Recently I visited Apna Ghar, a home for kids on one of the weekends to know (as I did not go anywhere before) how it will be and to present them with some sports items as requested by one of my friends. I wont say that I had a blah blah blah.. experience being with them but I came to know how the kids lead their lives being in such an orphanage. I think I have to visit all such places in Hyd to know more about their attitude and spirit of life and in that process I learn alot having everything in life but would complain about something or the other.
We went there in the morning and I got introduced to the kids. There were a group of senior citizens who visited at the same time to extend their part of help/mite. The chief of the Ghar made the students recite some of the slokas of their routine. They distributed some sweets, fruits (even to us). While the students were reciting slokas, we brought some of the sports items which we thought would be useful for them and everyone started staring at us as this would definitely attract their attention. One of the ladies of the senior group found to be very sensible(not that the others are not) but we thought so because she got ball pens while others brought things to eat and while others were specific about the discipline she was smoothly trying to convince them. Finally, we got our turn to spend sometime with the kids. We gave them what they wanted and it was like a piece of jaggery surrounded by flies.
Then the chief started telling us to instruct kids not to play all the day while neglecting household works and studies. So we convinced her that there would be timings beyond which they cannot play and the in-charge takes care of the items.
We tried to get the kids sit quietly before we decide who plays with what…we tried to know what they know basically like writing their own names in English/Telugu and during the time we made them write all their names we had some fun. We finally divided the items between girls and boys so that there wont be any clash(atleast on that day..because it’s usual that there wont be a 100% understanding between them distributing..as even we dont do that with our friends/siblings)…
One of the kids, Saidulu has vitalego – due to which the whole body becomes pink and the hair turns into white. It also effects eye sight. He is doing his SSC now. We should get him to a nice doctor and get spects for him that would be helpful for him to read books.
We started taking their names on a piece of paper and then the fun started. Everyone cracked jokes one everyone and a few students found to be sharper than normal International school going students. We wanted them to atleast spell their names as it’s a basic thing to know how to write their names in whatever language. We tried to get them write in English. One of the kids is the so called English teacher as he knows how to write few words in english(atleast based on their pronunciation he could frame words). We were surprised by the way they build words.. an incident to quote..a cute kid, Renuka 3rd standard kid, was trying to write her name in English. Based on the sound(phoenetics), we started with ‘Re’ so start with ‘R’..she wrote 6 as R is 6 in telugu…then ‘e’..everyone came up with their words.. e se ‘ek’ as in Hindi..edu..7 in telugu..but they liked ‘ek’ i.e., 1 in maths..so ‘Re’ became ‘61′ so far..then ‘nuka’ is left…so now..how to write ‘nu’..na sey ‘nikkar’ in telugu..so it became short…ka – koti in telugu…i.e., crore..so finally Renuka became ’61shortcrore’…now think abt it…do we need to teach them what’s encryption is…this is just an example…so wisdom comes naturally to all even though they dont have any knowledge…and anything as a team would be fun to do and ‘create’…here they are trying to create something out of nothing by collectively framing a word and she learnt the word finally which is the best part..she wrote it down proudly on her notebook where her name was written in telugu..now she knows English…
Most importantly out of all these conversations with them we thought they are commonly lacking basics like english alphabets(not all but some of them), multiplication tables. For that even the chief is thinking about arranging a tution teacher. Apart from these, next time when we go to that place we thought we would get them some abacus kind of things so that they easily remember multiplication tables and charts that show alphabets with some words like vegetables, places etc
With this I complete my first blog..even though the above info is like a brief summary..it meant more as we cannot express everything in words…more importantly..next time onwards i would prefer to inform everyone only if I could make a difference in atleast one kid’s life because I believe that this is not a great thing but a minimum thing that any one can do in their lifetime. Hope everyone understands my point.
