Akanksha community

So I went to visit the community in which the children from the school come from to try and find children who hadn't turned up since the beginning of the term (this monday). I was suprised at how not shocked I was, but then I suppose I'd seen the slums beforehand and walked/driven past similar shacks from when I was little and I've seen worse. It is a massive area and very built up; even the teacher, who I went with, who had been there many times, always just goes inside and finds a child that she knows to take her around the place. The homes are separated from the field next door by a wall, and it seemed the field has been made into the dumping ground, filled with rubbish. The homes are concrete buildings laid out seemingly randomly with little corridors everywhere; someone could easily get lost. Most of the homes have a bed and kitchen area with loads of aluminium utensils and suprisingly enough a T.V. Some of them are two floors, and to get up to the next floor, you pushed yourself against either side of the corridor and made use of extruding ceiling poles as foot rests. You really have to watch your head as many of the houses have extruding ceiling poles acting as washing lines during the midday sun. There were a load of stalls around the outside of the area and in a square in the middlish mainly selling snack-like things (sev, chukri, puri) and sweets. an area had a load of fruit and vegetables, fruit is expensive particularly apples but the fruit had been discarded from the larger more expensive stores. there was also a jeweller there. in the middleish square there were a load of taxis and broken down cars, people were actually getting taxi's all the way into the area, but couldn't get to their homes because it was way tooo built up. I arrived just at 2 which is the time water comes, so there were crowds of people (mainly women and children) pushing with buckets and large bottles and jugs trying to get water. Although there was not a shortage in water, the man was quite happy to fill up a little boys tray for him to wash his marbles and make funny sounds with it. Women who had already got their water were sat washing their children's and their own hair and sat outside their houses combing it through. Children all around were coming to talk to us, eager to help us with whatever we asked and telling us stories about their holidays in the suburban villages. Otherwise they'd be sitting indoors watching t.v., trying to fix a broken kite, playing catch with whatever they could find. Ushma was happy to see some of the children had chosen to eat coconut rather than paan or gum, which ends up making everything pink/red. Most of the men were at work or sleeping because it was the hottest part of the day so they couldn't work, others were touching up their hair in the large mirror in the barbars. Some in more open spaces, were sat with their families with emptied out rubbish lying in front of their homes, sorting through for anything worth anything.