kiddie school.

In addition to the Boys' Home and the government school project, we are also continuing the Kiddie School. For those of you who are new to Peace Child India, the Kiddie School is a makeshift school we created 4 years ago for the children of the migrant workers in the area surrounding our office/residence. Because the families work primarily in construction, they move around depending on where the work is, meaning that the children usually do not stay in one place long enough to attend school. However, because our area has been developing at a steady rate in recent years, many of the families have set up homes but are still not sending their children to proper school. Since the inception of the Kiddie School, it has been run primarily by interns, with assistance from Maruthi. In February of this year, we had two interns take over the running of the Kiddie School with great success (thank you, Olivia and Meije!), but since they've gone, we haven't had anyone interested in it, so Maruthi has been running the school every Friday for 2 hours. We realised there is only so much we can do at the Kiddie School with just one facilitator and children of such varied ages. The older children especially need a more structured education, so we have been working on identifying the ones who have the motivation and the potential and have been sponsoring their formal education (paying for books, bags, uniforms, stationery, etc). As of now we have enrolled 2 boys - Harisha and Karthik - in school, so our next focus is to get the parents to send their girl children to school as well. Many of the families wish for the girls to stay home and help with the everyday running of the house, but because one of the pillars of our organisation is the empowerment of females, we have told the families that we will only continue to support more children if they begin sending their daughters to school as well. We have many local volunteers who have expressed interest in sponsoring a child's education, so we are using their support and will hopefully have 2 girls enrolled in school in the coming months.

Thank you to all of you for your continued support of all our projects, and we hope you are enjoying hearing about all that we are doing.

Amaidhi Devaraj
Director
Peace Child India

welcome.

Welcome to Peace Child India's blog! We are hoping this will be an easy way for all of you to stay updated on our projects, but also as a way for current interns to post quick thoughts about their experiences with Peace Child.

Currently we are still going strong with our projects in the Boys' Home and in the government schools. We have 5 interns at the moment -- Lisa, Keir, Harriet and Jess from the UK, and Nick, who is the lone US representative. They've all been working hard on lessons for both projects. In the schools they are taking lessons from the children's textbooks and working on comprehension for the students' final exams. At the Boys' Home we've been doing a lot of craft projects; our most successful one recently has been the completion of a jigsaw depicting the solar system which is now proudly displayed on the wall.

We also recently had a group here for 2 weeks from Harris Academy Crystal Palace in London. They replaced a cement floor, painted a wall, and did some gardening at the Muthrayanagar School where all 3 Harris groups have been working. Upon completion of their hard work we traveled to Mysore and Coorg, where we had fun battling the leeches and playing in the waterfall at Honey Valley.




We have a few upcoming projects which we are excited about. We are hoping to provide all the boys at the Boys' Home with lockers for them to store their clothes and other belongings, and we are also looking into providing the boys who attend outside school with cycles. There are a few donors who are helping sponsor these projects, and as soon as we get them off the ground we will send updates (and hopefully some pictures!).

Hopefully soon I can sweet-talk one of the interns into writing a post about their time here. Take care until then.