Samyuktha Mobile School

Date : Saturday 25th March 2006
Place :Vicinity of Madapur, Hyderabad

The Trip
It was promising to be a hot hot hyderabadi summers day, with the sun just preparing to let loose his wrath. We (myself, srikanth from Samyuktha, Prasanna, Manikandhar, Nagaraja & Ranjit) reached a clearing in one the most posh colonies of Hyderabad, before us was a small shack and some foliage, srikanth who knows this place like the back of his hand led the way in to the foliage , and we followed him. What we saw just a few meters in to the foliage bowled us out. There were 100s of small shacks spread across the hill side, with drain water meandering all across the place; it was a settlement of construction labor well camouflaged from the world beyond the road (Inidan army might want to use some help from these guys in hiding their army bases :-)).

The School

We started a hiking expedition to the top of the hillock , negotiating the boulders and staidly going up the hill and as we were moving up we heard the kids shouting in chorus... A, B, C, D, E…….

The sound was coming out of a small shack on the top, we approached and peeped in and to our astonishment, there was no teacher (s/he had gone to attend a teachers training program being organized by samuktha), it was just a bunch of kids religiously chanting their daily lessons.

The Idea
This is one of the many schools which samyuktha foundation has setup to educate the kids of construction labor, these laborers typically root themselves in a location like this for a couple of years and move on in search of fresh pastures.

The idea of these mobile schools is to give the kids and their parents a taste of education, and help them understand the value of it.

Srikanth who has been with this foundation from about a year, explained that it costs them around 3500 a month to operate such schools. These schools have a make shift class room in a temporary shed, a black board and a teacher who is hired for about 1300 + traveling expenses. Each such teacher is trained to do her job better by a monthly teacher training camps held by samyuktha.

The children of the school greeted us with warm smiles and were courteous enough to spread a red carpet (oh ya it was a red carpet) for us and asked us to sit on it.

Our Meeting after the Visit - Thoughts
We headed down the small hillock and planted our selves under the very tree which obscures the sights of these shacks from the rest of the world and had a long chat about what we might do to chip in and help.

To summarize our talk (which was a mixture of emotion, feeling and ideas) we concluded that

• We would start funding a mobile school once we have enough funds to see us off through two months.
• We plan on starting this activity in the month of May so that we at least have funds to support for the first two months in to this as buffer. Also to make sure that each of our members refer as many other friends to this group so that we can raise more funds and plan for more activities.
• Looking at the number of active members involved, we feel the need to raise the minimum monthly contribution from Rs.100/- to Rs.150/-, people who are willing to contribute more than this are more than welcome and we would also appreciate if some of you could pay the annual amount at a time.
• In the eventuality of having surplus funds, we would be using these funds to sponsor bright kids form these mobile schools and other identified government schools for a better educational experience at government residential / public schools with a humanitarian face.
• Assiduously work towards bringing in more members in to the group.
• Try and spend some time with these kids and the teachers, hopefully at least once every three weeks.