Yesterday we went to the MGR Nagar Slum and were able to accomplish several things:

The first thing we were able to accomplish is the Focus Group Discussion that we had planned to conduct with the women in the slum. Through the discussion we were able to learn about the women and their perceived needs, and build a relationship with our most important allies in slum rehabilitation – the women of the community. This was led by Dr. Gayatri, Vandhana and Nivedita. More about this will be made available in a future post by one of the leaders of this project.

The second thing that we did was we ran a tuition class for the children. Because Sudha, the local Balwadi worker, was needed in the Focus Group Discussion, two of our members, Ashitha and Gayatri, took on the responsibility of running the tuition center for her in her absence. They had a wonderful time reading with the kids, and in this way got to know many of them better. This unplanned but fortunate event helped us to learn more about the children in the community.

The final thing we were able to do was to complete the survey. A number of volunteers came on the trip and did a wonderful job of continuing the survey work. Thanks to their efforts, we’ve been able to increase the total houses surveyed to nearly 85%.  This project was led by Gautam Bagga, who has been in charge of the survey project, and he’ll be blogging soon about the process and the outcome of this work.  We’d like to thank Anwin for coming out for the first time on this volunteer effort!

Thanks to everyone again for their wonderful support, and more information about today’s trip will be forthcoming.

This entry was posted by sriram on Saturday, July 25th, 2009 at 4:05 pm and is filed under education, survey, Women's Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.