It's a Start

They live in little huts made of plastic, paper and tin covering a bamboo frame.  Next to a polluted pond, five feet from a road where busses and trucks speed by.  These are the beautiful children of the bosti.

One father has no legs. He begs for a living. Some fathers are hard-working rickshaw pullers or day laborers. Other children have no father at all. I'm told there are drug addicts and prostitutes there as well.
For all of them, life is hard.  They bathe and wash their clothes and dishes in the polluted pond.  There are no toilets.  They eat hand to mouth,  never making enough to escape the cycle of poverty.

In my last post I wrote about  Ajina who works in our home.  I wrote about how I got to know these people through her because this is where she had been living.  I told how they had been able to move out of the 'slum' and rent a simple little house.  Now their landlord tells them he wants them out. They have a week to relocate.  They are rebuilding their roadside shack in the bosti.

 The children of this bosti have been telling me for months that they want to  go to school.  A couple of university students helped me survey the bosti families to find out the children's ages and whether or not they're in school.    Most of them were not. Regular government schools don't work well for these children.  They seem to need a sort of 'head start' program...something to encourage them and their parents on to the road to learning.   We walked along one area of the bosti and registered 22 children for our class.  Many parents were thrilled,  others indifferent, but ALL of the children were VERY, very excited.

I figured that securing a location for our little school  to meet would be simple.  There was a park nearby with a pavillion. Surely we'd be able to get permission to use it, I thought (naively)!  After several hours of sitting in offices: the mayor, the commissioner, and several others---always receiving polite verbal consent but---we still have not been given a place to meet.   I'm learning that people rarely say 'no' here, even when they have no intention of actually doing it.   Still, we continue to hope and pray that we will find a place to use soon.  Tomorrow I will go to the Railway office to ask for the use of a plot of land behind the bosti.

Meanwhile,  we have started to meet in an open field, on the other side of the pond.  At least it's a start!   The children are in their places--nametags around their neck and slates in hand,  by 8am.  We bring the books, chalk, a whiteboard and  a snack.
We ended up with  some older kids who had never gone to school or dropped out, so there was a wide age span. We divided into a younger and older group and sit on separate mats.  It seems to be working.

A couple of too-young children tag along with the older sibling because there's no one else to watch them.  They've become some of my favorite 'students', like this sweet little girl.  She's actually older than she looks but has a growth defect.  She loves to learn.

The last half hour,  Jonathan shows up and we do some games and fun activities.

A number game with the younger class.

Trying to catch Jonathan

A wild race.  Everyone cheated to try to beat the other!

  Thanks for reading about our little school.  Please pray for a future and a hope for these beautiful children of the bosti.