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| Our children with their chart-work (art work is too much!) on India's Children's Day 2013 |
Cause Kitchen is a learning center in the Chakkarpur village of the satellite city to New Delhi, India – Gurgaon – with about 60 students, at present. Chakkarpur is a village with Haryanvi landlords and migrant tenants, primarily from Eastern India. The latter community makes a living, mostly, by working in the neighborhood posh communities as housemaids, cleaners, auto and hand rickshaw pullers, and office/mall peons or housekeeping staff.
The one-room pigeon hole that they
live out of , in a building that roughly accommodates 90 tenants (which would be
about 450+ people living in 1 building), comes with steep rents, tough
landlords and tougher Estate Managers and alarming house rules, such as having
to buy all ration from the in-house grocery store. For example, tenants cannot go to the nearby grocer
like Reliance to pick up a pouch of Mahakosh-branded refined cooking oil. They are instead forced to buy
Sundrop-branded oil with a stamp 135 Indian Rupees from the grocery store of
the landlord aka Thekedar.
Many
of these residents of Chakkarpur are thus oppressed, rather than outright poor.
Under such circumstances, with the
added factor of these non-local children being bullied by' the locals, when
parents are out to work the entire day, many children miss going to school
altogether, not as much because the parents are overly-poor but because of the
environment they live in. So Cause
Kitchen takes school to their homes.
We have started with one learning center, and we plan to set up in every such ghetto of this village. Our first learning centre is in the empty space of one such building, adjacent to a theatre named Vijay Cinema, where the landlord is 'towards benevolent', compared to the general trend of landlords. That's how we have 50 students, 1 teacher, 1 social worker who multitasks as teacher, counselor, advocacy SPOC, and a handful of volunteers and plenty of well-wishers. Eighteen of our 60 students would be writing their Classes 3 & 5 exams through the Open Basic Education System (OBE) of the Indian National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS), in April. The other 40 are learning to read and write for the first time ever!
We have started with one learning center, and we plan to set up in every such ghetto of this village. Our first learning centre is in the empty space of one such building, adjacent to a theatre named Vijay Cinema, where the landlord is 'towards benevolent', compared to the general trend of landlords. That's how we have 50 students, 1 teacher, 1 social worker who multitasks as teacher, counselor, advocacy SPOC, and a handful of volunteers and plenty of well-wishers. Eighteen of our 60 students would be writing their Classes 3 & 5 exams through the Open Basic Education System (OBE) of the Indian National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS), in April. The other 40 are learning to read and write for the first time ever!
