A couple of months ago Ash and I met a nice Australian doctor called Stephen at a Brahma Kumari hospital in Abu Road, about 70km from Hunar Ghar. As well as treating us to such things as pizza with real, genuine, cheesey cheese, he was also so good as to organise eye-tests for all children at Hunar Ghar, which happened today.

Santosh and his team of two came this morning and swiftly checked all the kids that were there today, which was around 75 I suppose. I arrived with them in their jeep from the hospital and Hunar Ghar was under-way by the time we arrived. Deepak and I had both been way for a few days, so I wasn’t terribly surprised – smirking, in fact – to arrive to the sound of children chanting alphabets and times-tables. The good old teachers, they’ll always find a way to try and formalise Hunar Ghar, given half a chance! No worries though, it probably keeps us a bit more balanced and certainly helps keep the parents happy; who cares if our children are learning or not or to what quality they are learning, so long as it appears that they are learning! Actually, this isn’t their thought process at all; they have been conditioned to think that a certain type of learning is good and that anything else is bad, so such investigative thought would never occur. Again, we can say that children in government schools aren’t encouraged to think or query at all only to memorise, such skills are actually suppressed by stopping the children interacting and exploring learning themselves, so it is little wonder people aren’t in the habit.

None of the children or staff need glasses which is good, but I think three needed a few eye drops. I’m not entirely sure of the sensibility of explaining to our young children how to treat themselves, but that seemed to be their process!