“The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.” Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy
When we first joint colors we didn’t know what to expect from the children. We didn’t know how much they knew, what they would be interested in or how they would interact with us. We weren’t even sure how we should interact with them. Therefore, our initial classes were not productive. The children did not stay interested in our classes for long and we began to have problems with the attendance. The boys would refuse to talk to us, preferring to talk among them, the girls were shy and we had difficulty in connecting with all of them.
After three months of fruitless discussions, us pestering them to write and them demanding to go out, we finally decided to change our approach for lack of satisfactory results. We spoke to our teachers and mentors and unanimously came up with the idea of doing more activities with the children. Since then, we have done a variety of activities with them like the ‘hero game’. In this, we asked each child to think of his/her favorite film character and tell us how they would respond to certain given situations.
This helped us to understand what they admire in their heroes and it made them think about what they would do in the same situation. We also conducted a quiz o Indian states and capitals. Though we had asked them to prepare beforehand, most of them didn't bother. When we gave the teams which won kites as a prize, the joy on their faces was something we can never forget. They were genuinely so happy! Some of the others even came up to us and told us that they would come prepared next time. After months of frustration and disappointment with our work, we felt like we had finally achieved something!
Now, we feel more confident about our plans for the future. Though we had broken the ice some time ago, it is finally getting warmer.
Shreya and Ankita
Team Baroda
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