Hey there, my name is Hanno, for context I am a 20-year-old guy from Frankfurt, Germany currently participating in a project in south-eastern India, Pondicherry. I will try to give you guys a quick insight into my project and what I actually do here. The project is primarily a children’s home which is separated into a girls and a boys home 5 minutes apart from each other. The kids that live there are either orphaned or have lived in gated communities such as the gypsy or tribal community, which generally have a very different form of life than the rest of India. They live in old and broken one-room stone houses or in sheds made of plastic tarps and corrugated iron. Food and water are meager, and hygiene is a luxury. The kids are often not encouraged or even allowed to receive education. Either their parents want them to help them with begging, because kids make great beggars’ income wise, they do not have the means to send their kids to school, for

example clean uniforms, a form of transportation or pen and paper, or their parents want them to get married at a young age, build a family and help out in the community. I have personally met a 14-year-old girl that is about to get married this year. Outside of their territory they are being discriminated against, because of the still existing class system. The children that come from these gated communities and live in the project often have survived harsh conditions such as regular beatings and a disregard for their psychological and physical needs. The children don’t show any signs of mental issues at first glance, but low self-esteem, anger as well as trust issues are all too common. When you live in the project as I do, you regularly experience the children crying, throwing tantrums and using violence on themselves or their peers. My job is to make sure that the kids get out of bed in the morning, shower, brush and are fully clothed at the time breakfast is served. They are brought to school in a school bus by the project every morning and collected the same way. When they get back around 4:30pm, we play with the children for a while up until 6pm when it’s time to study for another hour or two. Dinner is around 8:30 pm and afterwards we bring the kids to bed.

All in all, it is a very structured day when it comes to the kids, but also very challenging due to incidents that can occur throughout the day. When a child finds a razor blade on the street, has a breakdown or hurts himself falling for example. There is always something, is what I’m trying to say. The fact that these kids can have somewhat of a safe harbor and receive education is an astonishing accomplishment and I don’t want to diminish that at all, but there are still a lot of problems yet to be fixed within the home that I perceive from my point of view. Hygiene is taken as a loose concept more often than not. The kids don’t wash their hands with soap and sometimes not at all as an example. Together with the project I have now tried to come up with a usable concept to improve the situation, but to actually implement it is often harder than it should be. There are other aspects to my project here, but I won’t bore you with the details. As for the teaching part of my volunteer work, I do have to go to the gypsy community at lunch time every other day to teach English and maths to some of the kids there. The room provided is small

and the kids do not have any study equipment. As it is just an offer, it is difficult to predict who is going to show for class and the kids are in very different age groups and have very different skill sets to what I am used to, making it difficult to actually get through the material. It seems to me that the point of the facility is more to motivate the children to strive for education than to actually offer substantial schooling. When you work with these kids you realize that what they’re especially missing is general education such as what letters are. During summer holidays it is now our plan to renovate the place and build a playground next to the premises. 

When I started this project, I didn’t know what kind of impact I could even have on the kids. To be honest I felt like it was all too big for me to make a difference, but now I see every day that even small improvements can make a big difference in the children’s lives. There are so many obstacles and things that don’t work when trying to help and educate, that it becomes hard to focus on anything else. At the end of the day brick by brick is the way to go and maybe somewhere down along the road there’s gonna be a metaphorical building to look at. Anyway, I am very confident that there is a lot to achieve here.