My love is like mutton

Heya! OK I no doubt have a massive backlog of emails to send – I haven’t really been on the computer doing that stuff in ages – it was basically most of the time I had to phone home once in a while lol. So I will first catch y’all up here and then send my multitude of emails, promise!

Well I think the last time I wrote, we were still a twosome in the flat – that has now developed to four. Orlagh came two weeks ago now and Ellie, Jon’s friend, arrived about four days after her. They started work on Monday in Ekta Vihar near the ASHA HQ. They were told that they would be getting young students with little English like us. What they got was 16-20 year olds who need a lot of polishing, which was a little surprising! However, on Valentine’s Day they did get them to write love poetry and the results were hilarious: “My love is like mutton” and “Love is life, husband is wife, and another knife” were two of my favourites lol!

Valentines day at Zakhira and Mayapuri were a bit less advanced – we got them to make Valentine’s cards, some of which were very creative – the ones from the boys class will go to the girls and vice-versa. They had fun making them anyway and it was a fun way to get to know the kids a bit better – albeit through our low levels of enlgish and hindi – and a hindi dictionary lol. I am really fond of them all – especially in Zakhira though – but I do worry that the differing ages (we have 9and 16 year olds in the same class) will make difference in how much they can be taught. We don’t want to leave some behind but I would like to help push the better ones even further…

We took a trip around the first area of the Zakhira slum on Wednesday 2 weeks ago as well. It’s a really interesting slum to look at – a bit like Kalkaji. It is set by the railway – which we saw from the roof of the support centre – and runs right along the track for a kilometre I think. It was more interesting because the kids took us round the slum so it was great to actually meet their families and see the community through their eyes. As usual everyone wanted to feed us, so we got unlimited amounts of biscuits. I will put some of the photos up sometime. We watched one of our kids called Haider Ali cut up the straps of sandals from the original factory rubber– the women in the slum get 1 rupee for every dozen they cut out – and it was amazing just how skilled and quick he was at doing it. O and we saw goats wearing cardigans, which was rather cute lol! It’s going to be strange going round Mayapuri because it is hard to see where the industrial area ends and the slum begins. We have about three hours of lunch time in Mayapuri and so I asked some of the workers if they wanted any time to learn some English – I didn’t quite bank on the idea of teaching reported speech, so I will have to look into that; however I am so glad that I feel I can help them too. One of the girls (well about 20) Natasha, gave us roses on Valentines day, so we made her a card with the kids – it was lovely! We also had three English teachers, who are starting permanently past time as part of the new literacy programme with us this week. Neeti, Aarti and Archana were apparently told that we were *dynamic* teachers and were to try and learn something from our teaching style. That seemed more than a bit weird to us as we have never taught before. But it was great having them there. They helped us translate a lot of stuff that we needed and also helped us communicate with the children a bit better. I think it moved us along definitely. Archana did have a mouth on her though – she would do well in Ireland…There was a hilarious moment when she was going on about the hospitality of the Indian people – “They are very hospitable, the Indian people, they will take you into your home and hospitalise people.” And she also gave Jon and very long and interesting history of Bollywood, and Hollywood. Very long. Anyway, they start work at the same place as Ellie and Orlagh on Monday.

We did the second part of the Personal Development course on Saturday, which was really interesting and trying to fit seven people in Sanjana’s car was fun. The next day we managed to get locked out of the apartment, which we also managed again today, except locked in this time. The door has the most annoying security system in the whole world.

I am pretty sure that I am missing out a lot of stuff but I won’t go on in much detail. The kids in Mayapuri during lunch are really cute and do not let us go a day without playing. The first class also wrote up on Friday “We missing Orlagh.” Highly cute. Half way trough almost and I still feel I need to make a big difference but I have loved getting to know them better. I wish in a way I could just spend a bit more time with some of them and push them on. We shall see. Anyway to bed soon, I was very tired today and I think we are going to Old Delhi tomorrow which should be very cool. Love to all, talk soon.

G