Project Smile

How much thought goes in to choosing the right playschool for your little one?  How much research do you do?  How many people do you ask about the playschool and how often do you ask people for their opinion on the whole schooling system as it were?

Imagine for a minute you couldn’t afford the school you wanted to send your child to.  Imagine you couldn’t just send your child away for the normal 2 hours it takes at his/her usual playschool but needed to have your child away for the whole day while you were away at work.  Imagine you spent the day cleaning and cooking at another person’s home and hoped your child had a meal to eat at their playschool.  Imagine you were a migrant laborer and you had to send your child to the local playschool in an unknown language only because you and your spouse had to both be away all day at a construction site, barely making enough to cover rent and a single meal.

An ‘Anganwad’i is a government-run playschool created as part of the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) program by the Ministry of Women and Child Development, Government of India, launched in 1975.  Begun mainly to improve the nutritional and health status of children between 0-6 years (including health checkups, immunizations and supplementary nutrition) the program also includes preschool non-formal education.  With nearly 33,000 Anganwadis operational in Kerala itself, just 63% of these (20837) have proper toilet facilities and a mere 74% (24404) have electricity.  Quite notably, all of these Anganwadi teachers are well trained and are excellent with childcare (at least every anganwadi we visited), and they have efficient young ladies as helpers to care for these children.

The stark reality is that, while these basic amenities remain to be seen, there are still numerous children being enrolled into these organizations.  Children here spend their day with, if they’re lucky, just one working tube-light in a room with no fan (this in a place where the average temperature is often at least 33 degrees Celcius), some old alphabet charts, often a blackboard and a couple of toys.  

One of our first places to start our
PROJECT SMILE
is an Anganwadi barely a kilometer away from The Ashoka Tree's office.  We found 22 children here with two mats to sleep on for their afternoon nap and a fairly decent sized area outside that could be used as a fantastic playground (provided the weeds and general wild shrubbery got cleared first).  While The Ashoka Tree and our friends managed to collect a fantastic number of toys for these children, we also had a donor sponsor mats for them to sleep on.  
We plan on clearing up the area outside to be used as a playground on Monday, November 8th, 2015, and look forward to painting the two rooms that house this Anganwadi at the end of the month.

If you have some time to spare, if you’d like to spend an hour playing with our children at any of the Anganwadis we work with, reading out a story or signing songs, please get in touch with us.  Better still, if you'd like to be a part of The Ashoka Tree's "Smile Project" - to help renovate or donate books & toys, get in touch.   As the festive season of Diwali begins, let’s share some of the love we so easily get around us with those less fortunate.  Just an hour out of your day today will leave some child with lifelong memories of the lovely person who came, taught them to sing and made them laugh.  Lets Spread More Smiles.

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