Saalam Baalak Trust

I can't believe it's already November!!! 

Friday I volunteered with Salaam Baalak Trust for the first time and had so much fun. It's an organization that serves street children in Delhi. They run four group homes where they provide shelter, food, medical care, education etc. and then they have a few contact points where they give medical care and informal education to kids who do not want to move into the shelters. I was at one of the contact points, which was basically a hut with three walls and some mats on the floor. There were about 12 boys there of all ages and two teachers. In the morning one teacher worked on English with the older boys and the other did math with the younger boys. The English lesson was focused mostly on spelling, which is really not my strong point, so I wound up working on multiplication and division with the younger boys. Each kid has a notebook but there's no chalk board so the teacher would write a problem in each kid's book and then when the kid finished it, the teacher would check that one and write another. There started to be a line of kids waiting to have their work checked so I offered to help with that. Within about 15 minutes I was sitting on the floor in the middle with all of the kids, making up math problems, teaching some how to multiply and divide decimals and trying to converse with the older kids to help them with their English. After lunch I played chess with the older kids for a while and then left. Starting next week I am going to go 1 or 2 days a week for the rest of the time I'm here.