Experience with EduCARE India, SWASH and other projects.

Hello EduCARE....I am very glad to work with EduCARE-India. I have learned many things here. I was always improving myself. This was a really good platform for me. I feel proud to has been part of EduCARE-India.This has been my second time working with EduCARE-India and there are many things that popped into my head when i`m thinking about my first month in RAIT.

Writing a blog post can be really difficult for me. Where could I start from? Ordering my thoughts, I would focus my feeling on the arrival to the Rait Center and the engagement with the community, especially building relationship with the kids of the village as well as with the shopkeepers/ and trash holder. 

I immediately fell in love with Himachal Pradesh and I mean it, it`s such a beautiful place! I definitely enjoyed my job as project manager for Swash Project. I still remember my first day meeting with the shopkeepers and local gov. Grampanchayat members. At that time I did not understand how could I deal with them, but after few weeks I found my way.

Spending time with the kids in Fun Club was extremely funny! We did different activities and games every Sunday in Rait Gov. School. We also had the possibility to prepare some educational activities related to the Waste Management and Sanitation. The kids really liked it! 

I would like to show you some photos representing the path I follow during my EduCARE India experience: 

At the beginning of my internship I started to work with Kevin the SWASH Coordinator. We had a meeting with the Sitaram. We had a great conversation about the Swash project and solid waste management system: how can they separate the trash, how many were the different kind of trash.....etc.

SWASH meeting in Mcleod Ganj with Sitaram son

Then me together with Sylvia,Madhu,Craig and Tom went to meet the local Government and all members of the Grampanchayat as well as the local community. It was our first step to try to engage the community and it was very successful.

Meeting with local Government Grampanchayt in BDO Office

Here you can see the trash collected form the shopkeepers and sold to the trash holder. He`s a very good person, always supportive and kind with us. We built a very good relationship with him.

Selling our trash in Rait

The Fun club with the kids is amazing! They are doing every time something funny with us. The girls are always very happy to see us in Girls Club. We also found out that involving the mothers in the Girls Club in our office has been very beneficial in maintaining the girls’ interests and focus. Plus, it is also a good platform to engage with the kids’ mothers and the families overall increasing EduCARE’s visibility. 

In these last weeks kids made artistic boxes with us. They decorated the boxes, they cut the important things they find in the magazines and then they put inside the boxes. It was a very successful and amazing things...I enjoyed every moment!

Our charming kids at the Fun Club and Girls Club

Our Girls Club activities

This is very sad moment for me because I am going back home in Varanasi. I have to leave all the Rait team and the community. I will miss everybody and our amazing house. I will try to express my feelings for my good friends writing down a few words:

Forever is a very long time. How is it that people can talk so casually about a concept that we cannot even wrap our minds around? Sometimes we have a friend and we sense that our souls are very closely connected. We know that the connection is above time and space. We know that wherever we are in our lives we will always remain friends. Even if we do not see each other for years we are able to pick up right where we left off. This is what people mean when they say friends forever.

Friends Forever 2015-2016

THANK YOU EduCARE India, THANK YOU RAIT

Pooja Gautam 

SWASH Project Manager 

Rait, India

Settling in India

I came to India with excitement and fear: I was on one hand excited to move to India and start my internship with EduCARE, and on the other hand afraid that my internship with EduCare wouldn’t be as I had imagined. Despite of my mixed feelings, I booked my one-way ticket to Delhi. Looking back, I’m so happy that I decided to come to India. So much has happened since I left my comfortable life in Norway 2 months ago... Let me start from the beginning.

My first week with EduCare was amazing! I spent 5 days living with a family in Naddi, learning about their culture and costumes. When I wasn’t attending workshops or interacting with new interns, I usually spent my time observing my host family everyday life.

Savita and Sunita's family 

After spending 5 days in Naddi, I moved to Rait, a centre which is located 2 hours from Naddi. During my first week at the new centre, I spent my days getting to know the community. I didn’t start my After School Program project – Fun Club – before my second week at the centre. My first day with the kids in Fun Club was a lot of fun! We did different activities and games to get to know one another. One of the activities involved tossing a ball at a player while remembering his/her favourite hobby. We also did some drawing. After my first Fun Club, I felt confident and that my experience with EduCare would be good.

 

Children from Rait attending Fun Club

A girl making a drawing during Fun Club

Besides from Fun Club, I taught English once a week at our main office. Teaching English was with no doubt my favourite activity during my entire week; it was immensely rewarding to see the kids learn English, and improve their speaking. Because of the kids’ eagerness to learn English, my job felt very meaningful.

Hellen teaching English to the kids in Rait

Even though I loved my job as a project manager for ASP, I had a desire to gain more responsibility in the organisation. When the HR Coordinator position became available in late October, I had a talk with the administration team about my interest in changing job position. After several conversations and a weeklong training, I became the new HR Coordinator. Since I took upon the job position, I have been busy recruiting prospective interns to join our organisation, facilitating induction, and communicating with project coordinators. Though HR is completely different from ASP, I still get to engage with projects that EduCARE has in Himachal Pradesh. Once a week, my team and I have Girls’ Club with the girls in Matti where we show films, draw, make bracelets, and dance. Next week, we are going to celebrate the Universal Children’s Day, a day to commemorate children around the world. I’m very excited to celebrate this day since we are planning some fun activities for it. Stay tuned!

Hellen - Norway

HR Coordinator, Maiti, Himachal Pradesh

My experience in Gajner

There many things that popped into my head when having to think about my first month in India.

And having to write a blog post can be really difficult. Where do I start from? Ordering my thoughts, I would focus on my feeling regarding the arrival to Gajner and the construction of the relationship with the community, especially with the kids.

I immediately fell in love with Gajner, and I mean it.

Before arriving here, people were keeping on describing the heat of this place, which made me think that I was going to hell, instead of to a physical place. Can a place be that hot? Will I be able to survive?

WILL I DRINK ENOUGH WATER? HOW OFTEN WILL I BE SICK?

I arrived here and Gajner smelled like home. The house, the village, the dust and the heat: everything was in its own place. I felt like everything was just fine, nothing was too much, nothing was too less.

Engaging the community has been easier than what I thought and, although the process is still ongoing, hearing kids shouting your name when walking in the street, makes you forget about the heat and everything e. There is something special about these children, and it is not common sense. There is something authentic and sincere. It is a sparkle in their eyes; it is a smile or a football match. I’m not saying that everything is easy, it is tiring and frustrating especially for what concerns the language barrier; it is hard to communicate, it is hard to express yourself and can be difficult to stand the impossibility to understand what kids themselves want to tell you. This is the hardest part for me, there is a lot which is unspoken from both the parts. However, anytime you manage to communicate and see that whatever you are doing is working, you come back home already thinking about the next time you will see these kids.

Moreover, working at EduCARE means being a multi-tasking person, one day you dig a hole to collect sand, one day you work with kids, another day you attend an English class and another you spend time mapping a community. I heard many times that EduCARE is an extremely flexible environment and things can change anytime, you adapt to the environment you live in. It is true and it is challenging and fun.

I also believe that a very important aspect for the functioning of this is having a strong team to work with. Having people around makes you stronger, no laziness allowed; what you face becomes a collective action, rather than an individual one. Doing that, any action turns to be easier, because is shared.

My first three weeks in Gajner have been a full and intense human experience. It is like being in a blender and being constantly moving and shaking. It is like a tornado of people and experiences, at home and outside. It makes you feel alive. The best is yet to come and I couldn’t ask for more!

Thanks Gajner.

Soccer championship outside the house with Laure, Vijay, Johann, Mehar and Camilla

Camilla Brancolini - Italy

ASP project manager, Gajner

Sharing Responsibility for the After-School Programme

In the past month, fun club has become increasingly interactive, providing a glimpse into how quickly it could progress into a truly holistic programme which will thrive on the enthusiastic participation of both interns and children alike.

As I prepare to leave EduCARE in the next month, I have recently been concentrating my efforts on assuring the smooth continuation of my projects after my departure. In order to do this, I have been more actively seeking out other interns to lead lessons so that they can become more comfortable with the format while I’m still here to assist and so that they are scheduled to prepare and run classes in the weeks after I leave. While some interns were definitely excited to have the chance to work with children, others were apprehensive, not knowing what to plan or how they can relate it to their projects. I sent around a project manual I had written up to address this problem of confusion or hesitation and met with quite a few people to discuss potential ideas and my experience up till now. In order to meet the children and gain a better understanding of how the programme works, several people decided to tag along to the next lesson (there are also only a handful of people here who knew where the fun-club room was, so showing them the location was a pretty vital first step!).

Expanding fun club to include other interns began last week when Emma ran a finger-painting activity. We had around another 5 interns show up as well…which outnumbered the kids 5-0. There was no one there and the town was strangely quiet for such a beautiful day, so I wandered around trying to round up some of the regulars. They were nowhere to be found, but I did find some children I didn’t recognise who decided to come along to see what we were doing. It turned out the children in Naddi are on holiday right now and many have gone to visit relatives; I believe the ones we did end up teaching were here from out of town because they spoke very little English. This shows the challenge of an unpredictable group – we were lucky it was an arts and crafts focus this week because they could all enjoy the hour without understanding much of what we were saying. Emma had brought paint, paper, some examples of finger-painted peacocks she’d made as inspiration, and – crucially – a big bucket of water for washing up afterwards! While they didn’t seem all that interested in painting the national bird of India, or any other animal, they certainly were excited about using all the colours and by the second sheets of paper colours were blending together and everything was beginning to become slightly brown…

Because we were unable to communicate well with the children this week, there was little educational about this activity, but it was a great chance to interact with some new kids, for interns to become more comfortable with the idea of fun club, and it was a really fun way for us all to spend an hour.

Lucy Di Santo, USA

After School Program Project Manager

The Journey of Rubbish…in Naddi

This weeks Shenney Fun Club activity was organised by none other than the waste management heroes themselves – the SWASH team – and as expected environmental education and awareness was on the agenda.

More specifically the activity was focused on the different ways we can dispose of our rubbish and what the environmental consequences of each are.

Hence the first activity consisted of creating a big mind map of The Journey of Rubbish as shown in the photo below.

The use of photos also proved to be an effective tool to the mind map to life for the children, though we had a hard time sticking them to the damp blackboard!

This activity was then followed by a short educational music video in Hindi – An Anthem for a Garbage Free India – that the kids loved.



And of course finally what more could we do than to empty the rubbish bins! In theory it was a brilliant plan, however in practice is proved to be much more difficult!

    

Because most of the older children were absent the muscle power was to come from the interns as we lugged the blue bins all the way to the other end of Naddi.

Surprisingly this proved to be a hit amongst the children, they loved the excursion, especially rolling the barrels back down the hill!

As usual the activity had its ups and downs but all in all it should be considered a success as most importantly the rubbish made it safely to the bin!

By Veronica Noetzli, October 2013

Making Healthy Choices... and Fun!

Last week in Naddi, we took over Fun Club (the after school program) in Sheney to teach the kids about what it means to be healthy and making healthy choices. The kids were all enthusiastic as we brainstormed what it meant to be healthy, but they were even more excited when we brainstormed unhealthy things, yelling out their favorite foods - ice cream, lollipops, chocolate! Eventually, we had the kids thinking beyond food and we began to talk about how happiness, work, and friends have to do with being healthy. Next we talked about "choices" and what it means to choose something. With folded paper and color pencils, we drew healthy choices on one side and unhealthy choices on the other - careful to avoid things that we did not have control over, such as the air we breathe or diseases we're born with.

Once the kids were thoroughly antsy, sick of sitting on the ground of the Fun Club room, we herded them outside to play a game about healthy choices. The kids lined up on one side of Sheney, divided into two teams, and we put the brainstorming poster on the other side with a line down the middle, dividing it into a healthy and unhealthy side. I stood in the middle with a stack of homemade cards - healthy or unhealthy choices on each (with an image, an English label, and a Hindi label). The kids had to hop on one foot to me, get a card, hop on the other foot to the poster, and stick the card in the correct column before hopping back to their team and tagging the next person. The relay race began with cheers and yells from both sides. (The kids can always be counted on to get a little competitive!) And as they hopped across the community, women came out of their homes to watch, smiling and laughing as the kids haphazardly jumped from one end to the other. At the end of the race - amid cheering, laughing, and overall confusion about which team actually won - we gathered around the poster to go over the cards. All the kids yelled whether each choice was healthy or unhealthy - vegetables, ice cream, sleep, water, visiting the doctor, visiting the dentist, fighting, going to school, cigarettes, soda, alcohol, many more - and we moved any out-of-place cards into the right column.

As the sun began to set and Fun Club came to a close, I pulled all the kids together outside and we pledged to make at least three healthy choices every day. "What should our healthy choices be today?" I asked. In the middle of the community, we did ten jumping jacks together, shouting the number of each one, choosing exercise for our first choice. Then I handed out lichis, and we stood together, peeling away the rough skin and sucking on the juicy fruit, choosing fruit as a healthy snack for our second choice. "What will be your third?" I asked, and everyone shared what they would do - push-ups, sleep, be nice to their friends, eat dal...

This simple activity may seem unimpressive to an outsider, but it was the first health activity with the kids and we all considered it a great success. Now they are beginning to think about health, what it means to be healthy, and how all the choices they make day-to-day affect their well being. Children are the future of course, and as this generation grows up, we want to ensure that the community will continue to thrive and develop even healthier lifestyles.

Betsy Hinchey

United States of America

Rural HealthCARE Project Manager

March – July 2013

Sanitation and Waste Management during After School Fun Club!

Sanitation and Waste Management during After School Fun Club!
 

SWASH police showing way how to sort out and reduce the quantity of trash waste !

Sorting and learning which trash is burnable and not, and why

After School Fun Club has continued to focus once a month on SWASH (Sanitation of Water, Air, and Soil for a Healthy Village) project. During this activity, we teach the children how important waste management is, and how dumping trash or burning plastic and other mixed waste can be detrimental to the local environment and their health. This week, we organised another trash sorting / classification workshop with the kids of Shenny with participation of Sara and Melissa from EduCARE India team in the lead. The kids in Fun Club have started to get more aware of this initiative and would hopefully further sensitise others (their family members and the larger community in the village) to dispose of their trash in a responsible manner.