Impact for Peace
Everyone can make an impact in this world.
Group 2
We arrived in the early July, which is the rainy season of India. According to the previous experience, there can be serious flooding in India. Luckily, it didn't happen to us. During the month we stayed in India, apart from the designated tasks, we also did some field trip to different slum areas and NGOs in Kolkata, so as to develop a deeper understanding in the community there and find out a way to make a greater impact.
Vocational Skill Transfer Program in Women Center
We decided to teach the women card drawing and bag making. Although some of the women know how to speak English, generally their English standard is not high. Luckily, one of the teachers there were willing to help in translation. We hope the women there could earn some money by making the products to improve their daily life. We observed that most of the women there don't have enough health education. We therefore decided to hold health talks and introduce them knowledge about physical health and personal hygiene like first aids, hair lice, food and water hygiene, contraceptive methods and so on.
We hope after the program the women not only can obtain the skills of making cards and bags, but also receives like, care, support and respects from us.
Teaching in the Children Center
The learning environment in the children center is far from satisfactory. The children center, was just a shabby and small house, classes 0f children from different ages and education levels were taught by the teachers at the same time and the children kept on shouting out vocabularies. Indeed, it was quite noisy there. We doubt whether the children could really listen to the teachers and learn effectively.
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To increase the efficiency of teaching, we classified all the students in two groups a group that can master alphabets and a group that cannot. Then each group will be handled by three of us. The remaining one of us would then be responsible for tutoring the elites. It is believed that grouping the class in this way would help to ensure that the standard of students in the same group would not differ too much.
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Through the classes, we hope the children can learn correct English pronunciation, new English vocabularies and songs form us. We also taught them some Mathematics and how to be polite and disciplined, as sometimes they went too excited.
Visiting children who are seeking for sponsorship
We went to visit the children in slum areas who have applied to FOCUS for sponsoring their school fees. We interviewed them to see if they are really in need of the financial supports to go to school. In addition, we gathered other personal information of the applicant (e.g. their dream, their interest, etc.) so that we can later show them to the potential donors. During the process, we filmed a video for each child to record the information they provided to us. We hoped that a lively figure can thus be created so that the children would get sponsors more readily.
Most of the children we visited were very kind and polite and has shown their interest in learning. Judging from their living environments and according to their descriptions, it seems that most of them are really in great need of financial supports. We recorded their information in written form and in the video. We have also taken photos of the children’s latest examination report to keep a record.