School, vineyards and games

Well, school is going well, I am getting better at sign language and teaching the children basic English instructions to make lessons/crafts easier. We have done stand up, sit down, quiet, make a circle and a few others. I am also getting good at talking very basically with minimal words, like 'colour', 'draw'! It is hard work but I am here to be challenged and I am enjoying it.

Today we went to the vineyard which was a 2 hour coach trip, but it was good to see the Indian countryside. We drove past lots of farming fields and rivers, we saw camels at one place and white cows (with a hump, maybe a buffalo?) pulling the ploughs in the field. At the vineyard, we saw the machines (which were Italian) and weren't in use as they only process the wines during harvest season from January to March. We also saw the bottles of sparkling wine and big barrels, so it was ok. Unfortunately there was no wine tasting, why go to a vine yard and no taste wine! There was the option to buy some but I was told that Indian wine can be very sour and I don't drink much anyway so it seemed a bit pointless!

This afternoon we played games in the campsite with the local guides and the Sri Lankan guides which was fun, but hot. We did some songs, in Marathi, Hindi, Sinhalese (Sri Lankan language) and English. We played a version of Cat and Mouse but it was a tiger trying to catch a God and a big game of tig. Whilst we were out in the campsite there were hundreds of dragonflies around, it was very unusual to see so many, there were so many that I accidentally hit one whilst doing an action song!

So all going well :)

Mumbai

Silly elephant statue in Mumbai
Flora fountain
Sugar cane juice
View from hostel window
Gateway to India

Mobile Creche

All is going well at the two creche sites, it is getting easier to communicate in basic words and phrases and sign language along with a tiny bit of Hindi. I played parachute games with the children yesterday, we have made origami boats, done dot-to-dots, maths, songs, colouring, fruits and much more. The children are getting to know us and it is good fun. I thought I would show you some pictures, so that you can see what I have been doing at the Clover site (Mon-Tues). Sorry don't know why it is underlined!
Fulabai with her lunch
This is where the children live

Playing games


The white block on the far right is the creche

Other blogs

Well, if you want to find out more about what I am doing (when maybe you don't hear from me for a few days), some of the other CVs are writing blog too:

Kristen who will be my room mate:
http://kralingen.livejournal.com/

Gerda, a girl from Sweden (you need to use google translator)
http://www.gerdapaaventyr.blogspot.com/

Had first full day at the creche today it was tiring but good, we did name badges, drew and coloured fruits (that is their current theme of the month), we did exercises, sang songs (alice the camel, incy wincy spider, a few marati ones) and the younger kids slept and played games/toys. We taught the kids about tickling which was great fun, and one little kid constantly wants to be lifted up she is really cute and loves being tickled and is always smiling :) Back to school again tomorrow, the teacher said about doing orgami and showed us a frog but this looks really complicated so we might do simple boats and/or fans and colour them in.

See you soon xxxx

Gerda wants a tiger, a bear, oh deer! She wants to adopt the whole zoo, I want a baby elephant!

We went to Pune zoo today, well actually we thought we were going to the snake park but the rickshaw drivers dropped us at the zoo instead. We later found out that the snake park was within the zoo so we might go back another time as we had to leave for lunch. One of the park rules was that you are not allowed plastic inside the zoo, this includes crisp packets. I had brought a packet of tomato crisps for 5RS (about 7p!) and the later opened the bag and tipped them into a paper bag made of of newspaper that was sewn up! It was pretty strange! The zoo cost 10RS for Indians (about 13p) and 25RS for foreigners (about 32p!) So as you can see everything is pretty cheap, a half an hour rickshaw costs about GBP2 max and that is between two or three of us!

Every time we saw an animal, Gerda decided that she wanted one, be it a tiger, a bear or a deer! We even found one type of deer that apparently poos in one place so she thought that was good as it was toilet trained! Hehe. Anna (who will be her roommate) thought this was funny and I suggested that maybe Gerda should just live at the zoo!

We saw monkeys playing in the trees...
The was a lovely lake in the middle of the zoo, it was such a nice view.
Then we saw elephants, sorry there were no baby elephants that I could take home but they were elephants! They were so cute, especially these two who were playing together.

On the rickshaw on the way home, we saw an elephant being ridden along the road! This was the first time we had seen this, Anna was on the side of the rickshaw closest to the elephant so she took the photo. It is slightly smaller than the other pics as the rickshaw was moving quite fast and she accidentally got her finger in front of it, but we still got the elephant, so all is good. :)
Hope all is well with you,
xxx

The day we became celebrities in Pune!

My new punjabi came back from the tailors today.

We went to Pune festival, which was joint with the Ganesh festival, we were picked up by a bus (by organisers) and taken in through VIP entrance, we kind of felt like we were gate crashing but we were later told that the organisers know Sangam and so we were special guests. We were taken past a big drumming band, then had large flower garlands placed on us and the red dots on forehead! Then flowers thrown over our heads, we also realised we were being filmed and everyone was watching us on the big screen. It felt very strange, we weren't expecting it at all!
This was a Ganesh statue made of lots of men holding up pieces and dancing him around.

There was lots of singing and dancing on stage and many colourful costumes! Here are two clips, including some very well behaved horses who didn't even flinch with all the drumming and loud music! I was very impressed! It was a great night, but very strange, we saw other white people which we were all quite surprised at. We wondered if they had rounded up all the white people in town and put them in one place!

First day at school

Today we went to our Mobile Creche site for the first time, we got a local bus then a rickshaw to the site. This wasn't quite as manic as we had expected the buses to be, yes the first two buses were very full with people hanging out the doors, but the third one was better and we all managed to get a seat straight away for the whole journey. The site was quite remote, with the typical metal sheet houses and the construction sites in the distance. The kids were all well behaved but a few of them were obv quite scared of us as we were the first volunteers from sangam visiting this partucular site. The younger ones cried, they probably hadn't seen white people before cos apart from Sangam people, I have only seen one other white person in Pune! We played with some of the older kids and they were smiling and hopefully the younger ones will get used to us. There are three of us going to mobile creche together (google tara mobile creche) Te, Anna and myself. Kristen and Gerda are going to the doorstep school. I have found out I will be sharing with Kristen :) Had first Hindi lesson yesterday which was good but a bit confusing, we need to do lots of repetition to learn it, but it should be fun and we have loads of people to practise on.