Finally, I have started volunteering.

After struggling for the past few months to find the right organization, I have finally settled on one and it was right under my nose, Parikrma Foundation. I had visited one of their schools  in 2009 but never followed up. I'm not sure why I was not impressed with the organization back then. I had even sponsored a child through Parikrma for a year when we were in the US and one of my friends spent 6 months volunteering at one of the schools and had a wonderful experience . For the past few months, I have contacted quite a few organizations but either they did not get back to me, they needed exhaustive applications filled and were meant primarily for students abroad and not local volunteers, or they were just too far, or they needed weekend volunteers or I didn't think there was a match. I visited one school for migrant worker's children funded by Sampark that was just a few minutes drive from my house. The teacher had to manage 20+ children of all ages in one small room, many of the  younger siblings of the children were also there.  Since the children only spoke Kannada, I realized that it would be very difficult for me to add any value. I  decided to pay  Parikrama another visit and this time around I was extremely impressed with the Koramangala facility. They desperately need volunteers and they even have a volunteer coordinator who structures the program. They have an English medium progam with what appeared to be a caring staff and highly qualified teachers. The school is obviously well funded and they are making excellent use of the money. They have an impressive computer lab, audio visual room, a huge cafeteria/assembly hall, a library, a science lab and an excellent remediation program for children who are struggling with academics. In addition, they have a mobile science team to expose the children  to science experiments and attend field trips. The mobile science teacher has an engineering degree and gave up her lucrative job to work here so she could spend more time with her daughter. They serve breakfast, lunch and milk before the children leave school at 4pm. They only accept applications for children in LKG, hardly any children leave, so they don't accept  children in the higher grades, they seem to have a fairly rigid entrance criteria.. The average income of the parents is just 2000 Rs per month so most of the children are from single family homes. They  have a healthy mix of young and experienced teachers as well student interns.  They have a set of full-time foreign volunteers that are probably on some grant similar to what my friend had  many years ago.They reach out to many of the local IT companies and have a set of expat and local volunteers to help. I was just so impressed. So what will I be doing there?  They have assigned me a set of children who are struggling in English and I'll be handling about 6 children over 3 periods twice a week. I'm encouraged to bring my own worksheets, assign them a bit of homework and define my own curriculum with the teacher's guidance. The children were very enthusiastic. One 13 year old boy with an infectious smile told me as soon as he sat down that he liked running, that he won a lot of the running medals at school and that he wanted to be a sportsman when he grew up. The girls were a bit shy and perhaps it was because they were younger but  the boys were very interested in my  cell phone (bling)  and wanted me to take pictures of them and at one point, I had 10 boys clamouring to touch my phone. If I knew how to get the pictures off of my phone, I would have attached them to this post. Anyway, I'll be there for the next few months so I'm sure I'll have plenty of opportunities to take pictures of them.