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