I want to describe how much I enjoy with the children and my stay in the project

My name is Dennis Jan. I am an FSL India volunteer from Germany sponsored by BMZ through AFS-Germany. Since the 7^th August 2011, I have been working as a teacher in the project “DEED – Development through education”. The main target of the project is to visit the tribal community in the area and search for orphan children and children from very poor families who have problems and cannot take care of their children. DEED takes these children to their school to provide them with all they need and give them education. Otherwise they would not have anybody to care of them or have to do very hard work even in a very young age. The children study English, Mathematics, Geography and do some creative activities like drawing, singing, origami and crafting with the volunteers. The Kannada teachers teach the Children Kannada, Social studies, History, Mathematics, Environmental studies, science and they also sing songs and do craft activities.

During the first two months of my work in the project we were four volunteers, two Kannada teacher and around 25 children. The four volunteers were Camilla, Haruka, Julian and I. Camilla was the most experienced volunteer at this time and basically decided what to teach and how to teach. I was not really happy with the way and the content we taught but during that time it was difficult for me to take the class. I had problems to get adjusted with India and I had problems with my host family too. Therefore, I decided to observe the first two months and get adjusted with everything before I really change things.

After my first two months, Julian and I decided to change the way of teaching in the project. We started to speak more with the children, read them children books, watched children movies in English, let them speak more in English and never gave them the full answer so that they would think more. The idea is to get them used to the English language so that they learn it naturally. After a while we could figure out that we have to give the children more words before we teach them how to speak sentence and then we had this great idea to make pictures of the movies. We kept watching and gave them new vocabularies to learn. It is incredible how fast they could memorize these vocabularies. During that time we also decided to teach them mathematics too, because we thought that it is good for the children, if they get mathematics problems also in another way so that they learn how to handle with numbers better and they learn how the numbers are called in English. Since November we also taught them how to read English. If they learn how to read English they will have the ability to read which is great by itself but besides this they would understand the grammar of the language better, they will memorize words much faster and I felt that they get much more interested in learning the language.

In February, almost after 7 months of my stay, the children made a great progress. When I arrived, some of the small children had almost no knowledge about the alphabet and had problems to write the English letters. The bigger children were not able to read a single word or to spell correctly. But now all of them can identify each letter of the small and the capital ABC. They can copy whole sentences from the board without any mistake and in a decent handwriting. Some of them can read whole sentences. They have adequate knowledge of words and understand almost everything I say to them. Some of them speak whole sentence and everybody can speak at least a little bit. They learned a lot about the Indian geography and start to identify the continents and they can identify the origin countries of the volunteers and finally they improved a lot in addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

At the end of this article I want to describe how much I enjoy with the children and my stay in the project. I remember at the beginning of my stay they looked all the same to me and it took me one month to learn all the names. But after a while I learned a lot about the children’s character and I started to see each kid as an individual. Everybody of them has his own humor, some are very motivated in class and some need to be pushed more to get interested. Some learn quickly and some need more practice but what they have in common is that they are happy in the project. They are all like brothers and sisters and take care of each other. They like the adults in the project and they all enjoy the lessons even if they have some days when they don’t want it. For me personal, I really enjoy it to take the class and spend some time with the children. They are always full of energy and make jokes during the classes and seem to be always happy which makes me happy too. To take the classes with these children is really not a work at all. They also taught me a lot about children in general. Because of teaching them I know now that I really want to become a teacher when I go back to Germany because I have so much fun with it. Sometimes when I have this feeling that I want to go home to Germany because I miss everybody there, I go to the project and spend some time with the kids and then I feel much better every time. They really give me the energy to stay one year in India. I think my stay in India would be much more difficult in another project and if I ever come back to India.

I think that’s all I have to say about my project for now. I hope you enjoyed it and I will write another one at the end of my stay.

Dennis Jan

FSL India Volunteer from Germany