Sevalaya

Sevalya has now organised a ‘cultural program’ for the children every Saturday at 7pm. This is basically where all the children from the orphanage get together, form an audience and watch performances by each other that they have prepared during the week. I think this is an excellent idea bringing them all together and giving everyone a chance to express themselves. So far it has been a complete success. I thought I’d organise something for the preschool children at the hostel (aged 3-5) to perform so we put together a “clap action performance” where I said a simple English word like elephant, mouse, butterfly etc. and the would do the action with 2 claps in between to make it into a rhythm.  They were a lot more nervous in front of everyone but I think they enjoyed it!

The following week I taught a song with some older girls at the hostel (aged 11-14) and choreographed it into a ‘story dance’. It called ’10 little green frogs” and consisted of them all jumping into the circle on the line ‘and one jumped into the pool”. Even if some might not have understood the words exactly they learnt it very fast – it takes me weeks to learn songs in Tamil!

Last Wednesday there was an exhibition of all the preschools work for parents and sponsors. Here is some of the artwork from a paper doll making activity I did with them using waste cloth from the tailoring room. They each made mini versions of themselves and learnt the word for ‘dress’ ‘shirt’ and ‘shorts’.

My origami group got jealous of another volunteers juggling class doing a performance on the stage in front of the whole secondary school (1500 students) and asked if we could do an origami performance. Origami is not something usually done on stage but I didn’t want to say no so I arranged a little routine last Saturday. They came on to the stage, said “konichiwa” (hello in Japanese) each made their favourite origami (mostly the crane) and presented it saying the English name. They finished with “sayonara” (goodbye). This photo above is from the run-through and below on the stage

We also decorated the auditorium with origami birds (notice them hanging above). They went a bit crazy with feathers and sequins but had lots of fun. Considering they had never used them before the final pieces were really beautiful.

I rearranged my timetable a bit so I can spent more time in the primary school because as you can see they are adorable! I took a snall groups from the preschool class for ABC colouring which they seemed to enjoy - especially the stickers! Above we have Pushpa and Giri and below is Dashini

As one of the chapters in my classes text book was on letter writing I set up a pen-pal letter exchange with my sister Orla's yr5 class and my 5th standard class. It took a lot of patience and one to one work but managed to get them all read and replied to in 2 weeks. They were so excited to get letters from England and spent alot of time and effort beautifully decorating their replies and ask me every day when they will get a 2nd letter.

Not all the children are at the same level in English so teaching can be very challenging. I went to the hostel one evening to help Subash and Lakshmi one to one as their just wasn't enough time in class to get round everyone.

8 of the 12th standard girls will unfortunately for me leave Sevalaya after their final exams have finished in 2 weeks. It will be a very sad goodbye as i have spent a lot of time with them over the past 6 monthes, I promised to print this photo of us all together before they leave.