volunteering at Child Haven International (India)

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I’m here in the village of Savarsai, about 75 km south of Mumbai (just outside of Pen city). Apparently, this Child Haven (CH) home has a better location than some of the other homes: we are surrounded by the countryside with a nice view of the hills and farms on one side. It is also the smallest home with only 32 kids at the moment. I absolutely love the kids, they are great to be around. They range from age 6 to 15 (grades Jr KG to 9). I teach mostly English but intend to do a lot of music and art as these are subjects that seem to be lacking in their school and in their environment in general. The difficult part is that most of them are tone deaf. I don’t know if that can change with time. I also visited a developmental project nearby run by Raj Anthony. The project assists tribal children in getting an education and adapting to mainstream society. I visited the hostel where the tribal children live during the weekdays while they attend school. They are of the Kathkari, an indigenous tribe which is on its way to extinction. Raj said that these children are much more connected to music and art and I’ll probably have an easier time teaching them. They sang a song for us and did sound a lot more in tune than the kids at CH.
With the children at CH, I guess the general mentality is that what’s most important is to get ahead in society and music and art are not really useful knowledge in that regard. The people who run the Savarsai home, a couple who I’ll refer to as P & K, have been pushing me to teach English and all hours of the day, on weekends as well, whenever possible, in fact. There have not been many volunteers here in the past and I guess they really want to take advantage of me being here. But I didn’t come prepared and have no teaching materials. I have only the internet for obtaining some ideas of what to teach and feel pretty overwhelmed. I especially have no idea about what to do with the small kids who have almost no English. The older ones are so much easier to teach and also don’t require any disciplining. Not that I do any disciplining. The younger ones just don’t listen, or they talk all at once, or create other usual problems teachers encounter with this age group. I find that I really don’t want to deal with that at all as I’m not here to “babysit”. If they don’t listen, I just leave which usually works to make them listen. I’m not sure how effective my teaching will be since I’m just making things up as I go along. The main problem I find is that they all have tons of vocabulary since they all take English at school, but they cannot make any sentences from the words. Any communication with them is just a whole bunch of words and most of the time, I can’t make out what they’re trying to say, including P & K. So my main goal right now is just to make them speak in sentences. One of the things we’re trying to instill in the kids are Gandhian principles. Since CH is an organization founded on Gandhian principles, which includes non-violence, the staff and children must learn not to hit each other but since hitting is very much a part of society here, teaching them non-violence will be a long and grueling process. Personally, I’m not expecting much change. If they stop hitting, it’ll only be in front of us, us being Raj Anthony who is a CH committee member, the volunteers, visitors from abroad, and most importantly, Bonnie, founder of CH, who visits 4 times a year.

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