Monday and Tuesday on the bus!

Monday and Tuesday are English teaching days so I am always keen to get on the buses for these two days. My friend Charlie arrived in Mumbai on Saturday so it was good for her to see the teaching program. I wasn't feeling great when I awoke on Monday morning but I still travelled to Mahim with Charlie and met with the street kids to play a quick game of football. Unfortunately, there was a problem with the bus this morning so we had to leave sooner than expected. At Bandra we met up with the Medical Van which is up and running this week. So far, Vision Rescue have struggled to employ full time doctors and so the Medical Van has not been running as much as they would like. This week there is a doctor over from Australia so Biju was very keen to use her on the Van. There were not many serious casualties or injuries to deal with so they spent the majority of the time giving medical check ups to the children. It was great to see the Van in action and the children were given treatment depending on their condition. Later on during the day, we ran a meeting for all the bus staff to talk through some additional jobs that needed to be covered by the bus team. Plus, we outlined the other training that will be taking place over the next four weeks. In the evening Charlie, Meena and I visited the market in Bandra. This is always great fun because we get to haggle with the sellers. Most of the market stalls are for women so Charlie and Meena were more involved in the haggling than me. I can specifically remember one group of children who were begging on the streets when I was last in Bandra and they are still there. I was able to give them some food and a drink but they are not well like by many of the shoppers and locals so were quickly chased off. It would be good to go back one day and see if we can get them to visit the bus when it come Bandra. They may have to walk a small distance but they would then be able to receive the food and education.

On Tuesday we spend the morning on the second bus watching Manoj teach. Manoj will be the main English teacher from January and will teach the English on both buses. This will allow me to work specifically with him in developing more English lessons and activities.

Some of you may remember me telling you about the boy, Manoj, at Kurla who had an infected foot and we took him to the local doctor to get it treated. He came onto the bus on Tuesday and it was great to see his foot nicely healed up. There is a large scar there but I would expect that with such an infected foot. I help him with his phonics and he was able to read an write several words made from the first 12 letters sounds. Some of the children are progressing really well with the phonics and are sounding out the letters better. They are successfully reading some three letter words and writing these down. They now need to start progressing onto sentence work with these words and that will be a main focus of the phonics training that I will be doing.

After spending the morning on the bus, we return to the office to do some preparation for the Wednesdays teachers meeting.