JULY (2002) NEWS PAGE1 SEPT (2002) NEWS MAY (2002) NEWS

One! Canada 112 Garland Cresent Sherwood Park, Alberta Canada T8A 2R2 Phone: (780) 467-6254	One! India Phone: (91) 98205-17805
Email: OneMumbai1@aol.com Webpage: www.one-international.com

Vinod’s Story

Vinod has been a great addition to our One! Family. He is 17 years old and pure sweetheart. Whenever you need help, he is always the first one to offer a hand. Vinod lives in Khar Danda with his mother. We have never discovered what happened with his father, but he and his mother are very happy together so maybe it is for the best. Vinod works every day, without fail, selling garlic. He leaves early in the morning and returns between 1 and 2 in the afternoon. Then he goes out selling again in the evening. He proudly supports his mother, and even though he is always working hard he is rarely seen without a smile on his face.

When he started studying with us in early May 2002, he was barely able to draw a square and didn’t understand any numbers. He began tracing pictures and learning the symbols for 1 to 5. Since work took him away from our classes quite regularly, his progress was slow. But there was progress and THAT is the most important part.

As of now, Vinod has progressed to learning his Hindi alphabet and putting simple words together. In math, he can do addition up to 15 and is just learning subtraction. Hurray!!! Vinod loves studying and hopefully he sticks with it. The volunteers love Vinod’s English. He knows one word ‘coming’ and he is very good at using it several times in one sentence.

Vinod at his smiling best!

Becoming Publishers...
One thing that we have learned over the last year is that we have way too many students and not nearly enough teachers! We are not effectively able to focus on each child and the children are not nearly learning at the pace they could. The rate they are learning is incredible (10-15 kids to read in a year!!!), but believe it or not, they could even learn faster! So…….we—Pallavi and I—have been persevering in working on study books for the kids. We have already finished 2 books and are more than half way through two or three more. The ’red book’ starts out with number knowledge of 1 through 5 and carries on with addition of these. It adds numbers slowly and ensures that the kids have ample practice before moving on...and enough coloring and puzzles too!!!		The ‘brown book’ adds numbers 11 through to 15, and starts with subtraction. The ‘blue book’ will go all the way up to 20, concentrating on the understanding of place value, and adding word problems and other new concepts. As well as these work books for math, we are currently working on books for Hindi—learning to write the letters as well as simple exercises, and similar books for learning English. Our philosophy in making these books, is that the children will be able to work at their own pace and feel the excitement of having their very own workbooks. The workbooks are also catered to the particularly needs of our children—for example, their difficulty with new symbols and need for plenty of repetition. Our cost is $1.50 Cdn. per book.

Housing Scheme

In the beginning of July, we tried to give the families an option for saving money. We all know that the houses will be broken again after monsoon and are worried about finding a solution.

So, we asked the families who wanted to, to give us 20-30 Rupees a day for three months, which at the end of September would add up to about 2000 Rs. With this money we were planning on rewarding the families who worked hard at saving, by doubling the money they put in, and use all of the money to find some sort of new homes—maybe not better ones, but definitely LEGAL ones!

It worked well for two weeks and some of the families had already put together almost 500 Rupees, but the project slowly fizzled and the families found it hard to keep up their enthusiasm and work for something that was so far in the future from their perspective.

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