Summer camp

Went on the Sunday morning outing with the Aashayein Foundation after a really long time. Going by blips, the last one was on 28th Feb. Today's was more than just a Sunday breakfast. From this week, a summer camp was started by the foundation in a couple of Govt schools in the city. Almost all the kids from the private schools and relatively affordable families go for fancy summer camps. There's no reason why these kids shouldn't, just because they don't have the money to spare. The camp was organized in their school itself and the arrangements were modest, to say the least. But that doesn't take anything away from the quality of the activities or how much the kids can learn, while having fun at the same time.

The school itself is just a two room structure standing on an open ground. It doesn't seem like the building was built as a school. It has two rooms - no bigger than my bedroom, and a small blackboard. I was told that there are about 3 teachers who are supported by the foundation volunteers every Saturday, who take some time out to teach a few subjects to these kids. The camp started off with some basic physical exercise. Though the volunteers were struggling to remember the exercises from their school days, the kids kicked some serious dust off the ground. After breakfast, it was a short movie and some education time for the kids. The short movie that was shown is a very famous and old animation video that talks about being together and the power of unity. Guess the adults need more of this lesson than the kids.

The other activity was more of a group discussion and educative session on water. Kids were asked and told about the water cycle, uses of water, water conservation etc. When I've interacted earlier with kids from other private and some of the high-profile schools of Hyderabad, I was amazed at the amount of information those kids have. What surprised me is they not only know about stuff but they understand about it as well. When I try to compare the young me with those kids, I don't even stand anywhere. The story about these under-privileged government school children is completely different. They are way behind their counterparts from other well-facilitated schools. And the kids are not to be blamed for this. This disparity talks volumes about the degree of access to information and knowledge. That's the gap that needs to be reduced, if not closed. Once that's achieved I'm sure some of these kids will be able to scale up and compete with their 'other' counterparts.