A visit to a school for street children

Every Tuesday and Thursday, Bridgit volunteers in a school for street children - she invited us along last Tuesday. Bridgit and Graham’s landlady (Mrs Metha) and her husband own a textile factory and are very anti-child labour. In June this year they set up a school with the intention of training up some of Delhi’s street children, giving them skills in embroidery and also a basic education in Maths, English, IT, Hindi etc.

In India, it is illegal for children between 14 -18 to work for more than four hours a day. Of course, this is not the case for so many children as they are too poor to afford school and need to work as many hours as possible to earn money to eat and to help their families live.

At the school we visited there are around 50 boys between 14-18. Every morning, they do four hours of embroidery. Though they are being trained with the intention of eventually being employed in the factory, this is still classed as ‘work’ and the children thus receive a small wage. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be able to afford to come here because they have to be able to take money home; some of them are surviving on their own. Some live in NGOs, others in slums. After the school has finished (at 5.30), many of them go on to an evening ‘job’ which could be selling books or magazines to passengers in cars, washing dishes in a restaurant etc.

After the sewing in the morning, the boys are given a good meal for lunch before going on to just over three hours of classes. The boys admit readily that they love coming to this school and ask why they can’t come on Sundays too (this is the only day the bus doesn’t come to collect them from the slums to bring them to school).

Chris and I were invited to take three classes each (each lasting one hour) and accepted the challenge. Being unprepared, neither of us felt inclined to teach a formal English lesson. Instead, I taught ‘art’ (I know, anyone who knows me must be laughing aloud! I haven’t taken an art class myself since I was 14 - dropped it in year 9!) and Chris taught ‘sports’! When I say art, really all we did was make some masks and make a design and then all wear them at the end of the lesson.

Chris taught some volleyball, played some football and even taught some chess! During Chris’ football lesson, the ball continually landed on the roof, and before he could even blink, the boys had scaled two stories barefoot to retrieve it.

The boys have never had any formal kind of education before and find it difficult to concentrate at times. Many of them are really so bright, it’s such a shame that they haven’t been able to go to school before and it’s so good that they now have an opportunity to at least be properly trained to be able to get a job in a factory when they’re 18.

Mrs Metha‘s idea is that if they’re trained from an early age, their different talents can be more easily spotted so that by the time they come to be 18, they can work in different departments in her factory, taking on a design or a managerial role perhaps.

After classes end, the boys have to do their prayers. This is something that is very important to Mrs Metha who wants to encourage the boys to be tolerant of others and open minded. There is a mixture of Hindu and Muslim boys and every day, they spend 15 minutes all together chanting Christian prayers in English, Hindu prayers in Hindi and Muslim prayers in Arabic. This is very impressive for boys who, for some of them, only months ago didn’t speak a word of English, to be reciting prayers in three different languages. After school has finished, the bus takes the boys back to their homes in the slums or NGOs.

Chris and I both really appreciated being invited to spend time in the school, founded completely in a contribution towards the end of child labour, and meet the boys. They insisted before we left that they show us their dance moves. Such fun! And a very humbling experience.