COUNTRY: India
PROGRAM: GapBreak
PROJECT: Teaching
WRITTEN BY: Bec Farquhar
8:00 Good morning India! Rise and shine it is time for a hot/luke warm bucket shower, bedroom duties, yoga and the occasional last minute worksheet.
9:00 'Breakfast is ready' we are being called to breakfast by Meenaji (our delightful cook). Toast, cereal, fruit and of course chai; occasionally we are treated with an Indian breakfast: savoury porridge or Indian rice flakes.
10:00 Our mini Van 'Magic' is waiting to take us to school. Our bags are packed full of resources for our teaching. We have a 20 minute journey to school, in which we drive on the wrong side of the highway to the reach the dusty pot holed road to school. Passing a cow house, army base, chicken wishing temple and many farms just to name a few.
10:30 "Say Good morning, Say Good morning, How are you? How are you?" our routine morning song is sung with with our school kids, followed by thousands of high fives.
10:45 Teaching begins. Here we constantly refer to our previously organised lesson plan in an attempt to keep our kids happy & engaged. In the two hours of teaching we manage to use our entire Hindi vocab, although not very extensive, is still very useful tool to bridge the language gap.
12:30 Teaching finishes. Time for the goodbye song..."Bye, Bye, Bye my friend...Thank you for today"
13:00 Lunch is ready. We are always pleasantly welcomed home from school with new and mouth watering Indian meals.
14.00 Lesson planning for school and orphanage begins. A production line of worksheets are made (lets not forget to mention they are handmade using layers of paper and carbon paper), we have a stocked resource room at hand stocked full of teaching aids and we busily prepare for the coming lessons constantly experimenting with new ways to effectively convey the syllabus.
16:30 CHAI TIME! Half an hour out of our day just to sit and relax with a cup of chai tea & 'Parle G' Indian biscuits.
17:00 Time to depart to the boys orphanage. Again our van 'Magic' is waiting for us to depart, so to is our wonderful driver Kanhaiyaji, whose patience has kindly dealt with our very bad singing to and from the orphanage.
17:15 "Gola Banao" (English translation: make a circle) here we sing the good evening song with our group of vibrant and polite boys & begin teaching.
18:00 Allocated game time for 45mins. Includes skipping, dancing, murder wink, poison ball, circus acts etc. Game time never fails to put a smile on both ours and the boys face, their energy and positivity is contagious and we always leave feeling uplifted.
21:00 Dinner time: Yet again our taste buds are spoilt and our stomachs are content after another brilliant meal prepared by the beautiful Meenaji. Dessert it rare, but is a welcomed occasion especially when it is our favourite Golab Jamon (a-hot-golden-syrup'y'-soft-doughnut-like-ball) Hungry yet?...It is even better with ice-cream.
After dinner, time is ours to spend as we wish & another day in India has been lived.
Goodnight!
Georgie, Lizzie, Sam & Bec
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