Towards the end of an unbelievably amazing year, as the children and staff are busy preparing for that BIG one-year milestone that we reach on January 03 but that we will celebrate on January 01, Christmas Day brought a beautiful chance of a well-deserved break for our kids.

Led by our Coordinator Vandita, the children and staff first decked-up a little tree and the board at Rein Basera with Christmas decorations. Here is a picture, though I wish at least one of them was smiling!

Vandita also painted the kids’ faces with Christmas tattoos.

Mrs. Charu Goyal, who also took these pictures told the children stories about Christmas and Santa Claus. It was a good day to take a break from the hectic work that the entire team has being doing to prepare for our big day!

On that front, we had started preparing a dance with the older kids on the song “Hawa Hawa” from the Bollywood movie Rockstar. The song tells a beautiful story of a queen who would sneak out of her palace of gold at night and wear out 12 pairs of shoes every night! The king comes to know about this and orders his spy to follow the queen and find out where she goes. The spy sees the queen tiptoeing out of the palace and follows her quietly to find her go to a place where the commoners of the kingdom were singing and dancing and to his horror, finds the queen dancing uninhibited with the commoners. She dances so much that she wears out 12 pairs of shoes every night! The king comes to know of this and furious, he sends for his queen. He rants and raves for he feels that the queen has humiliated him by dancing among commoners and forbids her from  leaving the castle again. The queen smiles and tells her king that she does not care for his riches and palaces of gold, for they give her no happiness. She wants, instead to be free and to dance with all her passion. In the end, we are told that the queen has now left her king, is dressed in the same rags as the commoners and full of spirits and gaiety, is dancing barefoot.

I love this song because it focuses on a very important lesson for our children: the lesson about the relative worth of money. These children have experienced a lot of pain and cruelty for money and most of the time, it is the only thing that saves them from a flogging or then on the flip side is the reason for being beaten. It is essential to remind them time and again, that money is important but it is not the ‘be all end all’ of life. So before beginning the dance steps for the song, we had a nice long chat about money, love and the relative importance of each.

We have had to, unfortunately exclude this song from the one-year celebrations because we do not have adequate time to practice our dance steps. However, we will definitely perform this dance by the end of February. We will have full costumes and will record this song and share the  link here when it is completed.

For now, our kids will present a play and a group song during the program. We are also working on a video clip that will include pictures and short video clips of the kids as they take us through the last one year when we set up our program at about six different places and the things we learnt and did together. Should be a good one!

As I usually say, watch this space for more details! 🙂