Akanksha

A friend of my aunt's (Ushma auntie) teaches in a school supported by the Akanksha foundation, a non-profit organization with a mission to impact the lives of less privileged children, enabling them to maximise their potential and change their lives. They have been allowed to use the premises of another school, after school times to teach the children essential skills in order to help them through life and hopefully get a better job than they would have. The organisation asks that the children attend a municipal school to improve thier mother tongue and they turn up for the lessons. The teachers have supplied the children with equipment and set the children homework and tasks, but many of the children don't do them and the equipment goes missing. Several of the children have even been given glasses but they don't wear them because they get teased by other children or they get sold. There are three classes of around 30 and three regular teachers, the rest are volunteers, mainly students from the colleges near-by. Ushma auntie was saying how there are sometimes of the year when it is just her for the whole class and other times when it's 1:3, which is really hard for the children to deal with, as they get used to the additional attention. The children were extremely enthusiastic and excited. And when asking a question, Ushma would have a flood of answers being yelled out at her. We separated into smaller groups to work on english and mathematics worksheets. After a while the children I was working with were complaining to the other teachers and volunteers that they couldn't understand my accent whenever I asked a work related question but then continued to understand it perfectly when they wanted to chat. I got invited to visit their houses and so I'm going before school today with Ushma who needs to find the children who haven't returned since the Divali holidays.