at-admin Street Smart Diaries will resume the routine, daily updates from tomorrow, i.e. January 14 since I am grouchy about the cancellation of my Auli trip and Penny’s computer crashed. I shall head back to my ‘happy place’, i.e. the school with our kids tomorrow and will update the Diaries for both days then.
Today we started with alphabets!!! Whoopie!! It was a lazy beginning with a few kids coming in and hanging around post a nice meal at the dhaba we had zero-ed in on, yesterday. Gudakesh drew the alphabet क for the kids and they started colouring in it and through the day, we had everybody discussing all words…
After yesterday’s fiasco we acted on Neelu’s (our team member who is excellent and enviously patient with the kids!) suggestion and brought in plasticine for those children who were no longer interested in painting.
So our fragile little house of cards almost came tumbling down today. We think that maybe the children have been painting for 6 days now and they need something new to do. Art is no longer engaging their minds, except for a few like Rajkumar and Naina.
We have officially arrived! Today was the inauguration of Street Smart at Rein Basera and it was a beautiful, personal, no-frill program attended by all friends and supporters of Street Smart, besides us and the kids, of course. We missed a lot of people associated with the project since they are not in town.
At the start of Street Smart, we had decided that we would set school five days a week initially since we had only five people as part of the project. But since tomorrow (Sunday, Jan 09) is the official inauguration, we did not want a break before tomorrow so we went to Astley Hall for a brief period of time today….
In my previous post I had written that we have a lot of girls coming in, which is exciting. Here is how.
Today Shaila got a nice little wooden table for us to put our art work on! We argued about the best place to set it at and finally settled on the pavement adjoining Astley Hall’s boundary wall where we could sit under the sun and also hog the usual space around the boundary wall! Little greedy group, us! The table…
I am assuming here that there is a lot of people following the blog but if for nobody else, I have to write this for that evil part of my brain that has been waiting for the daily posts to discontinue so it can mock me!
Day 3 was eventful and showed the first, faint traces of a routine as the kids sat down to paint with us under the sun again. We were joined by a host of strangers today too and we realized that contrary to what the widely held belief about people being selfish and apathetic is, they do want to be part of something…
