Children, when we listen to them, can give us perspective.
Perspective can give us wisdom.
Author Unknown
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Tribute to Change
We always try to hire from within at One!, and have had great success in doing so. Rekha—mother to Rajeshree, Bhagyashree and Nitin—has been our school cleaning lady for nearly a year and a half. She has improved immensely throughout that time. We couldn’t find anyone better anywhere!
Vinod (Big brother to the root children of One!—Santosh, Laxmi and Kiran) has been helping us with odd jobs for six months. The changes in him are outstanding. We benefit from the work he does, and he clearly benefits from his new found pride in himself.
Both Vinod and Rekha are working hard to prove that One! step at a time we can make changes in ourselves and others.
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Home at Last!!!
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We finally have a home to teach out of...and it has nothing to do with the classroom under construction.
Along with a VERY generous general donation, Acrodex Inc. of Edmonton has sponsored us an apartment to teach out of for a year. The generosity of Mr. Nazir, Mr. Bharkat, and Mr. Karim of Acrodex is simply astounding and we will never be able to thank them enough.
The apartment gives us freedom. We are now able to teach in our own space, set the timings, set the length of classes, decorate...and do everything without any boundaries.
The apartment is small, but perfect to suit our needs. We enter into the largest of the three rooms, 160 sqft. From there we walk down a hallway with a kitchen on the left and a bathroom on the right. The kitchen is a fair size—about 64 sqft—and is perfect for our toy room / play school group. The large bathing room is perfectly suited for our cleaning mom’s needs and for the girls to wash up the dishes after lunch. Finally, the last room is about 120 sqft and makes a fabulous classroom. So all in all, we can make three ‘classrooms’ out of the place and run our programs ideally!
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Without the constraints of government rules regulations, we are excited to start our sewing and woodworking programs as soon as the school year is through (Middle of April).
In this picture, Muskaan is enjoying the comfort of the floor tiles donated by Tracey Noon which we used to decorate the apartment.
It is like a miracle.
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Believe it or Not...
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I know that this has seemed like a story that would never end, but we finally got our school classroom back at the beginning of March. For so long we didn’t have a single place to teach out of...and now we have two!
The construction to the school isn’t yet entirely complete—no electricity, sewer, desks, chairs—but we were finally allowed to use the space bare...AND the last thing we did was to complain.
We had originally paid for the year of school—April 2003 until April 2004. We missed out on 11 months of what we paid for, and didn’t get a refund or anything. We got one month’s use out of it and I guess that is what we have to be thankful for.
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The children were all very happy to get back into the permanent space. They all complained about the little classroom we had borrowed for almost a year, and didn’t think of it as ‘their’s’. Our normal classroom on the other hand is ‘their’s’ and they walk in like kings!
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