AID Delhi Chapter - AID India, Delhi Chapter

After several rounds of discussion, we finally managed to convince the parents of 9 children at Aagaz for allowing their children to get admission in Ryan International School, Sector 39 Noida. Since the school is at some distance away from the community, we decided to hire a couple of rickshaws to drop and pick up the children from the school.

We told the parents that they would have to contribute Rs 50 per child towards the rickshaw charges and the rest would be paid by Aagaz. The day after the children got admission, both the rickshaw wallas, which had been finalized for taking the children to school, went to their respective villages for 15 -20 days without informing the children. Consequently, children had to discontinue going to the school.

The month of April turned out to be a quite a challenging month for Aagaz. After an extensive scouting, we finally managed to get a new room in the community for conducting the classes. We expected things to go smoothly after getting the new room, but we couldn’t have been more wrong.

Since the classes had been discontinued for 3 weeks, many kids had started loosing the interest in coming for the classes. By the time we started the classes, 7-8 kids which were regular in the class had relocated with their parents to some other places. The number of children coming for the classes came down to 15-17 from the previous month’s number of 40+ children.

 During second week of April, admission of nine children was done in anubhav school(run by Ryan International  inside their campus.).However, the rickshaw guy left ,hence children were not able to commute to the school.
Last week only, we had talked to another rickshawwala guy .We need to fix up the whole situation again.
So that children can start going to school again.Summer holidays for the school starts from 9 th may to 1st July.

We also had to face severe shortage of volunteers, as most of the volunteers at Aagaz were busy with their exams or with their office commitments. Hopefully, things will improve once the exams get over and summer vacations start in the colleges.

As we all know that there are many changes in Aid-Prays Noida mainly categorizing children according to their requirements and expectations. We have separate classes for  children who  are studying  in Nayi-Disha and  children who are of younger age and have just started studying. Then we have weekend classes mainly for children who are in age range of 10-14 ( with 1-2 exception ). These children have basic and rudimentary knowledge of Hindi, Mathematics and English. But we really don't have concrete  plan  or roadmap for them. For example :- we are confused when we ask ourselves what we want to teach them and why? or for that matter what we expect them from 1 year or 2 years down the lane.

We had few weekend discussion sessions in which we exchanged ideas and opinions on road map for weekend classes. Few points that we agree on :- 1> these children should have enough knowledge of mathematics so that they can perform calculation required in daily life. 2> they should have basic knowledge of english. And 3> they should be aware of their surrounding  and should have idea whats happening around them. Therefore, we decide to develop a curriculum catering to their needs. Amit, Sugandha and Kavita  have teken the responsibility  to  do  document the curriculum with help of others volunteers and members. Other than that, Kanan suggested that, with education, we can also provide children some vocational  skills such as sewing, handicraft or any skills that could help them economically.

At the beginning  of the month  only  3-4 children were coming although we had name of 15 children in register. Upon investigation we found that around 4 students had gone to their village . We personally talked to the rest of the children and motivated them to attend weekend classes. Currently 8-9 students are attending weekend classes. We are expecting this number to go high as our action will be more streamlined over the time.

We were also joined by three new volunteers: Amit, Kavita and Sugandha who are dedicated and showing concern for our cause. Please welcome them in our "AID" family.

Nikhil

On our meeting after putting up the children of Prayas into Nai Disha, we came up with an initiation of starting evening classes for the rest of the children who are beginners. We also decided to start with Eureka Methodology of teaching for the children. Me and Nikunj took the responsibility of teaching children with Eureka kit from 7-8.30 on alternate days. Nikunj has taken the lead of spearheading the entire class in my absence too. There are currently 15 children whom we’ve profiled and we’ve decided to stick to those 15 children. Preliminary classes with the kit have started and the vowels stage have been successfully taught with focus on phonetics. There are more fun activities carried out with the children while learning. We’ve decided to make the learning more joyful by telling stories, playing games and making groups among themselves and in a month time we’ve been able to observe a few changes in the children. Hoping to see more. 

Selva

A total of 32 children came along with us for the picnic. The kids were all dressed up and ready to go on a day of learning and fun. Gudia in a bright lovely yellow frock with red frills and a matching top, glowed with that beautiful smile of her. She surely was my favourite. But, every one of our children was rearing to enjoy this day and every one of them a special little star in our eyes.

Aagaaz is a weekend class for the children of the jhuggi community of Sector 52, Noida. It was started on 1^st January 2008 with Darshan and Shruti as initial volunteers. The project aims at raising the literacy and awareness level of the jhuggi children of Sector 52, Noida. In the past two months, it has grown from a class with 8-10 children to approx 30 children. And from a team of 2 volunteers to a strong team of 6 volunteers.