July + August update

Hi everyone! We are Marta, Andrea and Marco!!! In July and August we worked in Japthi. Even if the work sometimes has been though, we really enjoyed staying with the children: they are so cute... if you have been in Japthi you know how much!

In July - together with the other July volunteers, Julien, Kaisa and Lucia - we participated to the first "Kundapura disabled children schools meeting" (aka "The Olympics"). In particular Julien asked the other two schools for disabled children of Kundapura (and suburbs) to join their and our children for a day of games and shows all together. The children really enjoyed taking the jeep and going to the meeting, where there were some events like games, music, acting and singing performance, eating (Pavan was really happy about this last moment...).

We also took some children to the Medical Camp, in particular Jay Kumar and Kishore because of their fits, and Suhan, Sanath and Pavan for injuries on their skin. It was an interesting experience for us, but not so useful for the children, especially for Kishore and Jay Kumar because doctors said that they couldn't do anything for them: they needed a specific visit in a real hospital.

Because of this we tried to find a solution for Kishore's problem. We went to the Kundapura governmental hospital with Praveen, where they said that we had to go to Mangalore. We asked Praveen if this could be a possibility and he answered that he would try to do it. We don't know which is the present situation, but we hope it will be possible because in Mangalore there are many volunteers that could stay with Kishore during his admission in the hospital.

In August we organized a "Japthi visiting day" (yes, a Japthi party!), during which has been possible for FSL volunteers, involved in other kind of projects, to get in touch with the school's children and to become aware of some of the issue this social project is trying to face and solve. The children and us had a lot of fun and also all the other volunteers!!!

Then, together with Mareike, the august volunteer, and Julia, an "old" one, we started to paint the walls of the "dressing room". Unfortunately we have not seen the room completely painted and we have only few pictures, we hope that Mareike in the next will post some pictures that show her work finished!

Besides running the daily schedule, we updated and reorganized the "Japthi Bible", the file containing all the info required to new volunteers to become confident with the driving of this project.


During our last days in Japthi we had a good new: a friend of Rakesh (the president of FSL in Kundapura) has promised us to find and pay a real teacher for the school!!! We think it's a really big opportunity for FSL and for the children, a step toward the "Japthi Utopia"! We hope that this will become realty: we don't know the actual situation so we have to wait the news from Mareike and the others new volunteers. About this topic, we also left to the future volunteers, in our "final report", some hints for next things to do shortly for Japthi (obviously in our opinion!), and they are more or less:

1. make pressure to FSL about the promise of the friend of Rakesh and for the research of a new helper woman (when we were in Japthi Rathna had some problems, so there was only Sudjata working for the children)
2. understand which are the possibility of bringing Kishore to the Mangalore hospital
3. make more clearness about the ways to give donations to Japthi from Europe and the other countries of the volunteers (we didn’t understand it from Praveen!)
4. starts using the funds from the account of Gerda, for example to enlarge the playground of the school…

In the end, we promised to be available also in the future to try to collect money for Japthi needs, among our communities and friends, showing pictures and talking about the project. This could be a good way also in the case of collecting a fund for the salary of an helper women, to make a big example, but so we think it’s really important first to realize when and if there’s a real need of new funds, and then to clear to every old and new volunteers how it’s possible to send money there.


Japthi has been for us a very, very important experience, it let us a lot of emotions and feelings, we learn a lot of things…but overall we had the possibility to know the children, they’ve been the core of our journey in India. Even if many times they’ve been annoying, even if they often didn’t understand us, even if you need a lot of time to understand them, and it’s not sure you will succeed with some of them…sometimes they laugh, or they cry, for you, and other times a smile or a special light in their eyes let you believe they understood you…and that’s enough, you fell in love with them. So we are very grateful to have know them!

Bye!

artiniandrea [at] gmail [dot] com
marco.bellucci [at] gmail [dot] com
morandimarta [at] gmail [dot] com