Today we went on a visit to the MGR Nagar slum, what we had previously called ‘slum B’ in past posts. It was a wonderful and insightful visit.

We were a small group today, and we were glad to have many volunteers come from the city. We hope this is a trend that begins to pick up more and more. We divided into two main groups: the first group was the mapping group, with Katie and Kavi.  They began work mapping out the community with a GPS device. We hope this information will help us as we conduct a survey and learn more about the population.

The second group consisted of the rest of the people.  On the visit, we again met Mr. Ponuswami, who introduced us to the social workers of Paathai.  Paathai is an organization which is focused on education. They send out social works to run classes in slums for the children there, 5 days a week.  We met Ms. Yashodha, who worked for the organization, as well as Ms. Sudha, who works for the Balwadi Programme.  They were wonderfully helpful in getting the kids together, having them sit with us. Yashodha has been working in this community for several years and she has done immense, wonderful work.

We started with the kids by having them stand up and introduce themselves by stating their name, their age, and what standard they had studied up to. The kids were very disciplined and were pleasant to work with. Once we had finished with this, we then divided the children up into two groups. The older children (more than 10 years of age) had a writing exercise – they were told to write down what they would like to be when they grew up. The younger children had a name game followed by a simple coloring exercise, which they greatly enjoyed doing.

From Ms. Yashodha, we were able to get a list of all the names of the children on an attendance register. Ms. Yashodha also had conducted a census previously, which we were able to take as well. This will make our work much easier as we conduct our survey.

It was a great, friendly visit and we learned a lot about our community. Mr. Ponuswamy also showed us a plot of land where we could build something, such as a community center, in the future. Perhaps in the future we will be able to build something in this area to help the community.

Thanks to everyone for coming out and helping with this project!

View the rest of the photos from this album

This entry was posted by sriram on Sunday, July 12th, 2009 at 6:51 pm and is filed under visits. 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.