Sita school visit 16 Dec 08 - Anita Komanduri
Sanjeev and I visited Sita School yesterday. We took the 7 AM bus from Shivajinagar and reached Silvepura by 8:15 AM. We chatted a bit with Jane and headed to the school by 9 AM, when everyone assembles together. The children sang a few songs and then everyone dispersed for the next activity, preparing a dance drama for Christmas.
The dance drama will be presented on Thursday and parents are invited to come and watch. The children had been preparing since late last week and most of the dance seemed to be in place. Some 'kolatam' steps had been introduced just the previous day and the children were practicing those. It was fun to watch. Anjali, Jane's daughter, who is a Kathak dancer, was choreographing the dance. The story is about a man who is building is house. The masons are working busily when they see many people in the village celebrating, dancing. The masons guess that a child is born and join the celebrations. The man comes to the construction site to find it deserted. He then goes to the tailor who promoses him his clothes and the latter also disappears once he hears of the celebrations. The man is really annoyed and goes to eat something, only to be stranded by the hotel staff. He is now hopping mad and finds the scene of celebration - people dancing and singing around a new born baby and his mother. He is unable to resist their infectious enthusiasm and joins them.
The teachers and Anjali were trying to figure out a good way to end it and I went on to the next activity - Sanjeev's session with the teachers on electronics and abstraction. Kamala, Jane and another teacher were present. The teachers hadn't done much on electronics before and took some time warming up to using the circuit board, resistors and multimeter. They seemed to enjoy some of the puzzles on the circuit board, like figuring out how to fix a broken circuit, guessing what happens to resistors in series and parallel. Jane's interest was in linking this topic to something the children have seen, is part of their daily lives. This is hard to do since the subject is abstract. A good part of the time was spent in trying to find a suitable context to introduce the subject. And then it was puzzle time again. Everyone was excited to see the torch that the children at Thulir had built. They felt it was a good idea to do this course with also such a tangible goal in mind.
The session went on for a couple of hours, when it was closed since Jane and the one of the teachers had to leave - Kamala stayed on and asked many questions. She conducts science experiments and was interested in these as well. She also brought over two LED torches she had, one of which is not working properly. So Sanjeev opened it up and did some diagnosis, found the problem was in the switch (phew!) and promised to fix it the next time he visited.
After lunch, we chatted with Jane about fundraising ideas for the school. She wants to create a pension fund for the teachers as they get don't have any savings for their retirement. One idea she said they were considering was to have a dance drama event at the school for which they will invite friends etc and charge for tickets. He went back and forth about this since organizing events can be very draining without giving much by way of fundraising. They did one drama in the past about the Chipko movement, that was attended by children from Aditi school and it was well appreciated. She is also planning to send out newsletters and calendars to folks who have supported them in the past, as a means of fundraising. She was very happy to hear the calendars have been received well.
Jane was called to see how the play was shaping up and to give feedback about the ending. I also went along and saw that the kids had prepared a backdrop for the play during the day. They had built a small thatched structure. It all looked very nice and festive. And soon it was time to leave.