A Centre for Learning at Sittilingi Village

As we write this newsletter, our minds are filled with images of our children spontaneously dancing to music, singing with gusto and the audience cheering loudly! Our Annual Day function just got over and was a huge hit. We never imagined that our 4 to 7 year olds could tirelessly perform for almost two hours. The teachers and the nursing students from the hospital also joined the fun and danced for a couple of songs.

Interaction with Parents

We believe that our education work, to be truly effective, should not stop with the child but has to extend to the parents also. To foster a deeper involvement in the learning process and to encourage participation we requested parents to visit the school as observers and have one to one meetings with us. We set aside dedicated time for their visits during November/December. We staggered the timings of their visits. They visited their child’s class as a silent observer to understand the learning process as it unfolded and then discussed their child’s  progress with us privately.

This was an intense exercise as it involved continuous interaction with the parents but it was well worth the effort for both sides.

We had another parents’ meeting in March. Most parents participated enthusiastically. The meeting started with the feedback from the parents. Most of them were very positive and some of them related interesting anecdotes.  After that we had discussions about the contribution of parents, uniforms, children’s progress, TV  watching, admissions for the coming year etc. The children then put up a performance for their parents and also individually showed them their files and work in school.

Pongal Celebrations

Pongal is an important festival in the valley and it is a custom here at Thulir to celebrate Pongal in the campus with students and staff. This year also we had loads of fun during pongal, Children and teachers were completely involved in the activities right from the beginning to end. Cleaning the campus, planning decorations, applying cow-dung paste on the mud walls and floor etc.

Children unleashed their creativity on the classroom walls and each painting was unique in its own way. Pongal was cooked together and the women danced the traditional folk dances. Colourful rangolis from the children and staff adorned the walls and floor.

Project based learning

As part of our ongoing project based learning approach, children worked and collaborated on two projects

Plants

For this project, children were split in groups and each of the group were given separate patches to grow plants. They planted different varieties of seeds and observed multiple factors that affect or promote plant growth

• What does a plant need to grow ?
• The role of air, water, soil and sunlight in the life of a plant
• Lack of these natural resources and its effect on the plant
• The effect of chemical fertilisers etc.

Every week, they observed their patch, conducted measurements, tabulated and graphically depicted the growth of the plants. Later, they enacted a play stressing the importance of plants.

Water

Children learned about various types of water sources, water types, water cycle, various phases of water through observation and some experiments. e.g: boiling, freezing water. We also discussed our dependency on water.

We conducted a small awareness rally through the village stressing the importance of saving this precious resource. We wrote placards, created and shouted slogans and with the help of Sakthivel fixed the leaking community taps on our way. It was surprising to see the normally shy, quiet and diffident teachers and nurses chanting slogans loudly and enthusiastically through the village!

During the annual meeting of the Sittilingi Organic Farmers Association, our students performed a play on the importance of trees. The play was a reflection of village life. The 500 members of the audience cheered throughout the play and later congratulated the children on their performance. This was the first time our children had performed in front of a large audience (mostly strangers) but they pulled it off beautifully.

Village Trip

Most of the teachers and students had not visited each other’ villages. We decided to go on some local trips. We took the children to Thanda, the Lambadi hamlets in the valley. We visited students’ homes and also a small power loom plant. We observed how a loom works and how weaving is done.

Through out these projects children had lots of learning & fun – observing, collaborating, experimenting etc. The fact that learning can indeed be fun was palpable throughout these interactions.

Camping Out

Most of our 6 and 7 year olds had never stayed a night away from their parents They were very excited when a night out at school was planned. That whole night was filled with excitement and fun. We all collaborated and cooked our dinner using firewood and a star gazing session ensued after it.

Marudam Trip

15 children along with 4 teachers visited Marudam Farm school, Thiruvannamalai. Our children attended some of the sessions in the school. In the evening we visited the big temple and the Ramanashramam. We spent the second day in the Park developed by The Forest Way Trust.

Children played for hours in the slides and swings in the Park, it is also a great learning space with life-like paintings of various species of birds, snakes, trees, orchids and interesting facts about each of them. All of us fell in love with the park.

With the guidance of Thomas from Marudam school, Children baked cinnamon biscuits in the oven. They also learned new games that are popular at Marudam. The way these 6 and 7 year olds had their baths on their own and got ready by 6 am in the morning and the way they handled the crowded public  transport buses amazed us !

Scratch

With Sreyarth’s help Children created multiple programs in scratch and tried their hands in simple animation scripts. They went on to create an animated story, “Hathi, the elephant” and presented it to the rest of the school.

Workshops

This was a community where people used to sing and dance together. Most of that is lost now. In an effort to bring back some of that spirit we invited Mr. Mohan from Polur for a week to conduct an intensive folk dance workshop. Teachers too participated and learnt dances enthusiastically.

Four teachers are attending a two day yoga workshop every month. This is being conducted at THI by teachers and therapists from Yoga Vahini. This school of yoga is based on the Krishnamachari tradition of yoga.  Our teachers are learning to observe their bodies, minds and breath and how to guide children and others to do so and reclaim control over one’s s own health and well being.

The Sittilingi Run

A dream for many years, finally came true this year on January 22 nd. The youth from Thulir and THI got together and organised this beautiful event. There was much comradrie, laughter, sportsmanship and team spirit as around a hundred men, women and children ran the 10 Km and 5 Km runs! The weather co- operated completely and we couldn’ t have asked for a better day. Santhosh and friends from Runner’s High arrived and participated to provide encouragement and support!

Sakthivel and the BT students group participated in the Auroville marathon in February.

New School Construction

The new school campus is taking shape faster than we had imagined. Walls of three classrooms have come up to 8 feet height. The walls of the fourth and fifth are at 3 feet. The ferro concrete roofing channels are being fabricated. Most of the work is being done by the Thulir Alumni.

New Additions to the Thulir family

We welcome Ram, Archana and their 3 year old daughter, Sharada, to the Sittilingi community. They have left lucrative careers in Bangalore and shifted to Sittilingi. Their coming has definitely given an impetus to the work. We are happy that they have quickly adjusted to rural life and become a part of the Thulir team!

Visitors & Volunteers

In support of Thulir’s efforts and to fund-raise for the new school campus, a group of 10 young architects from Bangalore & Pune cycled to Sittilingi from Bangalore. The distance was about 200 km and they cycled close to 100 km a day. Some of us from Thulir also cycled from Sittilingi, planning to meet & greet them on their way. We met the group near Theerthamalai and accompanied them to the campus.

• Nandini, a student from NID Ahmedabad visited our school and taught some songs and guided the children in Art.
• Two groups of children from Marudam Farm school visited Thulir on two separate occasions.
• Valli and Ilakiya two architecture graduate students visited Thulir.
• Jaishankar & Madan, students of architecture, from Adhiyaaman college of Engineering are interning at Thulir and helping us with the construction of the new school campus

Sunder, a volunteer from Delhi and part of our team for about an year,  completed his stint at Thulir and has gone back to Delhi for higher studies. We thank him for all his efforts and wish him the best in his pursuits.

This summer has been especially fierce and we came very close to a severe water crisis, thankfully we made it through. The school is now closed for the summer holidays and teacher training classes are in progress, it’ll reopen on the first week of June.

We all are thrilled and excited about the new campus taking shape and at the same time gearing up for the new challenges that face us in the new academic year.

Thank you all for supporting us through all this.

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Many new and exciting developments are taking place at Thulir!

Creation of the new School

After innumerable designs, discussions with the teachers and students and changes, we have finally started on the foundations of the classrooms last month! We would like to create an environment which is aesthetically pleasing, cost effective, environment and child friendly while satisfying the government norms.

The campus will be built by the local artisans we have trained over the years and it will use renewable energy as far as possible. Kumar is the latest addition to our Thulir team. He is from Naikuthi village and will be helping us with site supervision.

Gift Of Water

The Thulir Alumni under the leadership of Perumal dug an open well in the new school land. It was a pleasure to see them organise and conduct the whole operation very professionally.

We are really happy to have struck water at 12 feet and now we have a well full of water! Thanks to the water divining by Regi.

The first cottage

Sakthivel, Jayabal and the present batch of BT students. built a small cottage to store materials and for a caretaker to stay.

A new technique of mud walling – in situ mud concreting – was tried out here. We mixed mud, debris from the well digging, some stones and a small percentage of cement and poured it into bamboo shutters to make the wall.

Tree planting Mela

Govinda and Leela from Marudam School organised a tree planting weekend in the new land. Teachers and students from Marudam brought energy, enthusiasm and tree saplings and joined with our teachers, students to celebrate nature and friendship! The immense satisfaction of work like this and the bonding with like-minded people overshadowed the hot punishing weather and the hard physical work.

The Thulir team continued the planting and watering work through the rest of the week. In spite of the monsoon playing truant in the month since, the saplings are happy so far.

Teacher training workshops

At the beginning of this academic year, Poornima conducted a two day workshop for teachers at Thulir. Later, Jessica from Marudam Farm School visited Thulir and conducted a workshop on Pedagogy through movement and games.

Nikita from Marudam initiated an impromptu craft workshop for teachers when she visited Thulir with Ram.

Chitra, Sinthamani and Sasikala from Thulir attended a teacher training workshop at Marudam from October 20^th to 22^nd

We are grateful to our friends at Marudam, for providing these additional learning opportunities to us. Training programs such as these have indeed broadened our horizons and will definitely help us to take on the huge challenges of the new school.

Music and Dance workshop

Shirly and Baby, the founders of Kanavu Gurukula at Wynad visited with their daughter Shanthi from 20^th to 23^rdOctober and conducted a song and dance workshop. They got all of us to shed our inhibitions and dance.

Music and dance feed our souls and it is a shame that hardly any of us sing or sway to music nowadays. Even adivasi communities are not engaging actively with these art forms but are just becoming passive consumers of it. We hope they will visit regularly and continue these activities.

Parents Meeting

We continue to engage with parents, as we strongly believe that an educative process cannot happen in isolation and parents play a critical part in their children’s learning. We had two parents meetings: one in June and one in September.

Parents actively participated in these meetings and they were very keen to know about their child’s academic performance. Teachers engaged them with the works of their children and provided constructive feedback.

In an open discussion, most of the parents expressed immense satisfaction with the school and they were happy about their child’s progress.  The recurring question about children climbing trees was discussed again in this meeting, with some of the parents apprehensive about tree-climbing and others confident about the benefits of it.

We stressed the need to question ourselves as Adivasi parents, whether our negative response to tree climbing is due to the outside urbanised society’s influence; which makes us feel that our way of living or being with nature is “backward/wild” and must change? How do we educate our children to learn the skills of the modern world while not losing the inherent positive qualities of the local community?

Overall, the session was filled with buoyant enthusiasm with cheerful exchanges, feedback, questions and concluded with a wonderful performance by the children. We look forward for such meaningful participation and interactions from the parents in the upcoming meetings.

Participation in the Bangalore Marathon

On October 16^th, Sakthivel, Prabhu, Annamalai, Mohan, Perumal, Raghu, Sriram and Karthi participated in the Bengaluru Marathan 5K run

Participation in the Craft Week at Marudam

Sakthivel was a resource person for the Marudam craft week and guided students in bamboo craft work. The BT course students participated in the craft week and learnt various crafts.

Scratch

Sreyarth shared his knowledge about scratch programming with the children – Scratch, is a free programming language, with which you can create your own interactive stories, games, and animations.

Children were immediately hooked and we could witness the immense satisfaction in their eyes. Moreover, this process encouraged them to use English naturally without explicit instruction.

In a way, “scratch” not only helped them to gain programming exposure but also provided a great language learning experience. We intend to use scratch programming as a creative learning tool in the coming months, watch this space…

School Trip to Mel and A.K. Thanda

Our children come from six villages in the valley – Thanda, Sittilingi, Moola Sittilingi, Velanur, S.Dadampatti and Rettakuttai. We realised that many of the teachers and students had never visited each other’s villages. So we decided to organise exposure trips to different parts of the valley.

The first trip was to Thanda. It was an eye-opener to the fact that money, exotic locations and costly gadgets are not necessary for children to have a good time.

Melthanda and A.K Thanda are Lambadi hamlets in the valley. The Porgai artisans who create the beautiful embroidery are from here. We all carried our lunch boxes and children discovered great nooks, corners and slopes under various trees to play and have a great time.

Project based learning

In our project based approach to learning, every month we choose a theme and base our activities around it. Through this process, children gain knowledge and skills by working over a period of time – learning about the concepts, investigating and asking questions.

This time we chose three difference themes: Colour, Food & Five senses.

Colour: We learnt about different colours, their formation, making natural & artificial colours, colours in our lives etc., children were encouraged to express their interpretation of colours through multiple art forms –  watercolour paintings, play and songs

Food: We learnt about food, traditional & modern, methods of cooking, nutritional value of food along with theoretical & practical activities related to food.

We also tried our hands in cooking some traditional recipes.

Five senses: We learnt about the five senses – Sight, Touch, Smell, Taste and Hearing. Children experienced these sense expressions in their myriad variations. The setting of the school amidst nature provided ample opportunities for us to tune in to these oft-neglected sense experiences.

Various games and activities, in which each of the senses have to be used in a discerning manner, were held. Learning about the world around us, not only intellectually but with all our senses, was fun.

Visits/Visitors/Volunteers

• Anita Balasubramaniam visited us in September. She conducted a small workshop with a handloom and taught us how to weave. Teachers and some children started to learn weaving

• Vidya – a Young B.Ed student from Dindigul, volunteered in the school for 2 months.
• Sunder – from Delhi is volunteering here and taking English classes. Sunder doesn’t know Tamil and it is heartening to witness our children interacting with him despite the language barrier.
• Accompanied by Senthil from Helikx open school, 10 students and 1 professor from Kumaraguru college of Engineering visited in September.
• 30 teachers from Teach For India, visited in October and interacted with our children and teachers
• About 50 students from VIT, visited the valley and witnessed the Alternative building technology implemented here.
• Krishna was invited by the architecture department of VIT as the jury for their rural design project.
• Anu was invited to talk in the Children’s day celebrations and valedictory function of the Helikx Open School, Salem.

As we embark on this journey towards building a new school, we need all your support and encouragement. Please spread the word about the construction of the school and help us fund-raise for the buildings. Every small bit counts and  let us together create a meaningful learning space for the children & adults.

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There is fresh life all around us as we write this! Fresh grass, tender leaves, new flowers, new sprouts … Yes, a few good showers in the last 10 days have ended the blistering heat of the hottest summer here for ages, bringing great relief. All of us are now looking forward to the start of the academic year!

New Thulir Road

When Thulir started in 2004, there was hardly a proper road connecting it to the village. The mud path from the village ran over a stream bed that would fill up with water whenever it rained. Children would stop coming to Thulir whenever this happened. The road used to be so slushy that many a pair of slippers have been lost in the clay.

A bridge was finally constructed across the stream some years ago. But now from February this year we can boast of a brand new tar road!

Land At Last

After two years of intense searching, land for the new school has been identified and was bought this March.

This 3 acre piece of land is more central in the valley, about 1.5 km from the present Thulir campus. It is also easily accessible from Velanur, Kalaiyankottai, Nammankadu, Sittilingi, Moolasittilingi and Malaithangi. Yet, it is also far enough from any government school to satisfy all the requirements.

The 2 acre land which Thulir had earlier bought for the resource centre was found unsuitable for the school. It had no scope for expansion and was very close to the Sittilingi village and the existing government primary school. This land has now been transferred to the Tribal Health Initiative for its Organic Farming marketing activities.

We have now fenced the new land. In the coming month we will dig the well and then start the construction.

The process of designing the school is on, with inputs being taken from both teachers and students.

New Teachers

It was felt that the school needed a few more teachers with degrees in education. Once again, news of this spread through word of mouth to all the villages. Ten local youngsters with B. Ed and DT. Ed degrees applied. For the first time in the history of Thulir we had to conduct an exam and an interview in order to select people!
Jeyachitra and Sinthamani from Naikuthi and Rettakuttai villages respectively have joined the Thulir Team from April 1st. They seem to have bonded well with the rest of the team already.

Sports Day for the Government School

Regular evening classes for the government school children were put on hold this year as the Thulir team was preoccupied with the starting of the primary school. However, some children came in the morning to train for the 10k, 5k Runs that we participated in this year. We also conducted a Sports Day in February for them.

Though there were no formal announcements of this event, word had spread in just two days and a total of 104 children turned up to participate. The sweltering heat of the day could not curb the childrens’ enthusiasm; they all declared that they wanted the events to continue and never stop!

As usual, there were prizes for all the participants and not just the winners.

Annual Day – April 16th

The Annual Day at the end of the academic year was an opportunity for parents, teachers and children to get together and share the achievements and trials of the year. The children, many of whom had been completely shy—refusing to come out from behind their mothers’ sarees—when they joined a year ago now went up confidently onto the stage to sing and dance and act. After a while, they all left as a group to quietly engage in drawing and painting, leaving the adults to have a one hour meeting. Finally each one of the children took their parents to their class to show them their files and all their work for the year. At the end of the day, the parents all appeared to be very happy with what they had seen.

Participation in the Freedom Inclusive Summer Camp for Children: May 2nd-May 7th

Sakthivel, Ravi, Mohan, Perumal,Satish Raghu and Karthik participated in the Freedom Summer Camp for Children organised by The Runners High. The objective of the camp was to bring together children from completely diverse backgrounds in order to help create awareness and respect for each other.

Children from SSK, Shrishti Special Academy, Snehagram, Thulir and Ananya participated. The children stayed in the Spastic Society and Pegasus campuses and engaged in various Art, Craft and Theatre activities together.

Participation in the Asha Summer Teacher Training Session May 27th-May 31st

Rajammal participated in a teacher training camp organised by Asha Chennai at IIT Madras campus. Her confidence and skills have been given a definite boost.

Participation in Runs

Senthil and Ravi ran the Bangalore 10 K run on May 16th  to raise funds for the Tribal Health Initiative.

Sakthivel, Mohan, Raghu, Karthi and Perumal participated in the Anandayana Run organised by Runner’s High on June 6th. This was an opportunity for them to once again bond with the students of Ananya  School, Spastic Society and the runners from Runner’s High. It was good for them to renew contacts with old friends and make new friends.

Visitors/ Volunteers

Julian and Miriam from Germany conducted English language games with the teachers and children.

Old friends from Asha, Sridhar Desikan (with his daughter Janavi) and Balaji visited. It was good to have them here again.

The headmistress and teachers from Vidya Peetam, Salem, also visited.

Thank you for being a part of all our efforts so far. Hope you would stay with us as we now raise funds to build the new school and help create a meaningful learning community of children and adults together.

Wishing all of you a year filled with innumerable moments of Creativity, Learning and Fulfillment.

Pongal Celebrations

We had a wonderful Pongal this January! Pongal is a Tamil rural cultural festival. It is also a harvest festival. The sun, cows and the natural elements are honoured and thanked this week. The accent is on community spirit and on using natural materials for all the rituals. It is a lovely time to be in Sittilingi. The only jarring note here is the newly added custom of broadcasting loud music in the temples the whole month!

In Thulir, Pongal was special this year. Everyone creating countless kolams was enjoyable as usual. We also cooked pongal together in a huge mud pot on an open fire in the courtyard. Vellachi Ammal, a respected elder and an organic farmer from Thekkanampatu village was the special guest and resource person for the day! She taught us the traditional pongal songs and Kummi dances. All the women from Thulir and the hospital wore their sarees in the traditional Sittilingi style and sang and danced together with the children!

The traditional music and dance of the tribal people in the valley has mostly disappeared from people’s memories. We hope to re-discover and preserve what is left and revive it in the school for the future generations to look back on with pride.

The Transformed Thulir Campus

Those of you who haven’t been here for some months will now find the Thulir Campus greatly changed! The old workshop and the small Thulir classroom have become residences. Two families stay there: Senthil and Rajammal with Rishi, and Ravi, and Ambika with Ishanth. Senthil and Rajammal have a thriving mixed crop garden in front of their house which has a special beauty and draws everyone’s attention. The big classroom has lost all its books and teaching materials but is still used as a classroom for the basic technology students. It also doubles up as a dormitory space for big groups of guests. The office room is a guest room now. Most of the classes are now conducted in Professor’s house, i.e. the earlier guest rooms!

Towards a New School…

Planning has begun for the new school. We are still looking for suitable land. We then have to construct the buildings as per government regulations.

As a first step we have started a small pre-school for 24 children (aged 4 and 5). Most of them are children of the staff of the hospital and Thulir. Professor Ravindran and Sri. Nagarajan have generously permitted their house to be modified and used as classrooms temporarily.

Our search for suitable land for the new school has not been successful. It almost was. We had located a suitable piece of land and we were all set for the registration. But the pre-registration survey showed many discrepancies between the actual boundary in the field and the documents. So finally the deal had to be cancelled.

Legally the Trust cannot buy tribal land. Non-tribal owned lands are few here in the valley and most of the owners live outside. That is the reason for the delay.

New Energy and Cheer

Thulir has always had children of various ages occupying it at all times of the day and night. But now for the first time we have a group of 24 young pre-schoolers the whole day. These children have brought new life to the campus! Their enthusiasm, energy, innocence, laughter, learning and play have transformed the days in Thulir.

The Basic Technology Course group

We had planned to discontinue the basic technology course for teenagers this year as well,  in order to focus our energies towards the new school. However, 5 teenagers found their way to us. Their parents insisted that even if we had no time to teach them we should at least allow them to stay on campus and take part in the work here. They have no other place to go to! All these students have not ‘dropped out’ of school. They have been perceived as ‘academically challenged’ and have been ‘persuaded’ to drop out by their teachers in the 8th/9th classes! The schools are under pressure to show ‘cent percent’ pass in the class 10 public exams.

Years of corporal and verbal punishment in the  schools has made them extremely diffident and silent. But they are a sincere and earnest group. Sakthivel is in charge of them. Though we are not able to conduct an intensive basic technology course as we did for earlier batches, the group is blooming and growing more confident, vocal, cheerful and bright! The pictures above and  below show them learning to build Nubian vaults in sun dried bricks (adobe).

Evening Classes

The evening classes have been temporarily stopped this year. We needed to focus all our energies on the new school. The government schools also function for longer hours nowadays. Teachers come more regularly and students have more tests and assignments. So the number of students coming to Thulir has also reduced. Even those that come are often exhausted after a full day of work at school.

Also, after 11 years and around 500 students, we felt we needed to stop, take a breather and reflect on this programme and assess the needs of the community instead of just carrying on!

The school working Committee

Ravi, Manjunath, Ramesh, Prema, Anu and the teachers meet at least once a month to discuss the  policies and functioning of the new school.

Further Training and Exposure for the Thulir Team

It was felt that the Thulir team members needed additional training and exposure in order to take on the huge challenge of the new school. As a first step, Senthil has shifted temporarily to the hospital for further training and exposure. He will work with Manjunath, who co-ordinates the organic farmers’ association here, to get an experience of interacting with the community and the government offices outside. He will also help the Porgai artisans’ group with their accounts, thus gaining a wider experience of different kinds of accounting.

Bamboo Flowering

The bamboo trees in Thulir and throughout Sittilingi are flowering! Bamboo flowering is a rare event that occurs every 60 to 130 years. Producing flowers and seeds requires a massive amount of energy. As a result, the bamboo plants usually die. We expect the surrounding area to look quite different afterwards. Interestingly, when a particular species of bamboo flowers, the plant relatives and ancestors of that species will flower worldwide!

Running!

Some of the government school children still continued to come in the mornings till September to train for the long runs! Senthil and Rajammal were in charge of this programme. The Thulir team participated in three running events this year.

9 of them participated in the Kaveri marathon on September 18th. Although the younger students trained for it they couldn’t participate as it coincided with their exams.

The same group participated in the Bangalore marathon on October 18th.

The younger students and the teachers participated in the Ultra marathon and ran the 12 k and the 21 k on November 8th.

New Trustee

Dr. Ravi Manohar joined the Board of Trustees as a trustee earlier this year. Dr. Ravi was in Sittilingi in 2003/2004 when Thulir started.  He then left to do higher studies in the UK and Oddanchatram.  He returned to Sittilingi with his wife Prema and daughter Varsha a few years ago. He has always been a part of Thulir’s efforts. He is now one of the main members of the group initiating the school. His 5-year-old daughter, Varsha, was one of the first students of ‘Kutty Thulir’ and now the pre-school. In October, Dr. Shylajadevi Menon stepped down as managing trustee due to health reasons and Dr. Ravi was unanimously chosen to be the new managing trustee. His addition to the Board of trustees has indeed given an impetus to the work.

Workshops on Traditional Art and Music of the Valley

Ravi’s uncle and father are from Echangadu, a village in the Kalrayan hills abutting our valley. They taught us the joys of toy-making using coconut leaves. They have also started us on bamboo basket making.

Vellachi Ammal, from Thekanampattu, has started coming once a month to teach us traditional songs and dances of the valley.

Parents’ Meetings

Education here includes educating the parents by engaging the parents in a dialogue and making them a part of their child’s educational process. If the situations and values are vastly different at home and school, the child suffers. We have had three major parents’ meetings since June.

The last one on January 7th was very positive and left all of us extremely satisfied. Parents also got a chance to use their hands and wits when they were given different jigsaw puzzles and asked to solve them. Then they were asked to give their feedback on their child’s progress. We were pleasantly surprised and happy when parents remarked that their children were now intensely curious and asked many questions. All of them said that their kids could not wait to get to school in the mornings! We went on to discuss the pros and cons of a pedagogy which concentrates on only academics versus one which integrates art, sport and physical activities with academics as it is in Thulir. Some parents complained that we take their children every Friday for a walk to the forest and that we allow them to climb trees! So a discussion on the importance of Nature education and being with Nature ensued. After this the children came out of class and put up an impressive performance for their parents. Their complete lack of stage fright impressed many parents. Then each child took his or her parents to the class and showed them all the work done so far.

We were a whole group of happy and proud parents, teachers and children that evening!

Volunteers and Visitors

As always many friends and fellow-seekers visited us over the months. As one young friend, Shankar from Delhi remarked after seeing the number of visitors we had, “I never knew you had such a hectic social life in Sittilingi! If you need solitude, please come to Delhi!”

Vijayalakshmi from Vellore volunteered in Thulir for a month before starting to study her B.Ed. She was a part of the teachers group here and took part in all the activities.

Lami, who was on a sabatical from her bank in Mayiladuthurai, volunteered in Thulir for some weeks. She helped the children with their English.

Sakthivel, a computer professional from Chennai, while volunteering in Thulir, translated many essays on Education from English to Tamil so that it could be used by the teachers here.

We were very happy to have the teachers from Marudam Farm school for a few days here. We had many interesting and stimulating discussions with them.

40 young teachers from ‘Teach for India’ visited on October 31 st. The discussions with them continued even after the session was over, with much enthusiasm.

The ultra-marathon runners group from Runners’ High came for their training weekend in September.

Ajay and Neha from Asha Bangalore came for a visit.

Ramkumar and Archana from Bangalore visited in November. They are toying with the idea of visiting Sittilingi on a more permanent basis over the coming years.

Christina and Sarah, medical students from Germany, made a slide show about Germany.

Nondiya from Nagaland and Nisha from Meghalaya took some classes for the children, taught some of their songs and talked about their homes.

Lea, a medical student from Hungary, gave a presentation on Hungary.

Franziska and Sabine, medical students from Germany, talked about their country and taught some English songs and games.

Mithun from the US also joined them for these classes. He also engaged the teachers in some conversational English classes and helped with this newsletter!

We hope to make geography more personal and engaging for the children through all these interactions with people from different countries.

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The new Thulir School was formally inaugurated on June 17th. Senthil, one of the earliest students at Thulir and now a senior staff, lights the lamp.

Parents, members of the education committee, and students  participated in this event.

A discussion on the kind of education and the values that should underpin it, followed.

Prof and Mrs Ravindran, Mrs and Mr Nagarajan have generously permitted their residences to be used as classrooms. Here you can see the bamboo work added to create a class room

children during a break

New classroom!

Thulir Alumni Jayabal, Dhanbal, Kumar and Kumar, along with Thulir staff have been working hard to get the buildings ready.

The new Reception area under construction.

Starting of the day!

Quiet time!

Activities!

Hmm, what shall I do now?

Fun outdoors.

Wishing you a happy Pongal and New Year from Sittilingi!

(This newsletter was written and uploaded by Nikhil just before he left Thulir to pursue his interest in music and higher studies. He assures us that he will be back after a break. He will remain a part of the Thulir team wherever he is and we are eagerly awaiting his return. We wish him All The Very Best in his pursuits!)

Pongal Celebrations

As Pongal routine, buildings and floors were cleaned, washed and swabbed with cow dung water to give the entire courtyard a tidy and fresh appearance. In the rest of the village too, dusty brown turned to a dark fragrant green. It was then divided into separate areas in which kolams would be drawn and coloured. Soon it was evening time when children, nurses and a few doctors showed up for the get together and drew colourful kolams on the mud! It was great to see such a highly developed sense of symmetry in the artists as they drew large patterns-growing-outward-from-the-center style of kolams, and achieving perfectly circular figures without the use of any external tools. This years kolams were particularly impressive !

Farming

The rains passed and the cold was on till mid march and even though the days have grown hotter now, the nights remain equally cold. In Thulir, we got around 9 kilos of Coriander seeds, a bumper harvest of brinjals and tomatoes, chillies and spinach. In fact, we got so many brinjals and tomatoes that it supported 14 of us for two weeks! We ate only brinjal and tomato  for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and didn’t have to buy any vegetables from the shops till the 15^th day!

Our rice crop failed though due to a lack of water. We harvested thattam payaru, a local lentil as we needed, fresh from the plant and into the cooking pot and so were left with only a kilo of seed for the next planting.
The tapioca is growing along, although a bit slowly, and we can see a difference in the way the leaves have wrinkled up in the plants in Thulir and how they have lushly spread out in the ones outside (which presumably are watered often).

Thattam Payaru sprouting

Although things don’t look completely dry yet, the hills are also slowly turning brown. It is also that time of year when the bamboos are turning a beautiful orange-yellow and shedding leaves. A couple of bamboos in the village of Moola Sittilingi have flowered and borne seed and there is much excitement to eat the rice – an unexpected gift from the forest with love.

Trees in the campus are flowering and bearing fruits and seeds so all the walkways and the campus in general are full of seeds and dry leaves. These are good for the children to collect and keep safely, to see later at a time when there will be no seeds and remember the season of fruiting for that tree – A lesson in local ecology.

A seeding Bamboo!

Auroville Marathon

Thirteen people from Thulir, 9 young boys and 4 teachers went to Auroville in early Februrary to be a part of the Auroville Marathon. Children from many schools across India had come. Our boys, aged from 10-14, ran the 10 km run, and the teachers ran the 21km run, and seem to have had enjoyed themselves. Some of them got to see the beach for the first time! There was activity time before the marathon where all the participants from all schools worked together on art projects.

Activity time – Working in groups

New School

Discussions on how the school should be still continue. In the last months we have talked to the hospital team, the farmers group and the womens group. Smaller working committee meetings are also going on. The land for the school has still not come through. After much debate and discussion, it has been decided that the new school will temporarily start functioning in Professor’s house from June with 20 children. Work on finalising and buying the land, building all the buildings, getting government recognition, will continue simultaneously. The minimum age limit has been decided to be 4 years.

The curriculum will give importance to tribal culture, agriculture and the forest that surrounds Sittilingi. Working on specific themes, like clothing or water or food will give us many opportunities to talk about the processes behind the themes, and how it came to be the way it is. For example, if the theme is growing plants, then the children can learn about the biology of the plant, good soil and climate, seasons, geography of its spread, measuring plant growth, garden patch size, plot growth graphs, measure weight and volume of produce, understand nutrients provided by the vegetable/fruit, organic vs. inorganic ways of growing, writing poems and stories about plants, drawing them, sculpting them, etc. The limit to what can be taught with a central theme in mind is only limitied by the imagination and resourcefulness of the teacher. Therefore, development of the teacher’s interests and knowledge base becomes important.

Temporary School

Exposure to different learning situations we hope will enthuse and inspire our  teachers to think differently about teaching, learning and living itself. So we travelled to Sita school in Bangalore by jeep and to Anand Niketan school in Sevagram( Gandhi ashram at Wardha, Maharashtra) by train.

Train Travel

Had the bay to ourselves mostly. Story Telling!

The travel itself was a great learning. It was the first time many of us travelled by train. In it were people from Bihar, Maharashtra, Assam, Kerala, Andhra and Tamil Nadu, both healthy and diseased, rich and poor, all packed together in some places and spread out comfortably in others. The views from our windows told us what was being grown at each place and topography, and as all our teachers are from an agricultural background, it was all very interesting for them to see – how crops were being grown in different parts of the country, where there was plenty of water, where the land was rocky and undulating, etc. A visit to the pantry came as a rude shock to some teachers, and after that, they weren’t very keen on eating anything prepared there. Some were surprised that all the cooks there were men.

Anand Niketan School, Sevagram

 From the railway station, the 11 of us ( and the 4 babies !) caught 3 auto rickshaws to Sevagram, what used to be the residence of Gandhi in pre independence times. It was early evening when we arrived. There were a lot of bustling khadi clad figures moving about the place. We found out that there was another meeting being held there near our guest house. Medha Patkar, Subhash Palekar and Anna Hazare were a few among them as we later found out. (they were visiting to rally people for a pad yatra from Sevagram to Delhi ) The idea of a pad yatra excited our group and they got thinking about how people could journey like that, without money or any necessities. In the evening was a short daily prayer out in the open by the residents of the ashram, after which was dinner and then bed.

The next day, we went to the school, situated within the premises, but in a different area. The school runs on Gandhi’s philosophy of education called “Nai Talim” which in Hindi means “New Education” or “Basic Education”. It focuses on teaching children the basic aspects of living, which are food , clothing and shelter and involving them in the actual basic work of the community. The original Nai Talim school was started in 1938 and functioned till 1965. The present school was restarted in 2005 by Sushama Sharma and her friends in the Nai Talim Samiti.

Learning to make a mat out of coconut fibre rope

There, in the school, we met Guruji, the tabla teacher, a gentle old man who had studied in the Nai talim school before it was shut down in 1965. He told us that in his time, children would wake up at 4.30 in the morning and go off to their respective duties, like milking the cows or helping out in the kitchen with the cooking or gardening work or general cleaning. The groups would rotate so that each group would get to do all the activities through the week. After an early breakfast, the children would clean the campus till lunch time around mid day. He specifically emphasized the time they spent sweeping and cleaning. After lunch, children would have academics where the lessons would be based on the activities that they did in the morning. For example, if a child had helped cutting vegetables in the kitchen in the morning, then the lesson would invariably cover basic mathematics, science, diet, geography, history, economics of cultivation, basic literacy and language just to name a few. After being brought up in the Nai Talim tradition, it was Guruji’s opinion that this way of teaching children was much more effective than studying the same things out of a textbook.

Walking around Sevagram

All children were involved in all activities in the ashram, whether it be agriculture or spirituality or thinking about the direction that society is moving in and coming up with ways to bring about change. All children would also spin the charkha, the simple device that brought down the rule of the British and the East India Company. This process of spinning thread from cotton using the charkha was very meditative and required concentration and skill to get a strong and evenly thick(thin) thread. Once we did it, we understood what a great activity it would be for all children to really apply themselves to, to develop power of concentration and patience.

The Charkha!

Preparing the cotton before it can be used in the Charkha

Presently, the school doesn’t function the way it used to in Gandhian times. There is less time spent working and more time devoted to academics, but still enough time is found in the day to learn dance, music, craft, gardening, embroidery, cooking, vegetable cutting, cleaning and spinning the charkha. Even though we got only two full days at the school, we feel we got to see a lot of things and came back inspired and understood the place of work in elementary education.

Visit to Sita School in Silvepura, Rural Bangalore

This is a school that Thulir shares a close relationship with. We’ve had more than a few exchange programs for students but this time, the entire teacher team visited the school. Along with the mothers came their babies, happily dressed in colourful clothes but constantly soiling them without warning. We went together from Thulir in a Tata Sumo, the owner of which is a man from Sittilingi who had never previously been to Bangalore. Apart from the confusions with the routes and experience of being completely smoked in in rush hour traffic and minor incidents with the traffic police, it was a smooth ride to the school, jolly and excited as the whole group was. We were glad to reach though, after long last, and to be welcomed by the smiling figure of Jane Sahi.

Mother and son

The babies, we noticed, were giving the mothers a lot of trouble (as usual) and made it impossible for the latter to concentrate on anything else so we arranged for a baby sitter to distract them and take care while the mothers were gone – Me!  The mothers were relieved at having “a day off” (after a year!) and went around the school to observe its functioning.

Learning Materials in one of the classrooms in Sita School

The teachers were particulalry impressed with Jyoti Sahi’s oil paintings and other abstract art works that were put up all over the campus on large pieces of canvas. Sasikala remarked, “Each one has at least a hundred different stories! We can imagine whatever we like by looking at the painting, and all of it could be true!” Even our driver Theerthan absorbed a bit of the philosophy of the school with respect to raising healthy, capable children, and was pleasantly surprised to find that kids here swept, washed vessels, arranged their own classrooms in order and did other chores without the least bit of supervision from the teachers. Even while eating our meals, he was surprised to see that  boys helped with the kitchen work, and even men can help with the arranging and the cleaning up of the table, and that more importantly, there was no shame in doing so. What inspired the teachers most was the excellent quality of education and care given to the children there while using very simple resources and infrastructure and the teachers ( especially Jane) being gentle and soft spoken!

A different pattern arranged by children every morning before prayer. This one uses Mahogany pods and flowers – all materials for this are taken from in the campus.

We left early in the morning from Sita School so that we could reach Lalbagh Botanical Garden before the morning traffic began. Fresh from a good dinner and a good night’s sleep, a morning walk in cloudy Lalbagh was very enjoyable. The large trees and massive honey combs, far above our reach, swayed gently in the cool breeze, and brought us a scent of flowers from somewhere near. We then headed to MTR for a breakfast of bisi bele bath and rava idly. The babies were fascinated by the traffic, and much to our dismay, so was Lakshmi, and that too while crossing the road! We had crossed to the other side, and realized that we had left Lakshmi behind, who was just coolly crossing Double Road with peak hour traffic as if it was the road outside her house in the village. But we still managed to travel back to Thulir in one piece, and even enjoyed the gift of rain on the way, after hot weather. The anxious mothers were much easier within themselves to be, after what seemed like a long journey, back home.

Lalbagh

What we saw in the few alternative schools that we visited were curriculums designed keeping in mind not only scientific aspects of children’s learning and failure, but also ways to promote equality, justice and a sense of inclusiveness among other things. All of which are  ignored in the conventional curriculum followed by most mainstream schools.

Construction and Moving in

There has been a bit of construction going on here in the Thulir campus. The building {Professor Ravindran and Vanajakka’s house}that is to be used as the temporary school for the next two years or so (till the land comes through and construction is done) needed some changes to its structure before it could be used. Some sunshades were installed in place to keep  the rains out, and a new sheet roof was put to cover the central courtyard of the building.
The books and other things from the shelves were all first cleaned up. All books except for children up to 8 years of age and some reference books for the teachers were packed up in cardboard cartons and kept aside. The remaining books, puzzles and play things were arranged in the shelves and moved to the new classrooms.

The present Thulir classrooms are being converted into guest rooms. This conversion requires some modifications of the existing structure, and additions like a new battery room and tool shed. The roof of the existing tools shed and the library had to be changed, the thatch had lived its life and was beginning to leak in places. Dried sugarcane leaves were used as the roofing.

Leaky roof fixed with sugarcane leaves

The hill grass that was previously used to roof the main Thulir building and library is now getting increasingly rare and expensive to use. Even the men skilled enough to use it are reducing in numbers, and soon, it may be go out of circulation as a common roofing solution for hot climates. The thatch is a bad conductor of heat, and hence doesn’t radiate outside heat into the house during the day while during cold nights, doesn’t radiate the heat from inside to out or the cold from outside to in, keeping the house at a moderate temperature at all times.It is an ideal roof for our country.

 Evening Classes

With all of this going on, we are also busy learning and preparing  to be full time teachers at the new school. The learning materials are being prepared by us during the day, and when added to all the regular responsibilities of taking care of the accounts and the campus in general gives us very little time to prepare for classes in the evening and hence, we have decided to stop evening classes for children for the time being.

The number of  children attending too has reduced gradually. The children at the government school here are being kept for longer hours at school.The children of class 9 and 10, especially, are in school from 7am to 6 pm preparing for and writing revision exams. So they are hardly able to come to Thulir. For the other classes too there is more emphasis on rote learning and writing tests than on understanding the lessons and actually learning. So the children are exhausted and drained by the time they come to us in the evenings. This last year when they were in Thulir in the evenings, it would be clearly visible that they are not interested in any more learning and we would find it hard to do any kind of activity with them. They would just want to play in the evenings together, and attempting anything else suddenly became very difficult.

Just the other day, i met a few boys who used to come to Thulir previously but stopped as they moved into the tenth. The boys who used to be so spirited and energetic seemed dull and defeated, and on asking how being in tenth was treating them, answered sadly  with the usual sense of disillusionment that all the tenth graders here exhibit. They wanted me to teach them English. I gladly invited them to come but wondered silently when they would find the time or energy to learn, living the way they were.
Now with the exams going on, and their parents insisting they score high marks and literally locking them up indoors to study, the least we can do is wish them well and hope that the school that we are starting will prevent or at least reduce the damage to children in this little village…

Sports Day

A Sports day was suddenly organised on the 29th of this month, as a sort of farewell to me! Though the evening classes had been stopped, when we sent word to them about this event, children promptly came. It was sweltering heat but the children were enthusiastically running and playing and refused to go home after it was over. We had to have an indoor session of  viewing photographs and films after that!

Kutty Thulir

The children in Kutty Thulir are growing up really fast, and we often forget how magical the process is. Here’s hoping to a great time ahead for these children and us.

Congratulations are in order to our friend and colleague Ravi and his wife Ambika who have a baby boy now, 2 months old. We wish them all the best for parenthood and beyond!

Happy New year to all of you!

May we together make the world a slightly better, wiser, happier and a more healthy and peaceful place this year.

Read in this Newsletter about rains in Sittilingi, Raspberry Pi (a mini computer designed for villages without much electricity), craft week at Marudam school, plans for a starting a school, farming, visit to Puvidham school, re roofing buildings in thulir, sports days, hogenakal water falls visit, cycling trip to Sathanur Dam and about the visitors we had during these months.

Rains
This year has been worse than the previous year in terms of rainfall. Summer was unusually hot this year and when it was the monsoon’s turn to show up, it never did. It seems that other parts of Tamil Nadu have gotten their fair share (and more) of rainfall, but little Sittilingi remains parched. Hard working farmers around us haven’t got their expected harvests and are a bit frustrated especially after hearing from others traveling outside that other regions are blessed with good rains.
Our crop of Kambu (bajra) too hasn’t been very good and much of it was consumed during the harvest itself (The evening children like it raw, fresh from the plant).

The water level in our well has increased but not so much that we can tide over the summer. This year, a bore well has become a matter of having water to drink, rather than a question of ethics. With farmers around us increasing the amount of water they use for their (relatively new) cash crops- to flood their paddy, or irrigate sugarcane, turmeric or tapioca for instance- all our judicious water use is like climbing a coconut tree with a weight problem and a fractured ankle.
The village panchayat has been of some help by digging a bore well on thulir land and installing a working motor inside it. Now there is a water tank inside thulir campus that holds the water from the bore that is pumped occasionally, but the only problem is that the bore well doesn’t have much water in it.

Ultra marathon runners from Runner’s High
Santhosh brought his team of runners again one weekend in September to train for their ultra marathon. They did a 12 hour run on Saturday and A 5 hour run on Sunday. Senthil and some boys from Thulir too joined them for part of the day. Unfortunately the sun too came out in full form and decided to join them making them thoroughly hot and dehydrated! Seeing and interacting with them, the Thulir team is now inspired to host a run here in the valley some time.

Madanyu
We had two interesting visitors Aftab and Max from the UK, PhD student and Post-Doc at the University of Cambridge, from the Madanyu Education Programme (http://www.madanyu.org) to travel to remote villages in India to provide computer skill training at education centres via the Raspberry Pi. This is a low power, fully functional computer that will fit into a shirt pocket; basically a CPU with in-built ports to connect a monitor, keyboard, mouse, Ethernet cable and a memory card, which is the main data storage of the Pi. It also has GPIO (General Purpose Input Output) pins which are exploited by hobbyists to connect various components to the computer and use it in different ways. The memory card comes loaded with the Madanyu OS, basic programming software, educational games, etc. which we could all use and learn from. We had a three day workshop on how to use this computer and Python, a powerful programming language that is increasingly being used in the computing world. The children and teachers had a class on turtle graphics, a program much like the original DOS version LOGO, except more advanced and colourful.

The children watched videos of hobbyists who have used this computer as cell phones, radio transmitters, discreet cameras, and even robots capable of responding to instructions through radio waves! At the end of the workshop, there was a competition of sorts, where children had to come up with a new and different application for the Raspberry Pi and explain with a drawing and some writing to the two volunteers. Some wanted to study Marine life by attaching it as a camera onto the bodies of  aquatic animals underwater, some wanted to use it as a controller to control those serial lights that we see in Christmas trees and install those lights in shops to make the shop more bright, colorful and attract more customers(very practical!), some had totally outrageous ideas, like using it to increase the strength of an elephant so that it may carry more load, or generally increasing the capacity of an animal to do more work (we were equally boggled at the idea!)
The competition ended with the resource persons gifting us with an electronics kit, without any manuals or other help so that we tinker around with it and figure out what all it can do all on our own.

Marudham craft week
Marudham has almost become like another home for us at thulir, and if it is craft week, we somehow find ourselves planning and packing to spend at least 5 days there. This year also we did the same and had a great time, soaking in the energy of the place – there is activity in every classroom and outside too with varied activities like kalamkaari to silambaattam, and everything else in between so there is something for everyone. The school is so vibrant during that time that the whole 5 days there is like one long endorphin rush. Such an atmosphere is so charged with learning that we come away with our hearts full. This time, the entire thulir team went and participated in kalamkaari, palm leaf weaving, ear ring making, silambaattam, wood carving, stone carving and the art of learning how to learn! The football sessions in the evening, the unicycle that was just lying there, free for anyone to try it out, juggling lessons, learning how to perform a summersault in the air by jumping off a spring board and landing on a mattress, learning dive rolls, walking on a tight rope and interacting with different groups of people all added to the experience.
Senthil and Sakthivel will soon be visiting Marudham to conduct a workshop on bamboo chair making. The chairs are elegant and comfortable to sit on, and completely bio degradable, made of just bamboo.

Shankar birdwatching club

Dr.Shankar, a friend from Bangalore was kind enough to donate a pair of fantastic binoculars to Thulir this winter. This has come at just the right time when the children are beginning to pay more attention to birds around Sittilingi. Now with a few interested kids, we have started a birdwatching club! (and decided to name it Shankar birdwatching club as a way of saying thanks). So far we have spotted many birds and bird nests in Thulir itself, and roughly identified a beat. The best part about the binoculars is that it has shown the watchers beauty in chickens too! This is a big achievement as this is a bird they see every day, everywhere, it being the most common feathered friend around. Butterflies are also observed, along with squirrels, rats, dogs, cats, sometimes people, the hills nearby, tree tops, clouds, etc. Knowing about a person like Salim Ali and that it is also possible to write a book and make a living observing birds has given some kind of energy to a few boys here, and they are still amused and browse through the plates of ‘The Book Of Indian Birds’ with a quiet wonder.

To school or not to school…?

For years the community here has been asking us to make Thulir a full time school. We have been putting it off saying that since there is a government school here, it makes more sense for us to supplement and complement it rather than replicating the entire infrastructure. But education levels around here have actually become worse and what we do does not suffice. The pressure on us for a new school has increased.There is no place for real learning or values and definitely no place where children are allowed to discover themselves and learn freely and happily. A new school is on the horizon definitely now.

Plans for the new school in Sittilingi are being made as we speak. We would like a larger community to have the ownership of the school and be part of formulating the philosophy and vision for the school. So all the doctors and the staff from the hospital, organic farming initiative, tribal technology initiative and Thulir have been meeting up on a weekly basis to discuss the school and democratically arrive at a consensus on all matters ranging from the values and culture it should uphold to how the school should be, how its teachers and teaching should be, what kind of an atmosphere do we want the children to be in, should the students be primarily tribals or non- tribal,should the students wear uniforms etc. The meetings have been of great help for us as a group to understand what everyone is thinking about the school, and also education in general.
A couple of practical problems like land for the school, funds, a team to get permissions from the government officials, water, still remain but are being discussed also. It is a challenging task ahead for all of us but we hope it will be a space for learning more relevant and interesting than any other institution in the entire valley.

The children came up with this plan when we discussed with them how they want their dream school to be like!

Farming

The enthusiasm during what little monsoon we had manifested itself in the form of ploughed fields and planting of brinjal, green chilly, onion, spinach (a variety known as pulicha keerai in tamil because it is sour tasting – which we keep harvesting from time to time for chutney, etc.), beans, ragi, rice, and for the first time in Thulir history, tapioca, a one year crop. Everyone, including the kutty thulir kids, helped us in preparing the field! We made furrows, flooded the fields and leveled it with everyone helping out. We hoped that the crops would benefit and mature from whatever monsoon rains we have. We would harvest most of them before March when the heat starts so there won’t be much irrigation required. Tapioca doesn’t require water.

Due to the density of the salt water, the lighter grains of rice float to the top and the heavier or more mature grains remain at the bottom. The heavier grains are then selected for planting.

Ragi Motherbed

Puvidham visit

As part of the initiative to start the school, we decided that exposure trips for our team of teachers to different schools would be good . With this idea, the entire thulir team travelled to Puvidham school in a little village called Nallampalli, 20 kilometers from Dharmapuri. It is an alternative school catering to rural and dalit children. It was the second alternative school that many teachers from here visited, after Marudham. The men in the team cycled to and back while the women and the 4 babies went by public transport, changing 3 buses. The thulir team got to interact with the Puvidham teachers and students, learnt about their functioning, curriculum and exchanged songs, dances,etc. The experience was good and we learnt different things from it.

Examining a corrugated roof made of compressed layers of tetra packs with a thin plastic lining on both sides.

Another big learning was how the Puvidham school team managed to deal with the government officials for the registration process. Getting recognition now even after fulfilling all the requirements is a long and cumbersome process and it has been good for us to hear the experiences of Marudham and Puvidham so that we are a little more prepared, and have a better idea of what to expect.

Exchanging songs!

Re roofing Thulir
The thatch roofs of the course room, tools store, engine shed and entrance verandah had decayed and it was time to re roof them. Normally we would have employed people from outside for this. But this time Senthil, Sakthivel, Ravi, Mohan and Perumal decided to take this up as a weekend project and do it themselves. They worked hard from Saturday early morning and finished by Sunday evening. Senthil’s two year old son , Rishi, refused to be left out of the action and generally had great fun carrying and playing with sticks/leaves,rolling in the sugarcane mulch etc.

Sports Days
In December, we had two days of just sports and team games. It was such a hit with the children that we decided to have one later in the month too! Interests had changed, movements had become more fluid, children were planning a bit more, also executing plans a bit better, physical strength had increased from last year. But what remained unchanged was the adrenaline levels during games and the cheerful mood (well, mostly) throughout the day . No one wanted sports day to end, and it was always us adults who had to tell children to go back home or take a break in the afternoon or stop for lunch, etc. On sports days, children can live mostly on air and water!

Sports day started with a talk on winning, losing, sharing, caring, rising above just prizes (and as an extension, not being a slave to a materialistic mindset), and most of all, knowing why we play sports – not to win prizes but to learn to handle winning and losing and to have as much fun as we can. It is the joy that lasts in our minds that makes it more important than winning.
Then there was a warm up as the kids rushed out of the enclosed space to the open ground. A few stretches and laughs later, sports day was on its way! There was the usual games as always – running, long jump, relay, kho kho, kabaddi, dodge ball, frog jump and nondi- hopping and catching, a thulir favorite that is very hard on the leg that hops.
To end it, there was a prize distribution where all the participants got a box of crayons. Guests Marina and Charu taught us some songs.The songs revived the children and again no one wanted to go home but since the teachers were all too tired, it had to stop!

Excursion to the water falls at Hogenakal
This happened immediately after the visit to Puvidham School. There were two teams from thulir -The bus team consisted of mothers and their infants – Rajammal, Sasikala, Lakshmi and Ambika with their babies, all barely walking, Prema, Anu and Nikhil. The cycling team (Senthil, Sakthivel, Ravi, Perumal and Mohan) left much before the bus team, early in the morning to Hogenakkal on their cycles so their experience was very different from ours, also due to the fact that we couldn’t meet up there. While they went bathing in the water, the bus team went boating with the babies on ‘parisals’,I.e, circular boats with the black bitumen lining on a bamboo frame, rowed with a small wooden oar. The experience of it was something new for all, and the different kinds of rock formations made by the water on the black granite over the centuries were fascinating to see. The spray of the waterfall too reached far beyond the fall itself, and gently wet our faces and finger tips.
The movement of the boat was gentle and smooth, calming both the babies and their mothers. Initially, everyone feared it, but later, as they got used to it, they started enjoying it, and were all smiles.

Cycling to Sathanur Dam

The boys Senthil, Sakthivel, Mohan, Perumal, Annamalai, Solomon Raj and Nikhil went on a cycling trip to Sathanur Dam, around 50 kms from Thulir. It was Annamalai’s and Solomon Raj’s first trip outside on cycles. The uphills were tough and down slopes were a breeze, especially on old and rickety cycles with rusted moving parts. Rocky hills, quaint villages, semi deserted temples, idlis for 1 rupee each, vast green fields, winter skies, many slim tyres on black tarmac silently speeding through… We’re sure they will be back for more!

At the dam itself, we visited the crocodile farm that we had heard much about. With an entry fee of half a rupee, we walked in excited. What we found was that in a fifty by fifty compound with a wall of about 5 feet high were locked up at least 25-30 adult crocs. The “water body” that they had to “swim” in or cool off consisted of half the area with the water as dark as pools of tar at midnight and a stagnant stink of rot that would bring hungry vultures. There were many of these compounds and some were filled up more than the others with the animals lying lazily on the floor, some absolutely still with their jaws open, some on top of the others, taking the morning off with friends and spouses. Not that there is much else to do in a place like that where you are fed and watered according to a schedule. But it was a chance to talk about reptiles, alligators, dinosaurs and interesting things about crocs like how their skin can be bulletproof. The boys thoroughly enjoyed the animals and will soon be back for more.

Kutty Thulir

Alphabet in Maida mixed with turmeric powder to make it yellow. Makes it easier to learn when the children get their hands involved in the process too.

Little Farmers!

Visitors
Roshan Sahi from Sita School, Bangalore visited us for a few days. It was great to have him here. He was good enough to share his extensive knowledge of painting and sketching with the children in the form of a class on nature sketching. Concepts like shading, observing, and depth were discussed and examples were pointed out to the children, who all interestedly took to it, forming little groups and sketching plants and other objects around thulir.

Stan and Mari from Gudalur have been like gurus for Anu and Krishna when they were working in Gudalur amongst the adivasis there, and their visit to Sittilingi was great for all of us. Stany’s class for the thulir team on the injustice committed against the adivasis all over India from the Pre independence era, their struggle for justice, the Forest Rights Act which recognises their rights over their forests was very illuminating for us. Listening to his stories from Gudalur and how the A.M.S faced and overcame the injustice of the police and government laws for the past 30 years was inspiring to hear. Two sessions with Stan were not enough at all, we felt, but still we learnt a lot from them, and are very thankful for such an experience!

 Rebecca, the 14 year old daughter of a good friend Christiana from Germany volunteered at Thulir for two weeks. The children enjoyed having her around,doing things with her. It was amazing to see how so much cultural exchange happened, most of the time without language, as neither Rebecca nor the children were completely comfortable in English.

Lakshmi, AKA Kutty lakshmi, Anu’s niece, was in thulir for over a week and did many interesting activities for the children in craft. Swetha from Poorna School too was here. She shared with us the functioning of Poorna and the systems in place there during one of the school meetings. With Lakshmi, we spent many hours during these Christmas holidays weaving loom bands, quilling shapes, making new kinds of ear rings and paper jewellery, and also dancing to songs together. It was fun for everyone to have lively new persons in the group.

Thanks to all of you for being with us all along. Your support gives us the courage to face the daunting tasks ahead. Thank you.

Newsletter – June – July 2014.

Rain, rain Everywhere but not a drop here

Waiting and waiting for rain, in vain, has become one of our major activities here, and water, our most valuable resource! We can completely empathize with the millions of farmers in our country. This summer has been the most severe one we have experienced in the last 10 years. The temperature soared above 40 degrees Celsius most days. The water level in our well kept reducing and from March, we have been managing with one or two feet of water in our well. For the first time, we had to close Thulir down for a whole month in May for students and visitors.

Senthil, Sakthivel, Jayabal, Parameshwaram and Perumal worked in the sweltering heat deepening the well during the vacation. A few showers towards the end of May lifted our hopes up. The plants, grasses and trees sighed with relief and put out tentative new green leaves and buds. We immediately ploughed our land and planted Saamai (little millet) and kambu (pearl millet/bajra) – but alas, the parched land soaked up the moisture very soon and there were no more showers after that.

In June, the Sittilingi Panchayat came forward to help and dug a borewell here. But even that had no water! Thulir re opened the same month and we kept managing with little or no water. When suddenly on 3rd July, there was not a drop of water left in the well!

Now desperate measures were needed. We were wondering what to do when Gunashekharan,a farmer who lives half a km away came forward on his own to help. His well had water and he offered to fill our well with some water. Senthil, Sakthivel, Mohan, Perumal, Ravi, Nikhil and Krishna worked for two days laying out pipes from Shekhar’s well to ours along and across the Panchayat road. The distance between the wells was measured to be around 400 odd feet. Some pipes were borrowed from Sakthi, another farmer we knew, and the rest from Shekhar himself.

(Technical aside – We had a total of twenty pipes, each measuring 20 feet in length and 2 inches in diameter. The pipes used were the semi-flexible hard plastic kinds with a connector and a clamp on one end and a receiver on the other. The joints were the weakest part of the 400 foot pipe snake, leaking and spraying thin jets of water into the air). With this we filled our well with water in a matter of 8 hours (and watered all the sugarcane and arecanut fields that the pipe snaked through because of the leaky joints). The most surprising part was, there was no money transaction. This, we thought, could only happen in Sittilingi!

Many 20 foot pipes connected together running through the thulir grounds

Life flows though a pipe..

We are managing with that water now, and still waiting for the monsoon … It looks like the well is losing on an average 3 inches of water everyday, even on days we don’t pump out the water. From the time we have filled it, the water level has dropped 8 feet. 8 feet since the third of July…

Contrasting colours – A well watered mango orchard and arecanut farm looking lush against a drying up bamboo forest and hillslope

What is work? What is play?

A younger group of boys (all aged between 14 and 17) – Thirupathi, Udayamurugan, Solomonraj, Karthik, Annamalai, Charlie and Hari were here the whole summer in the punishing heat watching the well deepening and helping out now and then. We urged them to go home and have fun – it was summer holidays after all, but they didn’t. This was FUN for them and one could see that. Does this too happen only in rural/tribal areas or is it everywhere? Teenagers wanting to do physical work in the hot sun instead of sitting at home and watching TV? Maybe the fact that they were not forced to work made it fun for them? They definitely wanted to ape the young adults and do what they do!

Lakshmi

Lakshmi with the newborn calf.

A quiet, unassuming member of our family, our cow Lakshmi had patiently put up with all our inexperience, clumsiness and eccentricities passed away suddenly in May. She had given birth to a female calf just on May 1st without any fuss or whimper. The mother and calf were doing well when this happened. Fortunately for us, Ambika’s cow had just lost her calf. So we have now left our calf with that cow. The calf is growing well now under Kannagi’s care.

Marks! Marks! MARKS !

A major change in our valley the last 10 years has been that the ‘marks fever’ which has gripped the rest of Tamil Nadu has caught us too! The frenzy for scoring marks at the cost of everything – even education –  has entered Sittilingi too, sadly.

The government school here has claimed 100 percent pass in the class X board exam. One of the Thulir students had scored 464 out of 500 in this exam. What astonished us was that his parents were far from happy. They were angry with him for not scoring higher marks than the boy studying in Kottapatti(the neighboring village). The irony of the situation was that the parents of the boy in Kottapatti who had scored 484 out of 500 were unhappy that he didn’t score as high as a boy in the next town!

Where is all this leading us? What are we doing to our children?

Admission to professional colleges in Tamil Nadu is based on marks scored in the class XII examinations. Ironically (more irony), this move was done 6 to 7 years ago to put rural students at par with urban kids! Many schools which only coach students to score high mushroomed all over TN. Unfortunately, we are just 100 to 150 km away from where these schools are located, a “lucky” place called Rasipuram. A few such schools have come up in towns 50-60 kms away too.

Victims of success stories

Much later, we found out that the hundred percent pass in the government school was possible only because the teachers have slowly and subliminally (and later on, quite openly too we heard) persuaded some students to drop out by telling them persistently that they were not good, they can NEVER study, they were less intelligent compared to their classmates, etc.

If they are rejected by even the government school, where will the so called “backward students go? Whose fault is it that they are “behind” in studies? How can any teacher dismiss a student as “good for nothing” ?

We found two of those students, Mohan and Perumal, and they are now full time at Thulir. They are still very diffident and hesitate to even speak. But already, after just 3 weeks, one can see a sparkle in their eye and the beginnings of joy in their smiles! They are definitely interested and will soon bloom.

Weekend camps 

“Roller Coaster” – this paper will be rolled up into a cylinder. The story rolls on, one page at a time. The paper is loaded into an old shoe box with two firm cylinders on each end. The movement is similar to a cassette.

Since Saturdays are usually  an uninterrupted day with the kids, we have decided to make the most of them and do more interesting things to create/sustain interest in activities other than academics. We have had treks into the forest, visits to a nearby waterfall, where we got to observe many life forms in the wild, clay modelling , craft Workshop, sports day and film screenings. There was a rather beautiful film called “Animals are Beautiful People” which is a hilarious, yet informative documentary on the wildlife of the kalahari desert, and an ecosystem around the Nile.

Sports day- No Water but full Energy!

An important part of any child’s development is the often overlooked, much under played, sports. It’s clear to anyone who observes children play that they learn much from their play times while enjoying it. Relating to each other, team work, handling success and failure etc. are all learnt during play. I myself have observed that whenever I play and exert myself, finishing up sweaty and tired, I am always in a more cheerful mood, and with a mind that is cleared of the day’s accumulated dust.

Thulir favorite – Kabaddi!

On a Saturday, we had a sports day for the children with a lot of team games. These are days when we get to see how much energy the children really have. We had just one pot of water that day for drinking and there were 60 children playing the whole day!  But we could only manage because we were in Sittilingi! No one complained. Children brought water bottles and food  from home, someone cheerfully brought a pot of water from their home in the afternoon and we all had fun!

Trek to chettikuttai

Chettikuttai is a small hamlet,  about 6 km away, in the middle of the forest off the Sittilingi – Kottapatti forest road. We trekked there along with 40 children one Saturday. Time and distance passed unnoticed while observing the various trees, birds, picking wild berries of various kinds, exchanging stories and eating the food we carried! On our way back we had a sudden crisis. Siva, a ten year old, kept complaining that he was tired. This is very unusual among tribal kids – they are never tired during physical activities! So some of us lingered slowly behind with him telling stories and singing songs to encourage him. Suddenly Siva collapsed and had a siezure! Luckily we were on the main road by then. Some bikes stopped and gave some of us a lift to the Tribal hospital with him. Within a short while Dr. Regi was reassuring us after examining him. Siva has completely recovered now.

Discussions on thulir

We feel it is important to keep discussing, from time to time, the philosophy and ethics of thulir with each other. Along with that we also have had meetings where we got together to discuss stories, exchange notes and share each other’s experience of being with children, opinions on what we feel is working and what isn’t, problems we are facing, new ideas to take things forward, taking another look at why we are the way we are at thulir (with respect to following an alternative model of education), how we can all be better, more effective teachers, the need for organizing our time properly, trying out the teaching methods on ourselves before trying them on students so we can better predict problems and the experience of learning a concept from another angle (an alternate angle!) and more such themes.

These meetings have always been very helpful in understanding each other and the pitfalls of our own teaching methods. Such meetings, I feel, are valuable and bring all of us working here closer together and will continue to happen regularly.

Ananda Yana Run, Bangalore

(L-R) Solomon Raj,  Charlie, Karthik, Hari, Annamalai, Sakthivel, Udayamurugan.

The running group consisting of seven boys this time went to Bangalore in June accompanied by Senthil and Sakthivel for the Ananda Yana(in kannada, that means “Journey of Joy”) Marathon. They were all registered for the 10 km run. Staying at Ananya school, an alternative school in Bangalore,  they were very close to the starting point of the run. The run is organized by Runner’s High, a group who want to bring the concept of fitness to people across different socio-economic backgrounds.

Since it was a weekend, boys could also visit Lalbagh, K.R.Market, and S.P.Road to do some of their shopping and also experience what a city is like. They all loved the experience and want to go back very soon! The lights, the cars, bikes, roads, tall buildings, colourful shops, the wares they sell.. One can imagine a child who has been in a secluded village for all his life suddenly in the bustle of K.R. Market, looking at the crowd and things on display, people busily moving about their work, traffic congestion.. Maybe they wouldn’t like to live there, but visiting such places is surely fun for them!

Balaji Was Here

Our good friend from Pondicherry was staying here for close to a month. He took classes for the children in the evenings and helped out with the accounts and the computer department. He also started the children off on “Scratch” , a beginners level programming software with a graphical user interface designed for children by Ubuntu. Although we had planned a cycle trip with him and were almost ready to leave, we had to “postpone” it. The time for cycling was not right i guess, but we soon hope to have a trip with him anyway. With his loud voice and singing of old Tamil songs, and frequently voiced political opinions, we would all know where Balaji was.

Anu’s father has been diagnosed with advanced cancer and has been taking treatment at Vellore. So Anu has had to be away for atleast a week each month since December. So it was good for all of us to have Balaji here at those times.

A new teacher arrives! (with a B.Ed.)

Ravi, a B.Ed. graduate was working in a village nearby at a government school for four months without pay and was tired of it. He wanted out and we were also looking for another teacher for our evening sessions. It was good timing, and soon, Ravi joined Thulir. He has been taking classes in the evening. His report of thulir would be interesting to read, we imagine, as he is finding everything at thulir very different from the government school environment that he is used to. After having a few meetings together, he has voiced out his opinions and issues of working here, and we have all been giving each other little ideas to overcome the problems. Ravi was present for the well to well water transfer episode, some wood work (we were making tangrams) and chopping firewood, so he now knows what it means to be a teacher in thulir!

Poornima’s workshop

Poornima from Marudam school, Tiruvannamalai graced us with her presence at Thulir! She came here to conduct a weekend long workshop for the teachers on the Montessori Method of teaching young ones. One of the best things to happen to thulir in a long time, her workshop managed to blend having fun and learning, philosophy and practice, singing and writing, dancing and drawing, laughing and introspection, dialogue and monologue, learning and un-learning! So it was a very good event for all in terms of new methods of teaching, using the resources we have more effectively, like our library and all the plants around us, and having a different perspective on education and children itself. We divided the time we had into looking at different age groups and how they learn, but at the end of it, we felt that we did not have enough time with her to go through all. We all (i think) emerged from the weekend as slightly changed people in our ways and outlook towards educating our next generation.

Red whiskered bulbul on a bajra plant