Chalk and Challenges

As I would stop by on a red light terminal , children in their tattered clothes and as young as 5 years old would run up to the stationary vehicles to either beg for money, show their catapulting talent or to wipe windshield in exchange for money.

Deeply disturbed by this view, I always wanted to help. But how I did not know. Many ideas would cross my mind. I could help them with decent employment but a child so young doesn't deserve to work. I could teach them but if they study how will they feed their family. Just asking them to stop begging wasn't going to help because there was a strong reason behind why they do what they do. So in 2016 when I came to know about ' Teach for India ' I decided to contribute my bit , even if it was not going to eradicate poverty. I reached out to the organization over email in the month of November as a volunteer and visited their office in Delhi, Green Park. Although only fellows ( and not volunteers )? are allowed to teach a class, my timing was such that class 8 students were without a science?teacher and their final exams were to be held in a few months. So they interviewed me and happily enrolled me .

This all girls school started at 7 am in North Delhi, civil lines . So I would take the metro at 6 am and be there during their morning assembly time. Young , wild and free girls of class 8 refused to study, would beat each other mercilessly , pull each others hair and had a lot of house chores to do after school. On top of it, most of them were going to get married right after their eighth grade exams. They lacked any interest or a reason to study. So I started thinking of ways in which I could engage them and bring them on track ( at least in my class ).

The next few days were spent playing badminton with them, engaging them in plays, poem recitation and playing Bollywood songs in class so as to unleash their dancing potential. I must say all of them turned out to be having extraordinary potential. After building a good rapport with each one of them , I started engaging the class in actual science lectures and managed to complete most of the syllabus.

My goal was to ensure? they clear the exams , so I looked through previous years papers and started with those chapters which had a high weightage . Chapters with less weightage were done in a hurry as three months had already passed and March had approached .In between I was also visited by reviewing faculties who would sit through the class and assess how the teachings were being conducted. The exams were conducted and I had a pile of answer sheets to evaluate . My entire weekend was spent evaluating them but it gave me immense pleasure to see the fruits of my efforts, for many of those who would resort to beating each other on day one, had done fairly well in their term end paper. As I distributed the answer sheets and informed them that my term had ended, I distributed my contact number, for if anyone happened to study further or needed employment at some stage.

Today I happened to come across this picture from 2016 and wondered where would all those kids be now. I hope some of them happened to turn around their life and did not succumb to the weight of poverty and sacrifices that come along with it . I hope someday I am able to contribute more concretely. But for now I am happy I did , what I could, with what I had at that moment. ?