Introductions

Hello Hyderabad!

This week, after arriving in Hyderabad, I went to the Mahita office, which is located about 10 km from where I am staying. Once there, I met with the director of Mahita, Mr. Ramesh Reddy, and the program supervisor, Mr. Swarup. I found out that Mahita has four slum education programs in Andhra Pradesh, three of them in predominantly Hindi/Urdu speaking areas. Since I am fluent in Telugu more so than Hindi, we decided that the best location for my project would be in the Rasoolpura slum in Begampet. The Rasoolpura slum is one of the largest slums in Andhra Pradesh, with many of its residents in extreme poverty, which the Worldbank defines as living as less than $1 a day. In Rasoolpura, Mahita sustains a Community Based Learning Center (CBLC) for children called the Cambridge School. The Cambridge School is a tutoring program during the regular school year, but since it is currently summer break, it serves as a remediation program to help the children have a more successful transition when they go back to school in July.

I went with Mr. Swarup to Rasoolpura where I met the educators and students of the Cambridge School. When we drove up to Rasoolpura, the asphalt roads of the Hyderbad highway changed into dirt roads, and the apartments and high rises became makeshift shacks that lined the streets. When we finally arrived at the school, we were greeted by around 20 children of various ages and three teachers, Shankar, Lalitha and Jessica.

The school is a moderate sized classroom located in a small building. There are various teaching tools around the classroom including a globe, posters of the human anatomy, and a chemistry set. Many of which seem beyond the age of the students, who are around 8-14 years old.

Mr. Swarup introduced me to everyone and gave a basic description of my project. The school runs everyday from 9am-1pm, and as it was already 1:30 by the time all the introductions finished, so I decided to come back the next day to further explain my project.

The next day, I went to the school by myself and I explained my project to the children, but since I could only accommodate 6-7 kids for my project, I had to create a selection process to pick from the pool of 20 students. I decided that after I explained my project, interested students could raise their hands. Everyone ended up raising their hand. Since that idea didn’t work out, I decided to ask questions about what exactly they would take pictures of and why they thought it was important. After this, the teachers helped me select eight of the most vocal students.