By Ruby Nakka | Director
Dear Friend,
It is with deep sense of grattitude and satisfaction I write this report to update you abotu what we are doing under our COVID relief operations, with your donation.
As soon as the COVID lockdowns were announced in March of 2020, we began to reach out to our neighbourhoods and communities with cooked food. We were cooking and serving 150 packets everyday and we did it for 40 days.
When the lockdown was relaxed, we decided to stop doing this work thinking that people would be going back to work. Little did we know then pf ground reality. Our staff who were distributing the food packets brought the feedback to tell us that in some communities, adults do not have work, schools are not reopened and children have no food to eat. Children were resorting to begging on the streets.
Then, we decided to resume cooking and start distributing to children alone this time. Again, what we learned from our field team is that chidlren were eating the food we were distributing but were roaming the streets as the schools are not reopened. Thats when we decided to run classes of academic value to the children and the numbers grew to include 150 children in four different locations.
We have been continueing this work for the past 18+ months uninterrupted (Monday to Saturday) with your support and if you look at the profile of these children, they are the most marginalized in the community. Some children in some communities have no house, no electricity, no water and no sanitation. Sometimes it is difficult to fathom that in this day and age, people do live in such squalor conditions but we are glad that we could be of some help with the support that you're entending to them.
Currently we serve breakfast, morning snack and lunch and also run concurrent class room learning for four hours from 8:00 AM to 12:00 PM. We try to get constant feedback from the community to alter the foods that we serve to ensure that children are eating palatable foods of their choice.
Most of the children have very shallow academic foundation so they are strongly averse to going back to school. We are also afraid that they might drop out from schools which we worked hard to enrol some who never attended. They might also be targets for the bullies. Hence, we developed an alternative program to ensure that the learning continues in shcool.
Once the school reopens, we intend to convert the current program into "Evening Tuition Center" where a tuition teacher will spend atleast 2 to 3 hours everyday (Monday to Saturday) to ensure that the child is learning and addresses any challenges that the child may be having at school. He would also be a liason between the school, the family and the hope house on behalf of the child. Since they would be receiving school lunch during the school days, we hope to provide them with evening snacks alone which makes our operations cost effective.
This will enable us to taper off the feeding program gradually while ensuring that the child is continueing with his/ her academic activities. We want to say a big thank you for playing such a constructive role in supporting these most vulnerable children. We hope that you'll continue to support them as they would be supported in a new concept called "Evening Tuition Center".
I would be more than happy to answer any questions that you might have so please feel free to reach out to me at ruby@indiahopehouse.org.
With kind regards
Ruby Nakka
Director - The Hope House
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