Tuesday 28th July

The day started at 8.30am. I caught a taxi from Goregaon to Mahim and arrived at the kitchen in time to join the 2nd bus. Today was English teaching so I was particularly interested to see if phonics was being taught. Sonita was teaching on this bus and I am glad to say that she didn't disappoint me. At Kurla (location 1 ),the children have been practicing the letters a-p so today she wanted them to practise writing them. She recapped over the names of the letters and the sounds and then the children wrote the letters on their boards. I was hoping she would go on to write some words but she didn't - maybe a lesson for next time! Again, it was so good to see the children really trying hard to write the letters correctly and to sound out each letter. They are lovely children at Kurla and you may remember this is where I helped little Manoj with his foot injury. Unfortunately, he was not on the bus today so I will try and catch up with him another day. We then moved on to Vision Rescue's newest location, which is on the other side of Kurla. This new site was recommended to Rajesh by Cathy, who is an English mission worker out in Mumbai. She lives right next door to the slum and spends most of her days with the families, helping to look after the children and attending to their needs. She arrived with some of the children at the bus so I spent some time chatting to her about her work. She was telling me about one of the boys, Arif, who is pictured above. Arif is six years old and when he was two, he got acid put in his eyes and he is now blind is one eye and partially blind in the other. Cathy said that he is often sent out by his parents to beg. Unfortunately, the doctors have said that they cannot do anything to help his sight and if they did then there may be a risk of him losing the little sight that he has left. He is a lovely little kid and even though he couldn't see the picture, he loved having his photo taken. I also treated him to a Murray Mint! There is a lot of need in this area and Cathy says that some of the parents are quite violent towards their children and beat them. It still happens a lot in Mumbai the children are often helpless to do anything about it. As this is a new location the children were still working on learning the beginning of the alphabet but they were so enthusiastic to learn. They love being on the bus and I guess for some of them it is a welcome relief from the normal activities in the slum. I also met a group of students who insisted on taking my picture. I returned the favour and you can see the result above. They were on their way to distribute advertising boards for 'Loop' mobile phones.
After Kurla, the bus continued onto Deonar but I returned back to Mahim to meet Rajesh. We needed to go and by resources for the children to do their Christmas artwork. I had already brought over some donated colouring pencils but we were specifically on the hunt for felt tip pens and art paper. The hassle we went through to find some coloured pens! We did eventually find some and managed to get the paper we wanted as well. We headed back to the kitchen for some lunch and met some of the usual kitchen children. I decided to give them a lesson on balancing sticks on their noses but I think they will need a bit more practice. Hopefully a couple of the teachers will be returning next week so tomorrow I will start preparing the next few teacher training sessions.