Pankhudi Foundation Blog

On the midnight of August 6, people in Leh did not see in the wildest of  their dreams what they are going to wake up to. Leh experienced one of its worst natural calamity in recent times. We all read about it in the newspapers and felt sad for our countrymen but we have no control over natual disasters and hence cannot do anything. What we can do is help them regain partially if not all, what they have lost in their worst times. Coming months are not going to be easy for them considering the winters are setting in. So many lives have been lost which can never return, five villages have been badly affected, property and crops destroyed.

Pankhudi, in collaboration with Goonj, has started a Sahayata campaign to offer them help in whatever ways we can.  And it can only be a success with your assistance.

Sahayata is a nationwide collection drive led by all Pankhudi chapters (Bangalore, Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Pune) and starting from 28^th Aug to 10th Sept.

For more information please go through: http://pankhudifoundation.org/Leh-collection.shtml.

For collection/donation and any kind of queries and information from Delhi chapter, following people can be contacted.

Pankhudi Delhi Sahayata volunteers:

Help your fellow countrymen when they need you the most.

The children at Anatha Shishu Sevashram, Wilson Garden can now access the internet thanks to the LAN setup painstakingly done by Yogesh and Animesh. Animesh, though not being a member of Pankhudi, helped us out to do the setup and we are extremely thankful to him. Due to their efforts, the children can now browse the vast sea of information looking for anything they don’t know about.

This was possible after putting in long hours in the ashram taking measurements of the computer room, crimping the LAN wires and attaching the connectors and then trying out various ways and places in which the router could be placed so as to be able to connect to all the computers. But the story does not end there! A lot of computers had been affected with viruses or had old hardware and so connecting was difficult. But this did not deter the duo and they were finally able to connect some computers to the internet.

We hope the children make optimum use of this facility (teaching them how to use it has already begun!) and be well informed about all that happens around them.

Everyone has heard about the devastation in Leh because of the cloud burst earlier this month. Hundreds of lives have been lost, houses have been destroyed and people have lost everything they have. As understood from people who have actually traveled around the area, the extent of damage is immense.

To offer whatever assistance we can in their time of need, Pankhudi has started a Sahayata Campaign (relief collection drive) for the victims of the floods. We have collaborated with Goonj for the same.

More Info: http://pankhudifoundation.org/Leh-collection.shtml.

Sahayata is a nationwide collection drive led by all ~Pankhudi chapters (Bangalore, Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Pune) and starting from 28^th Aug to 10th Sept.

Any of the following Pankhudi Pune volunteers can be contacted for any queries or information.

Pankhudi Pune Sahayata volunteers:

DO COME FORWARD TO HELP FELLOW COUNTRYMEN AT THE TIME OF NEED!!

The hidden fact we don’t know is “Kids can plan better then us, If we just direct them in a right direction.” So to make this happen this we have planned project for a batch2 kids.
We have given very interesting project to Batch2 kids, they to conduct classes for younger kids for two hrs.

Challenge:
 They have to plan everything what they have to teach.
 How to make class interactive so younger kids will not roam around here and there

On that day:

They had a well planned innovative activity for the class.

26th of June 2010 was an exceptionally brilliant day in Pankhudi’s life! Mahesh, Pooja, Sham, Priti, Akshay, Tushar, Irfan and Nasir just rocked the show! What skill! What ideas! What intelligence!! What execution! We are falling short of hats to take off in their honour! What kids!!

Here’s what exactly happened:

They all entered the class just before all the batch3 kids arrived. This was at 5pm. It was a housefull class. 40 kids from batch3! It started with “Kaun banegaa chocolate-patii”. This game, invented by Mahesh-Pooja, had 4 teams of students, the teams were supposed to answer the Math questions being announced in fastest-fingers-first manner. Whoever did so fastest, got 2 points and the scores were recorded on the blackboard. Every question was solved and explained by Pooja so that those who couldn’t answer in time would understand the Math. Every team was helped by one “young teacher” all this while. After 20 questions, all scores were summed up and converted into chocolates and the “chocolate-patii” team was announced!

Chits was laying down on the the desk , they called out one kid from each row asked the kids name and asked them to pick a chit and read the chit (or atleast spell the alphabets). Each chit had an English word , used in day to day life (like read, write etc.). They asked the kids if somebody knew the meaning of the word. If none knew it, they explained. The explanation was followed by enacting of the same by Akshay. They also made sure that the word is written on the board along with its meaning in Hindi. They covered around 15 words in one hour and made sure everybody is involved in the class. They also revised the words after they were done.

Time for English! Akshay-Sham planned this activity. Mahesh asked all kids to explain how they felt when their friends tease them. “Express it on your face”, he said! Then he sketched a face with that expression on the board. Asked all to draw it in their notebooks. He wrote the name of the expression in Marathi first. “Raag”. Then told the English word for it- “Anger”. He continues for 2-3 more expressions. Every notebook was filled with a sketch, with the Marathi word below it and the English word above it, as the other young teachers took round in the classroom to check the progress of the class.

Then it was time for Origami. Mahesh came forward, tore a paper from his notebook and the entire class followed him! He then started folding the paper step by step, clearly showing it to all, giving them time to do it, asking them to hold their papers high up so that he can check all at once. All this while, his other friends were helping each and every batch3 kid to make the exact paper fold. And finally!!! Guess what?! There happened to be a crow which could open its beak as it flipped its wings! Oh myyy!!! Amazing it was! Batch3 creative kids drew eyes on the paper-birdie!

Time for colours!! Mahesh had made a drawing of the famous cartoon character from Sakaal newspaper called “Chintu”. Every batch3 kid was given a copy of the drawing and crayons (one pack every 3 kids). They coloured coloured and coloured! Even the bhaiyyaa-diidii were made to colour! Lot of prize money involved too! “1st prize: 10 chocolates, 2nd prize: 5 chocolates, 3rd prize: 3 chocolates”, the black-board screamed! Finally, when everyone submitted their sheets, the young teachers judged them and announce in some time: “After seeing all these paintings, we think… ALL ARE WINNERS!!” Every child was called in front, his painting was held high and then given back to him along with2 chocolates! All clapped!

It was 7:45pm when the class ended!
“A completely professional performance”, We’d say!!

Out Come :
.1. The two distinct religious groups of kids which do not interact with each other came slightly closer to each other while working collectively for this project. This was one of the basic goals of this project, in fact.
2. Some of the families of these kids also realized that their kids, once motivated, can actually create something. They all knew that something was going on, though they may not have actually understood what it is.
3. All the kids worked hard for a common goal for as long as 15-20 days and now they know how lovely it feels to achieve something.
4. Kids actually learnt how to think from someone else’s perspective. All the Math questions (great, smart and intelligent questions, all of them) were carefully chosen by the kids, keeping in mind the level of understanding of batch3 kids.
5. Kids have relaised and they taught us there’s no point in screaming on the kids! We should have patience! We should learn to love them first! If we explain everything with love, they’ll understand it better.

So much is written, but what We can do, every moment was beautiful so don’t want to miss anything

We spend few hours with kids at weekends and teach them. But most of the time kids spend his/her time with his parents or with his actual surroundings. In pune this kids are from slums area where parents are not bother about what’s theirs kids are doing whether kids are going to school or not. In Short Parents themselves are not aware off importance of education. So it’s very common we found many dropout kids. To avoid all these we conduct the Parents Induction meeting on 4th July 2010.

Purpose of this event to meet the parents of kids and tell them who we are what we do and creating awareness in them towards importance education, so they will send the kids to School.

Main points what we covered.
1. Why we are meeting today.
2. Introduced Pankhudi.
3. Pankhudi is not an option for school. Admitting their children into schools is a must.
4. Who we are.
5. Voluntary structure of Pankhudi. We don’t get any money for this.
6. 4 volunteers introduced themselves in full detail so that parents understand who we are in a better way. Sanghamesh told a very apt story in his introduction (Apeksha wrote about it already).
7. Unicef Meena video about a girl child wanting to go to school and her family asking her to do all the housework instead.
8. Discussion about video immediately followed by Poonam’s introduction.
9. Poonam’s felicitation. Her speech- “I am happy I achieved this and I want to study further.”
10. Poonam’s mother’s felicitation. Her speech- “We should let the girl child study. We should never discriminate between our son and daughter.”
11. Some instructions for parents which would increase their involvement in their kids education.
12. A short skit on the biggest problem of our time: “People don’t educate their daughters much because then the daughters won’t find appropriate partners, since it is hard to find educated boys.” This skit was interactive and it explained how the sons are always let to do whatever they want to and how no one cares even if they remain uneducated because, in the end, they being boys, can work anywhere and make a living. And thus the girl also needs to remain uneducated so that she gets a partner when she grows up. The skit concluded that we need to responsibly educate girls as well as boys so that we end up in a generation of well educated boys and girls who can happily marry each other!
13. Speech by our chief guest Mr. Pravin Saptrishi and Mrs. Rama Saptrishi a veteran from Education field, on value of education in our life.
14. Video of real life story of a poor girl in a remote village of Rajasthan who became a police officer because her father encouraged her to continue her education even though she failed twice in 10th std. The story was from “Girl Stars” section from the website of “Going To School”.
15. Discussion on the video and a positive remark about letting the son do some of the daughter’s tasks and thus increasing his sense of responsibility.
16. Mahesh (our student) noted the attendance. Those who put a thumb impression were told that they’ll have to make a proper signature in the next meeting! Thus we ended on positive and motivating note

Out come:
1. Parent induction affected parents to an extent that Durga, one of our student told that her uncle would make his kids wash clothes & utensils along with her. She was so surprised hearing this that she asked innocently that whether boys should do these house chores or not? Even she told that her uncle would not make her miss even a single class of Pankhudi and most importantly, school come whatever be the situation.
2. At the slums, we saw parents whom we never seen before coming to leave their children & enquiring the new bhaiya’s about the class timings & their identity as told in the meeting.
3. Parents is responding more positively and motivating the kids to go to Pankhudi class and school while we reach them.

Lots of written but this event was like that only

Come April, and the children at Patil Estate finished their school exams and were all ready to begin their summer vacations. We did not want the children to study or to sit through regular classes while their friends back home enjoyed! However, neither did we want to declare a vacation as well so, we decided to make full use of their free time to do extra-curricular activities with them. Now was the time for dance, art, craft and Origami classes, reading and star gazing sessions, outings, movie screenings and lots of games!

Here are the brief details of these activities:
• Reading: As with a large number of children world-wide, we had been observing that our children were not keen on reading for pleasure. So we introduced reading sessions during our weekend classes to see if any of them would want to pursue reading as a hobby. The children explored the world through several colorful children’s books lent by Pankhudi volunteers.
• Dance, art, craft and Origami classes: Creativity, as we know, is a very desirable trait, and in what better way could the children tap theirs! Dancing to “All is well”, drawing sceneries, folding paper to form interesting objects and crafting pictures out of paper, they did it all. And they enjoyed it a lot!
• Movie screening : Movies are a great source of entertainment, especially for our children, so we decided to screen some meaningful, yet fun-to-watch movies for them. After arranging for projectors and speakers, we screened the movies ‘Makdee’ (about a brave young girl’s fight to rescue her twin sister from a Witch) and ‘Finding Nemo’ (about the father fish’s journey to find his son).
• Katraj Snake Park outing: All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, and there’s a lot to learn outside the walls of a classroom. We realized this and took 45 children from the Patil Estate along with us to the Katraj Snake Park and Zoo. Our motive was to facilitate informal interaction between children and volunteers, to let children see in real life the animals they had heard or read about, and also to have fun!
• Star Gazing: Stars and celestial bodies are something we always see, and like too; so we decided to get up close with them. With the help of two telescopes set up on the terrace of a COEP building, 25 kids began exploring the structure of constellations and the surface of the moon, ably guided by Mr. Tushar Purohit from IUCAA.

Last Saturday on 28th of August, Pankhudi Delhi organized a trip to a toffee factory for the kids. It has been a long time since we had a trip so everyone, including the volunteers and the kids, was pumped up with energy and enthusiasm. 

The volunteers met at 1530 hours at the slum. The kids were all dressed in new clothes and were visibly excited about the visit. At times it got a bit difficult to subdue the adrenaline. It took a while to get the kids into the cars and finally we set off at 1615 hours.

By 5 o’ clock we reached the factory. Once we reached, the nostalgic aroma of kismi toffee bars greeted us.
Mr. Khan, the superviser of the factory welcomed us and took us to an AV hall that they had set up inside the factory. Here they showed a 20 minute movie about how Parle started, its different products and also explained the entire cookie and toffee making process. It was an animated movie made especially for children. It was in easy and fun language and had a lot of cartoon characters. It also had excerpts of old Parle ads that all the volunteers remembered from their own childhoon and highly appreciated. Overall a good fun filled educative experience for everyone.

After the movie, Mr. Khan conducted a small quiz for the kids, wherein he asked them questions related to the movie and distributed biscuit packs to the kids who answered all his questions with great alacrity. The kids enjoyed this a lot. After this interaction, Mr. Khan took us on a tour of the factory which was very interesting and at the same time educative. He showed us machines that are used to make and package Mango Bite and Parle candy and even told us interesting facts like those machines could package 1000 toffees in a minute. The kids were quite fascinated seeing all this and were at their best behavior. This is the only factory in Delhi-NCR which manufactures Parle toffees.

After all the knowledge transfer it was time to grab a bite. We served them some snacks that we had brought with us. At the end, Mr. Khan gave little gift bags containing biscuits and toffees for the kids to take home. We were back by 1930 hours and dropped the kids off. Overall, it was a very interesting and informative fun trip for all of us.

Next day when we asked the kids about it, they actually remembered and were able to describe what they saw and the whole process of toffee making. Apparently the target was achieved as the kids had learnt something. Hope we are able to organize similar kind of trips more often.
The link to the  album containing pictures that were clicked that day is below:

http://picasaweb.google.com/pankhudi.pictures/PankhudiDelhiParleToffeeFactoryVisit

Extracts of Independence Day celebration:
The event was a great success with a large number of attendees. There were around 90 people from Patil estate Slum (including kids, their parents, siblings, relatives) who had come to COEP classroom to see the program. The classroom was decorated beautifully by Volunteers – drawings by kids, balloons, ribbons, flag, and ‘HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY’ were put up on the walls of the classroom. Also 1 notable thing was in the whole room there was a single father who had turned up for the program. He was given a bouquet for coming to attend the program, to encourage Father’s attend such program and take responsibility of the overall growth of their children.
We started the event with National anthem which was followed by a short Marathi movie on “Shahid Bhagat Singh”.
It was time for the Kids to take the centre stage and show their talent. Following were the performance done by them:
• Welcome Song
• 5 skits and 3 dance performances were done by the kids.
Most important thing about the above performances were that the kids did it all by their own.
The following two skits were written/directed/performed by the kids on social issues, find below the theme of the same:
One of the skit was about: A boy named Ratan used to go to school but left school because his teacher hit him once. He then went to park since he had nothing to do. There he met some other boys playing cards, smoking, drinking, etc. Soon he joined them and never turned back to school. 15 years later while he was working as a bonded labour at a road construction site, he met one of his school friend who continued learning, got a B.Com. degree and got a job. They talked and looking at the friend, Ratan realised that had he continued education, he would have lived a far better life. The skit ended with Ratan’s monologue where he urged everyone not to do what he did.
Another skit was about: A woman called Lakshmi whose husband used to drink every night with her money, come back home, and then beat her up for more money. Lakshmi lived a terrible life. 2 years later, the husband died of liver failure. What will Lakshmi do now? Two “diidii” came to meet her. They tried to help her out. But Lakshmi was illiterate so she was not able to go for a better job than rag-picking or house maid. She had to continue with the same misery. The skit ended here. And then all performers can on stage and Mahesh (a 12yr old extremely vagabond kid) said this to all kids and parents- “Drinking is a terrible habit. Never drink. And to all the little boys present here, I urge that none of them should ever beat their wives when they grow up.”
In between the above performances we showed a Girl Star video to motivate kids and parents towards importance of education.
. One of most memorable part of the event was that we invited two lady traffic police inspectors, to share their experience and about the importance of education. They came from same environment as that of Patil estate, but they struggled a lot and never stopped their study and today they are self dependent. Kid’s also asked some question and they answered beautifully.

The Program ended with the prize distribution, we made sure that all the performers got some prize and none was named 1st or 2nd but everyone was awarded for their performance and encouraged to do more.
We also distributed colors and chocolates to every kids, along with Snacks for all the attendees.

Just a day before 15th August, Pankhudi Bangalore took the kids of Anatha Shishu Sevashram on a trip to LalBagh. Lalbagh organizes flower show on every Independence Day and Republic Day. So this was a nice eve to take the kids for the visit.

40 kids with 6 volunteers reached LalBagh at 9am. The flower show was quite fascinating for the kids. They enjoyed seeing different kinds and colours of flowers. The interesting thing was the India Gate made with flowers.

After the flower show the kids roamed around in Lalbagh. They visited the rose garden. Sitting under a tree near the rose garden, the kids were able to find the green parrots among the green leaves of the trees.

The next was the huge HMT clock. Kids were happy reading the time and seeing the cartoons. The volunteers then took them to the lake where they enjoyed the most. They enjoyed counting the ducks and other water birds near the lake. They were excited to see the fishes in the lotus pond.

After all the roaming around they were still not tired and were in enthusiasm to go to the small hillock with the temple. They rushed to the top when they were given the signal to go.

In all after 2.5 hours of roaming around, the kids looked happy. It was a nice picnic for them and a small break from the regular schedule.

Pics can be viewed @ http://picasaweb.google.com/pankhudi.pictures/PankhudiBangalore_Lalbagh_ASSA#

When Pankhudi began, way back in 2005, one of its primary objectives was deemed to be the promotion of child adoption in India. However, this being a rather complex issue, the founding members wisely decided to put it off for a little while longer until they had gained some experience in running an NGO. Five years down the line, the time has finally come when we can say we are truly ready to tackle this issue. We have decided to call this new project ‘Aanchal’ – a term synonymous with protection and care.

Our knowledge on this subject is still rather limited since our work in most of our chapters involves children from slums and government schools, and not orphanages (Bangalore being an exception). Before we can decide what we want to do to promote child adoption, we need to learn all there is to know about the current process and its flaws. To get this process started, we recently had an intern from the UK visit our Mumbai chapter to work on research about child adoption in India. He got us off to a great start and gathered a lot of useful information that has helped us create an initial picture about how things are done in India.

The next step will be to actually visit orphanages, adoption agencies, and other organizations involved in the adoption process to get a firsthand understanding of the system. We will use this to determine the role Pankhudi can play in supporting adoption in India.

Our main requirement right now is for enthusiastic volunteers to work with us in getting this project off the ground. Even people who are not able to work on field can help us by engaging in secondary research and brainstorming with us to determine our next steps. If you’re interested, please send us a mail at join@pankhudifoundation.org with the subject “Request to join Aanchal”. You can also e-mail us at pr@pankhudifoundation.org with all your queries.