Meeting with Dr Rita

January 12^th, 2nd blog:  Meeting with Dr Rita

It was time to meet with Dr Rita, who had been on leave last week, to run past her a few ideas which have cropped up during our visits with RUHSA people. 

• ·        Firstly, this year’s outing for the children. As it’s in the annual budget we can plan for it during our visit. We think 22^nd January, to the same park as last year, and with one parent per child to accompany. We need to ensure RUHSA book transport.

• ·        The garden at Seetaramanpet (Pachaikili). Having seen what can be done at Panamadanga, I would really like to talk about this again. Dr Rita says it is the fault of the SHG at Seetaramanpet that they don’t make a success of it. Sekar says that they really have tried, put in extra enrichment into the soil, but vegetables just don’t grow well there. . We have always found that SHG to be excellent and enthusiastic. I think we need to try to meet with them again and see what ideas they have. We have ruled out keeping stall-fed goats there as yet- though it remains a possibility for the future. Keeping chickens Rita also thinks this might be too difficult. We once talked about the SHG loaning out vessels for large functions. We will try to have a discussion with the women to see what ideas they have.

• ·        I explained that I would like to do a training day for the staff at Pachaikili and that one of the main things I want to do is to develop a simple method of keeping observations of children, a way of recording their progress whilst in the school, for purposes of demonstrating the value of the school’s work and for reporting to parents. I have in mind something as simple as possible which won’t take up too much of the teachers’ time and perhaps will be based largely on observations of the children. We might think about getting them a camera so that they can include photos of the children in the record, which might be something like the Learning Journals used in pre-school settings in England nowadays. Dr Rita liked this idea but seemed to veer more towards some kind of tool ( which might easily become a dreaded tick-box sheet) and saw the possibility of it being used when students were visiting, as a way of them learning about what to look for in children’s development. I am hoping that this will emerge during our training day, now fixed for Saturday 23^rd.

• ·        The purchase of toys. I explained that we had £200 to spend on renewing equipment for the play centre. Rita explained in detail how to handle this. We are determined this year to have no repeat of the trouble we had last year with the purchase of saris… We must pay the money to Sanjeevi to put into RUHSA funds; then Vinoth will raise an order and Sekar can be involved in this purchase also, since he knows about play materials. Simple!

• ·        The possibility of some of the elderly centres also starting to have a part of the day when they might interact with children.  We have seen all but one of the centres and the slight problem is that the centre which immediately lends itself to this idea is the one at Kavanur run by FOV Sweden. I have talked a bit to Anna-Lina about this, about how both the balwadi teacher and the elders showed an interest in coming together, perhaps for twenty minutes per day. It is a new idea for her and she didn’t respond immediately. I am hoping that today she has visited the centre and seen the balwadi, and may be more enthusiastic. We might be suggesting that a snack for the children is made at the Elderly centre, and this would entail expense of course. Dr Rita said it wouldn’t be a problem to speak to the government official to get permission for the balwadi. She did say however that those who supervise balwadis are generally not good at picking up on new initiatives. We do know from our own experience in the past that this might well be the case. We once tried to get the balwadi organisers to be interested in the balwadi teachers coming to our play centre in KVKuppam to learn about the play method and we also suggested that we could help with them getting some of the locally-made toys, but nothing ever came of this.

• ·        Finally we had a long and very helpful discussion- and by now Rita had included Jeffers, John Peter, Vinoth and Dr Bishwara in our meeting- about our idea to start a group to meet at the Pachaikili centre after school closes. We have been so concerned about the incredibly high number of cases of suicide in the families whom we know, all by young men and women. We suggested that perhaps we could have a group for women, who could come to the centre to meet together, with perhaps a RUHSA staff member. During discussion Rita suggested a nurse at the hospital who is called Kavitha, and who has some experience of counselling. We thought that perhaps the group could officially be said to be for girls to come for careers advice. Hopefully the group would gel and then they would feel free to talk about family problems and share experience. If they wanted one to one conversation with Kavitha, then that could be offered too. Dr Rita said she would look at what training in counselling could be found for Kavitha. Dr Bishwara agreed with us that she must learn the basic guidelines for counselling ie, confidentiality, being non-judgmental, not imposing one’s own solutions, listening well. If the group is to work well it will also need to understand especially about confidentiality and about taking turns to speak and listen, so that group members can feel confident about sharing problems. Interestingly Dr Rita told us during our discussion that in 2004 she wrote a paper for the Lancet about the terrible problem of suicide in India and she said then that the age groups where the numbers are highest are 15 to 18 and the elderly. I said that it seems to me that suicide is not such a taboo in India, and that it is seen as the only ‘solution’ to their problems. She agreed and said that in fact sometimes families see suicide as better than the shame on the family if the young person is in a relationship with someone of whom they disapprove. This group would not be expensive, as we would only need to pay for staff travelling expenses and the cost of a counselling course.  If we can light just one small candle to give some support to the young women of Seetaramanpet…