Street Kids School Life

Me with the teacher Asha & some of the kids


Street Kids Photo Album

After a breakfast of bananas and chai (very sweet spicy Indian tea) we hear the loud honking outside and know our driver has come to pick us up & bring us to the street school. The 'Street Children Education' project I am volunteering with here in Jaipur, India, has been working towards building a school that offers a very basic education to the children of lower class families who are not currently enrolled in school. Their families are in such great threat of hunger and starvation, that many of the parents engage their children in work by 'rag picking' collecting recyclable materials for sale. This project encourages these parents to send their children to a basic, free school in order get an education and develop their full potential.Sadly alot of the street children that you see here in India, have either run away from home due to abuse or neglect or have been kidnapped or given up by their families in order to repay a dept. These children are often under the control of the local mafia who use them for their own financial gain in whatever way they can. It is safe to say that the lives of these poor children are very sad indeed.The kids who come to our school however are probably some of the luckier ones, because dispite the fact that they are still extremely poor, most of them have siblings and at least one parent or guardian to look after them and they are part of a community. This means that while they are often left to their own devices while their parents go out to work, or indeed have to work themselves, they are not completely alone like alot of street children and will have people looking out for them.

School 

The school is a short fifteen minute drive from the volunteer house on the outskirts of Jaipur. On our way up to the rented building where classes are held we pass directly by the slum camps where the children live. As I mentioned in my last post these slum dwellings are present throughout India and usually consist of simple structures made from bits of wood & sheets of plastic. The families sleep directly on the ground or on simple beds. Possessions are few and consist of some clothes, pots and pans, plastic containers for storing water and maybe a basin for bathing in. The people who live here are the very poorest of the poor, uneducated & often illiterate, their entire lives take place at the side of the road. The project I am working with was set up by an Indian husband & wife team, who originally ran the pop-up school in local parks. They have since secured enough funds to rent a small basic building that will accommodate up to thirty children. There is an Indian teacher called Asha who works at the school full-time & basically supervises the lessons. The classes however are mainly taught by volunteer teachers on an on-going basis. The children speak their native Hindi and most of them have little or no English. As most of the volunteers are English speakers from the West, all of the classes take place through English, with Asha translating if there is any confusion. Strangely enough, despite the fact that their English is very poor, communication is never a problem, and they seem to instinctively know what you want from them. It will be extremely important for them to learn to speak English fluently because tourism is such a major source of income across India.

Colouring at break in the class-room

The 'school' itself is extremely simple and basically consists of a large stone room much like a garage at home. Rather than being split out by age, the classes are split out by level of the child. We sit on dusty rugs on the ground and all the classes take place together in the same room, just in separate corners, as a result there are alot of distractions with the younger children running between classes or getting up and running outside onto the steps of the school. It's a full time job trying to keep them focused on their work. The school is open-air and flies, ants and the occassional rodent are our constant companions. There is also alot of activity going on outside the school while we teach, local women from the nearby houses walk past to the well with silver pots on their heads, men hammer, trucks rumble by, clutches of children from the local government run school in crisp white shirts amble past and peer in at us. These children are also quite poor, but their parents are earning enough to enroll them in the state run school.

Another big distraction effecting the kids focus during class is the fact that quite a few of them are sick. Alot of them have constant snotty noses that they just let run, giving the odd sniff now and then or wiping on their sleeve. Many of the kids have infections, ranging from eye infections, to throat infections, one little boy has a massive lump on his tongue, another has a constant sore tummy & we think he might have a parasite.

The sad reality is that the children get little or no medical care and rarely if ever see a doctor. As result infections and colds that would normally be cleared up in days, last weeks or months. This is really sad when you consider how cheap a course of antibiotics would cost in India, literally nothing. All of the volunteers have paid quite a bit of money to take part in the volunteer program but most of this money goes towards the costs of running the volunteer house, transport and rental of the school property. Very little money goes into the actual school itself and as a result supplies are extremely limited. In fact in my class we just have two ABC alphabet books which are old and falling apart.  I can't help but think of the classrooms back home covered in brightly colored charts and posters. There is very little of that here, most of the visual aids and books are purchased by the volunteers at the markets & they are constantly falling down off the unplastered walls.

Me with a few of the kids at break-time

The kids are the most gorgeous little things, so full of fun and beans each with their own individual lives and personalities. After just a few weeks of teaching them they have left such a lasting impression on me and I know I will never forget this time. They are just so sweet and loving, hurling themselves on me, playing with my hair and jumping up on my knee. All they want is my constant attention and some physical contact as a lot of them get no affection at home because their parents are just trying to make ends meet. They will constantly come over for a hug & vie with each other for my attention. Even the bigger boys will just jump up on my knee, something I found quite funny at first as I couldn't imagine little boys at home doing that. Probably one of the first things I noticed when I started teaching them however was just how skinny the children are. Their clothes are dusty and usually ripped with holes, a lot of them have matted hair but when they do have it washed they want you to smell it to see how clean it is. Many of the little girls have their hair cut quite short, making it hard to distinguish if they are a girl or a boy. This is because it is easier to manage and requires less attention and also to prevent the spread of head lice. None of the kids have head lice though and their families do their best with the facilities they have. While their clothes are often dusty & ripped with holes, they change them regularly and are always well presented. A lot of them have religious medals with Hindu God's around their necks, bracelets on their wrists and and eye-liner around their eyes, even the little boys. Some of the girls with long hair have their hair henna dyed, this is where henna is rubbed into the hair giving their dark hair an orange coloured tint.

Kids hiding on me after lunch when I'm calling them back to class

We know very little of the kids individual backgrounds and it's difficult to find out as the kids all speak Hindi and have very poor English. But it's clear from looking at them while most are underweight, some are a little better off than others. For example when I ask one little boy, What does your Papa do? He answers, 'auto-rickshaw', meaning his father is a rickshaw taxi driver which would earn him a better living. In general though
most are very skinny. They don't eat any meat because it is too expensive & maybe for religious reasons too as Rajasthan is a very conservative vegetarian & alcohol free state. So their diet consists mainly of vegetables and a little rice if they are lucky. They get no protein and it shows because they all have very skinny limbs and their clothes are literally hanging off them. You don't notice it too much, until they jump up on you and you can feel their little bones protruding, they literally have no meat on them. This doesn't dampen their spirits however and most of the kids are full of energy & mischief with the classes being a constant hive of activity.

I'll write more about classes & my own teaching experiences with the children in my next post.