Providing Life Skills to 300 Girls living in Slums

Dear Friends,

Warm greetings from Vacha Team. Once again we thank you for your continued support to our project with girls. As we built resources we began to let boys also to have access to some of them. They too are deprived children but they are privileged over girls in matters of nutrition, education and mobility. We now have a gender sensitisation programme for them and they participate enthusiastically to support their sisters at home.

We have some happy news to share with you. One new programme we have started recently is a library for youth (age group 10 to 18) in Golavli, a former village now included in Kalyan- Dombivli Municipal Corporation. The area now has some slums where migrants from poor and backward areas in the country live. It has books in Marathi, Hindi and English for children and teenagers. Our programme participants come from homes that do not have a reading tradition. Often the parents are semiliterates and also too overworked to have energy to read books. They cannot afford to buy books and not all get even a newspaper. But, within a month, the library picked up and now over 150 kids visit it to borrow books or to attend library events like reading out, dramatisation from books, quizzes etc. Some students from a neighbouring school rush in to catch up with a book even in the short school recess. We had found out that it is compulsory for even schools for the poor to have a library but the teachers do not issue books out of fear that children may damage them in some way and the teachers would have to pay a fine. They also do not have the vision to organise library events and help youth explore the wonderful world or books. We will expand the programme gradually.

Once again we thank you for all that you have done for us.