Thursday, July 26, 2007

daily wages...

i never imagined the marketing efforts to be so difficult!! the kids are making quite good stuff. So it is time for their work to be out in the market. There are two shops that are ready to display and sell our stuff...the response was good initially but it is a little slow. The kids want wages on a daily basis so the best way would be to get an order. one of the things that i am trying is to market our file folders with organizations that hold trainings, seminars, conferences etc. If you know of any such organizations, please let me know and i can pass on the pictures of file folders as well as samples if possible.

meanwhile, to encourage the kids and to provide them with a daily wage, i give them some money on a daily basis depending on the product that they make e.g. if i plan to sell a file folder for Rs. 70 then i give rs. 10 to whoever makes the file and the rest of the money (minus the cost of material) is given once the product is sold. the adolescent kids really responded to this change and are working hard to improve the quality of the product that they are making. And this method also keeps enough pressure on me to market their work :-)

finding a new place ...

The chandigarh administration has acquired the land where most of the kids of "chotti si asha" were living so they all have moved to Naya Gaon - a new settlement in the outskirts of chandigarh. The issue we are having is that our place is now too far off for the kids to come so the attendance has gone down.

We are thinking of moving to a place close to where the kids live or close to the market plaza where they come everyday to earn their living. I am also wanting that the new place we go to have facilities of a bathroom/shower where the kids can take a shower and we can teach the kids how to keep/maintain clothes. currently, they wear the same clothes till the clothes are worn out and then they arrange for a fresh pair and throw the old ones. i have often given them 2 pair of clothes thinking that they would maintain but they always end up losing the second pair. Therefore, i was thinking of a model where we have lockers for them where they can keep the second pair of cloth and learn to change as well as wash clothes. For making any such change, i would need a bigger place. Currently, we are working out of one single room where we do tailoring as well as other crafts, children activities like playing games, teaching etc. So a lot is going on in a single room and sometimes, it just becomes too noisy and chaotic. Therefore, a new place would do us good. The search is on :-) Let us see when will we be able to find one.

Monday, July 9, 2007

The exhibition is over and was quite a success. All of us loved working for it. But now we are a little stuck!! It is difficult to sustain the exhibition model as these street children/adults need a regular /everyday source of money. I have realized that before working on any other issue with these children, it is important to work on their income generation.

As part of that effort, we are trying to market the stuff that these boys are making. One of the items that we are making are shopping bags made of discarded and new clothes. As a marketing step, we are requesting different grocery stores in Chandigarh to keep these cloth bags at the check-out counter and give an option to the customer to buy these reusable bag (at a nominal cost of Rs 10) or use plastic. At the same time, we are also doing a drive against the use of plastic. Here is the picture of the bag that we are making-

The message on the bag is - "one less plastic bag for the environment,

one more alternative for the street children"


We are also making other items like environment friendly File Folders (perfect for use in a workshop), Jewellary, handbags, penstand etc. All these items are made mostly using waste material. Please see the pictures of some of the items in the blog entry below -
If you are interested in marketing any of these items, please write to me and I can send you the soft copy of our catalogue.
Please note that all the proceeds from the sale of these products directly go to these children.




The school did not work for Anike, Bobby and Aakash… there are various reasons…the foremost reason is the fact that “Sikhya” is very far off and the children have to be in the school from 8:00 AM to 3:00 PM. This means that these children cannot go to the market plaza to earn (by polishing or by begging). I was able to convince the families before the summer vacation but now that the school has re-opened, I faced the same resistance. In addition, the land on which they have their jhuggis/tents (they live on encroached land) is acquired by the government and they are required to move to a different location. The location that they are planning to move to is very far off from this school – Sikhya so the transportation would also be a problem. Plus, Anike, Bobby and Aakash are also reluctant to go to school because they want to continue coming to “Chotti Si Asha”.

It was a tough decision for me but I finally relented and have stopped persuading them to go to Sikhya…even if I am able to send them for a few days, I will not be able to sustain it since the desire is not there inside them. I continue to teach them at “chotti si asha” and will try again a few months later…may be by that time I will be able to convince them of the value to learn and grow and not just live by the day.


Meanwhile, I want to invite volunteers to help me in creating a curriculum for these children – a curriculum that I and the volunteers that come to us can follow. We are mainly teaching them Hindi, English and Maths. Please write to me if you are interested in participating in this endeavor.
“Chotti Si Asha” was started as an experiment about a year back…there were no big plans or agendas. The motivation was very simple - a desire to connect with this new city (Chandigarh) that I had come to live and to feel alive. The beginning was a simple visit to the market plaza of Chandigarh with an intention to connect with some children. As they say - you just have to have strong intentions everything else follows…that is exactly what happened. I went to the plaza and met two children who were polishing shoes and were begging at the same time. And I felt this urge to connect with them. So I sat along with them and chatted…we had lunch together and they told me a lot of things (most of it was a lie that I later found it) about themselves, gave me fake names and expressed a desire to learn to write. I asked them if they would like to meet me everyday so we can chat and learn new things from each other…they seemed to have liked the idea and so we set up a time for our next meeting.

The next day, I was there at the plaza but there was no sign of my new friends…obviously, they didn’t trust that I would come the next day. And so my search started…I started looking for them in the plaza and found them…we sat together with people staring at me and wondering what was I up to…I handed them a copy and a pencil. It seems that they were holding these things for the first time and the sheer joy of holding a pencil in their hand could be seen in their eyes, smile and expression.

So the experiment started evolving...for almost one whole month, I had to search for the kids in the plaza before we could start our daily activity that included drawing, playing, learning to write and story telling etc…slowly, our relationship grew and they started trusting that I would show up everyday. So we decided on a place in the rose garden and the kids started showing up on time. With time more people joined our group…most of the adults that joined the group were relatives of these young children who were begging/polishing shoes in the plaza. It was surprising to see the child-like characteristics of these elders boys…they would enjoy coloring as much as the kids, they would love to listen to fairy tales and would love to browse through story books with pictures, they would love to play games that we used to play at the age of 5 or 6…their understanding/reactions about a lot of things was very child-like. The only thing that they understood well was that they had to earn enough by the end of the day so as to feed their family and the best way to earn is through the younger kids in the group because they could beg.
I learnt a lot of things about them and their life. And tried (am still trying) not to be judgmental while working with them … their life is very very different from the life that I lead and so my judgments cannot be applied on them. It is a journey for me as well as these children/adults.

Some of the boys started learning stitching while the others started doing other craft work. We decided to put up an exhibition of the stuff that these kids made and that is when we realized that we needed a name. We chose – “chotti si asha”.

You can read more about our journey and our experiences so far on my blog - http://everydaytidbits.blogspot.com/
Follow this blog for our journey ahead :-)