Balamitra school is one year old - thank you!

In June 2005 "Samatha" started a small school in Hyderabad for children of the tribal people living in mountain villages abroad. WOW-Day donations helped very much with the start. Here is the report about the first year.

It was something very new...

... when we in June 2005 started our small initiative with 17 tribal children and two of my own children in a small rented house overlooking the beach outside the town. It was a totally new and wild initiative to take this big responsibility of looking after a group of children as they have to live with us away from their homes in the mountains.

It was just the trust that the tribal communities had in us as we have worked with them for almost twenty years and they understood that we wanted to do something good and meaningful with the children. The children who came were mainly from the remotest villages and from tribes called ‘Primitive Tribal Groups’ so called by the government because of their developmental backwardness but what we know as from the most culturally rich communities. They came from villages where it is difficult to find even a single literate person and where infant mortality is very high because of lack of medical attention.

Some of the children were our own activists’ children and some had lost one or both of their parents. They also came from different language backgrounds. Even four five year old children came and much as we tried to send them back home, they refused to leave.

The first two months was a trying time for all of us looking after the children as they came from villages which had no toilets, no electricity, no running water or roads. Lessons started with learning to switch on the light, how to use a tap, use the toilet and use doors and latches and there were lots of accidents using them. The children came with lice in their hair, scabies all over their bodies and within a week the whole school had scabies, including my own children who never knew what scabies was. It took us more than three months of scrubbing and combing and cleaning and washing. Finally the only solution we had to lice was to tonsure all the heads and we became a school of skin-heads...

We started with three teachers - all young tribal girls who just finished school and had attended some training programmes in Waldorf education. Two young tribal women joined us to help with the cooking and cleaning and our senior activist from Samata who is also a trained nurse took charge as the care-taker, nurse and warden of the children. The children were of three age-groups – four ten year olds, four five year olds and the rest were between six and seven years. In the middle of the term, we had two more ten year old boys who joined us. So we started with classes I, V and kindergarten. We started the school with a lot of singing and dancing as all our teachers and helpers and the children are from different tribes and knew beautiful songs about nature and fruits and animals. We have printed our first song book in different languages which we use in all our 40 village schools now.

It was easy planning lessons for the kindergarten and Class I. We were at a loss with where to begin with Class V because although they were of the same age group, they were at different levels academically. But our problem was solved to a large extent, because all the children in the class were bright and eager. We had to start with alphabets in English but it did not take long before they could read and write simple sentences. Most of the subjects were taught in Telugu, our local language and we would try to write them again in English. A short visit by two Waldorf students from Germany helped a great deal as they taught them songs and reading.

Our school life

We collected a lot mud of different colours from the villages and painted our school walls and learnt to paint on paper and on pots. Every time we went to the villages, we collected a lot of shells, nuts, seeds and leaves for our math’s classes and craft classes. Fortunately, we live in front of the sea and our morning walks are filled with hands full of shells, enough to build mountains in the school. The children learnt their counting and the four processes in maths most of the time with these shells and tamarind seeds. We made bean bags with the cereals we get in the hills. We could get coconut, palm and adda leaves with which we made containers and baskets for our seeds, chalk piece boxes, cradles for babies and other play material. In the second term we worked a lot with paper mache and made many boxes for all the classes and lots of animal faces from our animal stories.

Form drawing was mainly built on our Rangoli patterns that we draw in front of our houses. In Class I, we learnt language with bean bags, cards, from stories of tribal mythology and local proverbs and puzzles. By the end of the year, the children were writing their own stories and poetry and even put up a puppet show with a story composed and scripted by themselves. They were quizzing all visitors to the school with riddles that they had made up.

Our animal and nature studies block was a great thrill because we were fortunate to be living so close to the beach and our neighbours are lions and tigers and elephants because we have the zoo next door. All around us are fishing villages. Our school is surrounded with goats, sheep, buffaloes and cows grazing everywhere. We made several trips to the zoo last year and drew pictures and wrote stories about wild animals. Stories from Panchatantra, the Indian mythology were very popular with them. We also walked down to the fishing villages and watched them make their fishing nets and boats, talked to the fishermen about their sailing and their catch and went to the fishing market to see the varieties of fish they catch. We brought some back and learnt to cook with lots of spices.

In Class V we had our animal blocks on domestic animals, on fishes, on wild animals and the in the last term, on birds. We made a book of birds and although we knew about fifty birds and their habitat, we could only complete writing about some of them. All the children worked together in writing about the birds, their eggs, nests, food and all they knew about the birds, how they hunt them, drew pictures and made songs and stories. In took us one whole term to write about them. Then we went to the book store and picked up the most famous Indian ornithologist Salim Ali’s book of Indian birds and tried to identify the birds from what we had written and drawn and wrote down their English names.

In geography and history lessons, Class V made a map of the school and a census of the school. Then we walked around our colony, talked to the shop keepers, the local bank, post-office, panchayat (council) office, and other villagers and made a map of the colony and a history of the place and how it became a town. We then talked about our tribal villages and wrote about the families in our villages, made maps of our villages. We visited by bus some tribal villages in another district and learnt about their language, their crops, their dances and the houses. My son wrote about the city he grew up in while the other children wrote about their villages. Then we learnt about the tribal regions in the whole of our state and the districts in our state. We painted the maps of our villages, the state and the districts. We told stories about tribal heroes who fought the British army.

We had a big block on the Mahabharata and wrote the stories from the Mahabharata and painted scenes from these stories. One of the important heroes in Mahabharata we learnt was about Ekalavya, the tribal boy who becomes the greatest archer but sacrifices his right thumb as his tribute to his Guru because Guru Drona had promised that Arjuna will be made the best archer in the world.

In maths block in class V we learnt the four processes, measurement, tables and fractions. For fractions we made rotis and dosas and once even managed to bake a cake. We learnt tables with the stick dances and balancing the sticks. All of them could balance the sticks in their two fingers till the twelve table and two managed till the sixteen.

In the crafts class, we learnt sewing with hand, simple stitches and lots of embroidery stitches. The measurement class also consisted of taking measurement of all the children and we helped in sewing the school uniforms. Then all of us came up with a symbol for the school to put on our uniforms and notice boards. The children selected the tribal dance, Dhimsa, as the symbol and practiced drawing it. We then sowed the symbol on each of our shirts and even the small children learnt to do it on their own. They were so proud when they first wore their uniforms on the last day of school when we celebrated with an evening function. We invited school teachers, senior citizens, journalists, friends and children of the city to spend an evening with us. The children showed them glimpses of what we do in the class in different subjects, sang many songs, put up a quiz for the adults with the riddles and puzzles made themselves, and finally a puppet show. We made lots of interesting things to display and sell on this day. There were craft items, baskets, drawings, and food items. We had worked hard in our cookery classes and made lots of pickles, powders, spices, chips, and snacks. We also brought rice, cereals and millets from our villages, cleaned and packed them and explained about the range of organic crops that are grown in the tribal villages. The visitors were truly fascinated with the variety of things the children made and the creative learning activities in the class-rooms. We developed a small group of friends of our school from the city.

Medical and health classes: This is an important subject in our Saturday classes where we have health and cookery classes. Basic hygiene, sanitation and first aid are taught through theatre, songs and role plays. The children put up many role plays and learnt first aid treatment for common accidents and illnesses. We made our first aid kits with a combination of allopathy, homeopathy and ayurveda medicines. As we are a residential school, the children are constantly in need of medical attention, but for common problems, they have learnt what medicines to use and how to take care. Most of all, we could overcome some of the alarming myths about first aid like dangers of applying mud and spit on wounds, poking wounds with thorns or twigs or cleaning ears with twigs.

Even though we had only nineteen children, we had committees for cleaning, cooking, class-rooms, hostel, health, games and sometimes for dispute settlement. So almost all the children were heading some committee or the other.

This year our school has grown to 35 children and there are at least a thousand children (no exaggeration) who want to come. But then, we will find it impossible to look after them. So we are encouraging more village schools to take them and are training the village teachers to teach creatively.

We want to thank all pupils who helped us with their WOW-Day!

Ms. Bhanumathi