This month, we opened our 8th after school center in the village of Sengadu. We also started providing English classes for the students at Peter Paul School for the Disabled. In addition, a government school has started sending children to our center in Vikravandy. Consequently, we now have over 1000 students participating in our out of school programs! Thanks to our great staff for providing quality and caring instruction, and to all of our volunteers and supporters for helping us reach this milestone.

The ATOM | Art To Many project was launched in January. Fulbright Professor Kathy Fritz spent two days teaching CR staff about design and leading them through the projects they will be teaching their students. After completing the classes with the staff, Kathy took the program on the road. With the help of visiting student volunteers from Camp Hill High School in Pennsylvania and CR’s Indian scholarship students, Kathy brought ATOM to students at CR’s centers at Sithanangur and Peter Paul School for the Disabled. ATOM will be incorporated into CR’s after school curriculum over the next several months. Read more about ATOM at http://theatomproject.weebly.com/

Camp Hill students  had been in India for less than 24 hours when Cyclone Thane arrived. The students quickly became relief workers and spent the next few days entertaining a group of gypsies displaced by the storm. The damage in the area was extensive; over 48 people were killed in the storm. The next week of the trip was devoted to getting the ATOM| Art To Many project off the ground, teaching art in the villages and visiting Pondicherry and Mahabalipuram. See more trip photos.

In the West Village, you can go to your local greenmarket to buy milk that comes in a glass bottle printed with the name of an upstate farm in antique lettering. In the village of Vikravandi, Tamil Nadu, you can walk out of the kitchen to the organic farm in the backyard and milk a cow that you thought was male until you found yourself tugging at its udders. You can take tamarind from the tamarind tree and eggplant from the eggplant bush and dal from the lentil vine and make dosas and sambhar for dinner, under the discriminating eye of Velangani, the masterchef auntie who cooks in the kitchen. You’ve got a Discovery Channel on your front verandah, where you can watch the entire cycle of life and death in insect form (it appears to be bug-breeding season these days in Vikravandi). There’s a red-mouthed guinea hen who wanders in and out of the house and attacks if you reach for the eggs in its nest. People walk and work barefoot.

In the daytime, men in lunghis bike down the road balancing unlikely quantities of iron wire on the tops of their heads. At night, when the candles burn down, men and women carry cots from their palm-thatched concrete houses and relocate outside to sleep where it’s cooler. When you meet somebody new, they’ll ask you, “What’s your name?” and “What do you do?” and then, invariably, “Have you eaten?”

And by "milking," I mean watching a pro do most of it in 10 minutes and then awkwardly struggling with the cow on my own for another 10 minutes.

Dosa-making with Velangani.

I saw a lifestyle, a pace, a set of everyday rituals that I’ve never seen before. So I was excited to make videos with our students, because the topics of their videos were things I was curious to know: What’s your village like? Your school? Daily routine?

Here are two of the videos they came up with:

1) Our Home

Interview poker-faces.

Meet the students of St. Peter Paul Home for Disabled Children, a government-aided residential school in Mugaiyur, Tamil Nadu. In this video, they tour us around their school and speak about the difficulties they’ve faced as handicapped students in rural Tamil Nadu, their experiences finding a community at St. Peter Paul, and their ambitions for the future. Plus, they’ll show you their singing and dancing chops (which, frankly, put mine to shame. When they asked me to show them my dance moves, I changed the subject.)

Link to video here: http://vimeo.com/30616854

2) One Day in My Life

4th-grade hooligans.

They may appear pint-sized, but the 4th- and 5th-class kids of St. Antony’s Primary School are very busy people–and are capable of offering PBS-documentary-worthy reenactments of a day in the life of a primary school hooligan.

Link to video here: http://vimeo.com/30557432

We began with the brainstorming process where we had each staff member share out an idea for a video topic and then conducted a blind vote to select the top three ideas.  Each TMS teacher directed a group in producing a short film on the three winning topics:

• Child Labor
• Differences in Schooling Between The City and The Village
• Effects of Technology and  Media on Children

We planned the format and sequence of our videos in our first meeting and made arrangements to carry out those plans at the three hour staff training the following Saturday.   When the time came, we quickly introduced those teachers to the camera who did not have experience.  There was a wide disparity in the technological knowledge of the group.  Some teachers came to the group with a clear-cut vision of what the video would look like and a plan to shoot and edit advanced scenes and sequences.  Others had never taken photographs or video with either camera and had a vague, yet eager, sense of what we were trying to produce.

Each group gelled in its own unique way as leaders emerged to complete each task and less experienced teachers asked questions and contributed their ideas.  The grounds at SAMSSS were transformed into an impromptu studio as members of all three groups ran around planning, shooting, directing large groups of school children, and speeding off to shoot scenes on location.  It was a very exciting and inspiring atmosphere, and extremely productive when you consider the fact that we were able to shoot all the necessary video footage and introduce editing in only 3 hours.

My own group worked on a video about child labor.  In our planning session, we decided it would be most powerful if we could tell the story of a child who had been directly affected and pulled out of school to work.  A teacher knew one boy and promised to bring him along to the training the following week.  Sure enough, she showed up with Vikram and he was a great sport and brave young man for showing us around a brick factory similar to the one he had worked in, and answering questions to help raise awareness about the issue of child labor.  Although he was in fourth grade, Vikram looked more like a seven year old to me, and it broke my heart to see footage of him hauling clay for bricks at the factory, knowing that he had been forced by circumstances to grow up so fast.   The good news is that Vikram is back in school and with the help of his teachers and their film, raising awareness about the problem of child labor in India.

As our two week stay at CR wraps up after today, it is sad to go, but I know that we are leaving a very competent and committed organization behind that will pick up where we left off in our digital media curriculum.  I look forward to seeing the finished product of the Analadi Hostel boys’ “Discipline” video that Shiva will work on shooting and editing with them when they return from the break.

Communities Rising Staff: Child Labor from The Modern Story on Vimeo.

It’s been a real joy to join the efforts of Communities Rising in educating and empowering students in rural Tamil Nadu. While it is quite different from our busy home in the city of Hyderabad, the last week has been a welcome change for me. I’ve settled into a peaceful morning routine of cycling down the small country roads through verdant fields on either side amidst coconuts and grazing cows. Later in the day we travel to three different schools in villages in the area: The Peter Paul School for differently-abled children, Analadi RC Primary School and Boys and Girls Secondary Schools, and the Vikravandi after-school program for fifth class students and hostel boys at the SAMSSS computer lab.

Stella and her group members during the introductory camera workshop.

Meeting all our new students and teaching them has been a great experience over the last week. As Srilekha pointed out, the students at the Peter Paul School are particularly endearing and there is a very tangible sense of a loving, helpful community as soon as you walk through the gates.

My group at Peter Paul School.

My experience my first day there was truly impressive. We divided the class into three groups and each introduced them to both the digital and video cameras. I was working with Sathish, a college student who had made a film with Kara last year, who was well versed in the technology and a huge help in translating to the students. Thanks to Sathish’s translation skills, my group at the Peter Paul School for differently-abled children caught on to the concept of a photostory immediately. After he explained that the photos should fit together to tell a story, the students mobilized under the direction of a particularly creative student. They came up with the following narrative about a boy who is pulled out of school because of family troubles in less than one hour! While their creative skills are impressive, it is sad to see how prevalent and common-place the problem of child labor is in their communities.  Check out their photostory at the link below!

Peter Paul Photostory

We have made significant progress in all our classes in the last week, introducing students to the technology, planning individual film projects and filming the necessary footage to complete the videos.  The students have been hard at work running around to shoot scenes of their daily routines, girls playing various sports, tours of their schools and villages, music videos, skits, Tamil – English lessons and more!  For our video about the village of Analadi, the fifth class students were even able to get an interview with a member of the Panchayat.

The older hostel students have done a wonderful job planning unique and creative narratives and video topics.  I was impressed that the hostel girls voted overwhelmingly to create a video about women in sports.  The hostel boys at Analadi voted to write a short narrative about two boys to showcase the importance of discipline in education.  They planned a video that shows the parallel stories of one disciplined student and a boy who is acting out and failing to study who are in the same class.  The acting skills of this particular group were also fantastic.  Little Muthuselva had all of us cracking up as he played the “bad boy” traipsing into the classroom late and trying to cheat off other boys’ papers!

There is a lot of editing to be done in the week to come, but I am confident that we will have some very interesting final products to show the students.  Unfortunately, they have a holiday break next week so we will be unable to screen videos to the hostel students who have already returned home for the vacation.  The upside is that the Analadi boys will be able to finish filming their story with the computer teacher when they return and they will also have the opportunity to learn film editing once they finish shooting the remaining scenes.  Stay tuned for the final products!

Life in Vikravandi has been a sharp contrast to the hustle and bustle we have become accustomed to in Hyderabad. We are surrounded by fields and greenery and a variety of living things, from cows to the strangest of insects. Amidst this peaceful and relatively quiet landscape, we have travelled to three separate villages and discovered three schools containing the most vivacious and energizing students. One school that was particularly interesting to teach at was the St. Peter Paul Home for Disabled Children. This school houses and educates about 60 differently abled children and orphans. Like many of our other students, none of them had ever used a camera before, so they were supremely excited by the prospect of taking pictures and being in them. What particularly struck me though was how they interacted with each other. Like other children we have met, they instinctively wanted to push and grab in order to get their hands on the prized cameras. But they also had a wonderful way of helping one another to understand. The older boys helped the younger ones, the ones that could understand more English translated for their peers, and everyone offered support and encouragement to those whose disabilities made it more difficult for them to operate the camera. It was truly inspiring to see such a close-knit community where boys and girls of all ages worked together and shared us and our cameras. Additionally, it was also fun to see how excited they were at the prospect of being able to teach us. We have been challenging ourselves to try to pick up some Tamil while here and the kids were very excited to help us. They were challenging themselves to understand us and to help us learn what they knew, offering words of encouragement like, “Akka, [your] Tamil super!” These are kids that are eager to share what they know with the world, and meeting them has certainly made my quest to teach digital storytelling feel particularly rewarding.

On our first day at Peter Paul, here are some of the photos that our enthusiastic actors and photographs came up with to tell The Extremely Brief Love Story of Mani Annan and Gopala Krishnan.

Mani gives Gopal a Flower

Gopal accepts and they get married

Mani and Gopal dance at their wedding

Fellows from The Modern Story (“TMS”), a Hyderabad-based non-profit that teaches digital story telling will be working with Communities Rising for the next two weeks. Fellows Srilekha Jayanthi, Samantha Love and Stella Tan will introduce the students to storytelling practices and new digital skills so they can share their stories with the world. Students will gain experience with cameras, microphones, computer editing stations, and film editing software.

Communities Rising and The Modern Story began their collaboration in January 2011, through TMS Fellow Kara Newhouse. Modern Story Fellows are now working with CR students for several weeks each year.

We're ready for our close up.

Mask Making

6 August 2011

You’d expect a hot Saturday afternoon to make a bunch of 10 year olds lazy and indifferent: a foolishly naive assumption. They were bouncing about the grounds even as our bus was pulling up. We unloaded the supplies and split up into three groups – one group constructed the bamboo structure, another group rounded up the children and conducted warm-up games, and the third proceeded to organize and distribute the art supplies.

Students working on their characters.

When the four locations were equipped, the kids were split up into four groups, each accompanied by a member of our group and a volunteer from the other groups. We started with the name game; a quick introduction to each other and the notion of performance. Then we put on our masks and costumes to demonstrate the build up from paper and fabric to characters in costume assuming a role.

Getting lined up to show their stuff on stage.

The children soon cottoned to the idea and began working on their own characters. It was difficult to get them to move past their previous understandings of art – the quest for perfection, the fear of making mistakes. We found demonstration and modeling to be the most effective tools of communication. By making mistakes and being messy ourselves, we encouraged them to lose themselves in the fun that art could be. An hour and myriad weird ideas later, the kids marched out – with masks, costumes and brandishing props – entirely in character. They were jousting, dancing, even ‘saving the day’, all the while enjoying the attention from numerous cameras. When the time came for them to strut their stuff on stage, however, they withdrew and clammed up. The formal and streamlined atmosphere of the Catholic school and everything the stage represented to them could have been contributing factors to their unpredictable shyness. It was slightly disheartening, but we were overwhelmed with the excitement of the activity itself and the exhaustion came with its closing.

I like my orange hair.

It was a great learning experience – for us as well as the children. We introduced them to creativity and personal expression. They demonstrated perfectly their level of understanding, which ultimately aided us in the design process for their curriculum.

Student making a joyful noise with their straw flutes.

Day 3 Noise Makers

5 August 2011

If you want a great idea, the kids should be let loose…

As we rode through the village field only one thought was there in all our minds, “Whether we will be able to handle so many kids at one go?”

When we were planning out the activity back home, we realized that the nature of it refused to allow us to plan things down to the last T. This left us apprehensive, wondering if we could pull it off. But once we were at the school, there wasn’t room for apprehension, as the excitement from the kids rubbed off on us and we just went ahead with the activity. All apprehension was thrown out of the window when we started helping them out with their products.

Alagu helping to tie some knots for the mobile.

Working with the kids the first thing that we noticed was their excitement and eagerness.  But most of them wait to be directed, even if a general instruction had been given, it took them a while to be comfortable making their own decisions. Once they understood that we weren’t going to give them instructions to the last detail and that they really had to make whatever they wanted with the materials given, they had a ball.

It was a two way learning experience. The entire experience, right from the process of getting the materials ready to the actual activity itself, was hectic but a great one. Once we had everything ready the kids just got into it and started making their own mobiles and toys. They were warm and welcoming and opened up avenues for us, showed us their dance moves and taught us most importantly to have fun along with them. All the exercises engaged us with them and vice versa, we never felt like their teachers, more like their friends teaching and learning along with them.

Everyone assembling their creations on the display unit.

We taught through play which was an important lesson we learned from and they never ran out of patience while waiting in queue for a pair of scissors to use. The highlight was the flute making activity, where it took the kids time to get it to work, but they never gave up! They tried various ways of using it till they got it right and never ran out of patience. That activity really stole the thunder and they enjoyed this simple object thoroughly. Overall it was an amazing experience with agreat amounts of ‘happy learning’.

Students showing off their noise makers.

“Truly wonderful the mind of a child is.” – Master YODA, Star wars episode II: Attack of the Clones

- Alagu, Bidisha, Mahafrin, Raeesha.