This is a time when we get a glimpse of the children’s lives and hear about the many real and make believe moments (sometimes hard to tell apart) that make up their eventful childhoods.

Here is a bagful of anecdotes that we have heard:

Time for sharing!

• Shashikant was once married to a stone by his sister during play. Another time, attempts were made to marry Shashikant to a dog, but when it was time to tie the ‘tali’ the dog ran away (at the altar)! (Playing ‘marriage’ is common. ‘Marrying’ means tying a make believe ‘tali’ (mangalsutra) made out of any old string and a piece of turmeric tied to it.)  
• Playing ‘house’ is also common. Cooking for the family, pregnant wives delivering babies and coming of age ceremonies (Dry runs of life that get enacted in great detail.)
• In reality, Ratna’s family is waiting for their weekly payment which the contractor hasn’t paid and Nazia’s father came home drunk. Both families were on the edge that evening.
• Kasim went to the ‘ooru santhe’ (village fair back home) and is now the proud owner of a blingy plastic mobile phone called ‘Dhoom Machale’, that belted out repetitive tunes .
• When they were walking home Lakamma and Kavitha, saw, some men in a vehicle offering them, ‘sweets , trying to abduct’ them. They ran and ran.  Lakamma was so scared that she came down with fever that evening. (Fever is commonly cited as a logical outcome of fear and fear of abduction is strong.
• A few friends climbed up trees to get at ripe guavas and chikoos from the “owners” trees. They were beaten up for it (said with chuckles).
• Once Harish tried to climb the same tree but he fled - scared - when he thought that the tree was a ghost waving its hands in the wind (Middle Earth Ents in Lord of the Rings?)  The labour camp folklore goes that a ghost of a woman killed on the nearby railway track haunts the tree.  

Experiences of a learner-facilitator

                                                                                                                                          - Deyone (Centre Co-ordinator and Facilitator)  

           At GUBBACHI we are trying to learn and find solutions to issues of school dropouts among migrant children at Kodathi, a peri-urban area of Bangalore. The first question we had was why are children out of school? And during the survey before we started our centre, we realized that out of a multitude of reasons there were these  3 reasons which were immediate in the child's experience.

1.     Children need to stay back at home to take care of their younger sibling(significantly higher in case of an older girl child, though there were exceptions)

2.     Bad experiences during previous schooling stint.

3.     Fear of parents of their children getting abducted on the way to school 

         As an intervention we had to address these issues in order to bring children to the centre. The first step was to start a preschool centre, for the younger siblings of the school going children, adjacent to the main class room so that older children are at peace to engage in learning and not than taking care of the younger ones.

        We assured the children that they would be physically and emotionally respected. They didn’t believe in us in the beginning. Their experience at the centre is helping them trust adults better.  Now, there are moments at the centre when children just appear and take admissions by themselves and we have to go and find their homes/parents. Existing Gubbis and government school children are our biggest champions: our brand ambassadors.

       Next immediate point to tackle was the fear of the parents that their children may get abducted. Solution was to talk to the construction company and the community to make arrangements so that one person from the community brings the children to school and takes them back in the evening back. Inspite of of all our efforts we have lost one child to this fear...we have not been able to convince the parents of Rahul, an extremely bright boy, to send their precious child to us and we will take care of him as ours  
    One failure can't put us down. We have 57 children at the centre now... Our simple first steps to help children begin to experience the learning space.