Having heard so much about FSL India’s 100^th Monkey programme, I decided to visit St Theresa’s School, and experience first-hand the ‘workings’ of our programme. I set off with Madhuri, and picked up Madhumathi (FSL India’s facilitators at Bangalore) along the way. My first impression when I walked into the classroom was a sea of smiling faces.

The children were excited to see me (a new face always generates interest) and a babel of voices broke out. “Namaste, Madam”, “Good morning, Madam”, “What’s your name, Madam?  I replied to all their queries with an answering smile and thought to myself that this was going to be a fun time.

It was a ‘Project Day’, where the children had to impress on the public the evils of using plastic. They also had to convince them to substitute paper bags for plastic ones. To this end, they had made paper bags out of newspaper and planned to distribute them amongst the many shops around the school. The children were divided into 3 teams with 3 team leaders, of which I was one. We marched off, full of zeal, convinced that we were going to change the world in no time at all.

A fruit vendor, several shopkeepers and passersby were our willing audiences. They smiled indulgently, listened to the children’s impassioned speeches on protecting the environment and accepted the paper bags with a solemn promise to use them in lieu of plastic ones. Of course, we got the sceptical ones, as well, who didn’t think twice about dampening the children’s spirits with negative statements. Luckily, children are resilient, so they bounced back and moved on to the next receptive audience.

After tramping around the area for 30 minutes and exhausting our stash of home-made paper bags, we decided to call it a day and marched back to school. I must say, my little team of 6 girls and boys were very well behaved and in fact, took good care of me so that I didn’t get run over by the crazy traffic.

Next was the photo shoot, with everyone clamouring to have their photographs taken by the professional photographer …myself! I spent some time catering to their requests and then had to call it a day.

After saying my goodbyes and promising to come back again, I left with a bundle of happy memories, photographs and videos to document the lessons learnt at my first 100^th Monkey session with FSL India.