07 August 2008

Good Days

I spent the afternoon over at the Girls Udayan Noida Home today. They needed some help with homework and apparently things haven’t been going very well as of late.

Let me step back a bit. These kids come off of the streets and face a huge task off the bat of adapting and adjusting to a life that is way more structured and regimented than they are used to. Then you throw a bunch of other kids in the mix with just as many background issues (if not more!) and try to let peace and harmony rule the day.

Once they just start to get the hang of things, then they are enrolled in school. Not some “normal” school, but the best they can find and afford in the area, and classes are in both Hindi, which all speak well and only a few can write, and in English which none come to the home speaking well and none can write well. Since education is of high importance to the decision makers of these homes, each child is place approximately one grade ahead of where their skills and knowledge actually are in hopes that they will rise to the occasion and apply themselves. So they are faced with the double barrier of language and skills with the expectation that somehow it should be okay. Oh yeah, and on top of all that, the girls started school about 4 or 5 weeks after their classmates had already started...

So I spent the afternoon at the Girls Home today. One of the girls had some kinda of appointment or other so it was just me and the two younger girls. One is in UKG, which is Upper Kindergarten and we spent the afternoon working on writing and spelling numbers one through ten and trying to get the order of the ABC’s down. The other is enrolled in first grade and we spent the afternoon working on first understanding her homework assignments and then mostly on mental and written math. She doesn’t know all of her ABC’s particularly well either and since most of her assignments are written out in English, she has a hard time even understanding what she is supposed to be doing.

Frustration is a constant companion and the littlest things can boil over into big things in a hurry. This only adds to the challenge of keeping them both engaged and on task. I have had similar interactions with the boys, but since most of them have been in the home and in school longer, they are definitely further along in some aspects.

We had a very productive day today. Part of it has to do with the fact that I don’t see them very often and they enjoyed someone new helping out and part if it had to do with it just being a good day. In a world and systems where progress is most always marked by quantity and efficiency, I find myself in quite a different reality (one I found while working on the Coast as well). Good days are to be celebrated not because of how much stuff got accomplished or how efficiently everything worked out, but simply because they were good days. With the myriad of barriers and challenges present in these kids’ lives good days tend to be hard to come by in terms of confidence and peer interaction and identity. So it becomes all the more important to pause when they come around and recognize them for what they are... Good days

1 comment:

  1. Wow. I can't even imagine how frustrating that must be for the kids. I think I'd end up with an ulcer with all that expectation!

    I like the thoughts about celebrating good days. I don't think we celebrate nearly enough.

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