At the Local Primary School

Things at the local primary school have changed a lot since my last blog. Especially, once Angela arrived, she brought a new dynamic to the teaching. First, instead of being just me, there's now 2 of us, actually there was 2 of us. But now, like with the computer class I have left the school to concentrate on other things. You can see a picture of my last day above, the one with the kids all surrounding me. It was a great last day, we all sang together and I did some dancing too while the kids sang in Nepali.

Back in Australia, Angela is a music teacher and also is director of an amateur all female choir. So straight away, she added the musical element to the classroom which the kids lapped up. So it became normal that for the last 5-10 minutes of class we would sing songs. Most were simple and catchy ones, the most popular was an African one called 'Oh Malle', they loved it and sometimes we hear them singing it outside of school too.

Working together as team made the challenge of working with the children so much easier and has meant we have created a stronger bond with them. To help learn all their names we created name badges, which the children loved and felt very proud with their name on their chest. We also introduced doing a test at the end of each week, to see if they really were learning anything. It was a great way of testing their ability and to see how much copying they do, and many do, mainly because it is so prevalent in the local government schools, something I hope will change in the future. But we try our best to discourage it and let them know it's ok to make mistakes, it is how you learn.

Another great idea Angela came up with was to do some simple renovation to the classroom, as they were in a horrible state, holes in the floor and window sills and the walls were unpainted and full of graffiti, shows how much respect the children have for their classroom and the lack of it the teachers have too. So we enlisted the help of our amazing big brother Ramsaran, from the hotel, and he got a team together to patch up all the holes and Angela and I acquired some paint and got to work on the walls.

The most amazing part was that, some of the children from our computer classes who don't go to this school helped us paint without us even asking. That really made us feel lucky to be here in Bandipur with children and people like this, it makes us wonder who is benefiting more from our time here, the community or us, I think it's pretty "same same", as they say here.

You can see the difference in the pictures above, the one with the balloons was before and the one with the kids and me was after, but I think you could have guessed that!?

Anyway, I hope the children will continue to benefit from the good will of all the volunteers to come in the future, I will miss them and hopefully I will see them again one day.