We have serious issues with water at Hunar Ghar. The village itself is very dry – for two years there has been inadequate rainfall, and people are really starting to feel the pinch. We are being pretty vigilant at the moment about child attendance: It is up because food is short, they don’t have enough to eat and there are still several months until the next rain, and we feed the children. If a child stops coming, however, they may be ill. We are starting to enter the time of year when that illness can lead to death. It’s that serious right now.

At Hunar Ghar we don’t have an independent water source. Sakuribai carries water on her head each day from a well a few hundred yards away. She had to carry something like 12 pots, which is a lot of work. It is also time consuming, and it is the same situation when we need water for building works. We’ve basically given up growing plants outside of the rainy season such are the water difficulties.

On Monday however some super people at FES, the Foundation for Ecological Security, came and did a water survey of the area around the school and I believe the have found a good place for us to start digging. They are going to give us a full report, so I’ll be able to confirm it then, but hopefully we’ll have water guaranteed at Hunar Ghar soon.

We’d also like to do a full village, or group of villages, survey. It would be expensive, and we wouldn’t be able to do much with it at the moment. But it would mean that in time to come we, the villagers, other NGOs or the government would have access to high quality information as to where to dig or drill for water.

Water security is a massive, and increasing, concern of rural populations like ours. Diffing another well is a short term measure, we need to know why the water table has dropped so much and address those issues, such as deforestation, monoculture, burning of waste organic matter, altered rain patterns, if we are going to find real solutions.

I’ve uploaded some new photos of Hunar Ghar, see them here.

So, I had my first ‘class’ today! Actually they just call me Ed. Being my name and all it seems like a good thing to call me. I really enjoyed it, sooo good to be finally interacting with the kids in the classrooms. We started off just with a game of football for them to get to know me a bit and me them, then after a break for tea we went upstairs and started a class session.

I am with class 9 and we are exploring HIV, malaria and obesity as relevant diseases, the students’ relationship to those diseases and social, lifestyle, geographical and economic factors (not as absolutes but also the interaction between these factors) that affect that relationship, and how those factors change over time. This lead to a discussion about puberty, at which point we focussed the discussion more on HIV as a disease that they were entering a higher-risk demographic of, as well as other STDS, and explored their understanding of the transmission of those diseases.

The topic is not over, we will develop our understanding of puberty and change over coming sessions. The session was really good for me to highlight what seemed to be some of the main issues that appear to me to promote or hinder a safe and comfortable learning environment for the students to explore issues that may be concerning them, of interest to them, or that relate to their lives. I’m looking forward to exploring this, as well as developing a framework for planning that defines a concept route but that can be easily reactive to the important issues of the students, without disruption to the framework workflow, which I feel is important in maintaining respectful and productive learning environments.

I know I am going to learn and do so much here, and today’s session got me really excited about all the trials and tribulations to come!

After a great meeting with Ina, she is going to visit us at Hunar Ghar for a month from the 18th of April. It really would be super if it works out, our year and a half search for a new coordinator could be at an end! 

Teddy also arrived with us this week, and he is at Hunar Ghar today, checking out the school site and deciding when to build our new three classrooms. We’ll going to stick with the round room concept, but this time with roofs made of bamboo; lighter, cheaper, materials more accessible, and the replacement rate for bamboo is much faster than acacia so more readily sustainable too.

Ash, Deepak and I just spent a week at Hunar Ghar together. It was pretty fantastic to be back, seeing the teachers and the children. I met our latest teacher, Pinki, who joined in October and we arrived just in time to catch Preeti and Rajkumar, who were off to Rajkumar’s parents’ home for Preeti to give birth.

Deepak, Ash and I did a lot of talking over the week, and think a fair bit of it was quite useful. We’ve decided to concentrate the coming 6 months to a year on doing the simple things really well. There isn’t much point, we feel, having much original thought or fantastic ideas if we don’t have a really good system to implement them in. Often with schools, the quality can be dramatically improved just by doing the simple things better – the better pedagogy etc can come later.

We then popped down to Mumbai to meet Ina, a woman who we’ve been in contact with for the last few months, adn who is interested in potentially coming to work as a coordinator at Hunar Ghar. As we expected, it turned out that Ina is completely ace, so we are looking forward to having her come and spend a month with us at Hunar Ghar in May to see if she likes the real thing.