Bengali Basti Report April 2011

Everything is going well by His grace.

We have just completed the April 2010 to March 2011 session. As a whole it was very good. We have started our new sessions since 1 April. We had the National Open School exams in March where six of our children had to give exams. Five of them were from class 3 and one from class- 5. It was their first time giving formal exams and they did very well. All of them have passed and gone to the next level. We also had internal exams for class 1 and nursery. In the end of the exams we had parents teacher’s meeting which was a successful one as most of the parents turned up. It was great to give them the results of the children and talk about how the children did. It was encouraging to see that the parents did turn up and it is a sign of the change that is taking place.
Other interesting thing that we noticed was that when we introduced books for class nursery and class 1, the parents were ready to pay for the cost of the books.
Now we have Nursery, Class-1, Class-3, Class-5 and Class-7.

On the 7 of April, We took our older kids to the Zoo and for most of them it was their first time experiences. We had 14 children who came to the Zoo.

They really enjoyed the trip and some of them were so shocked to see some of the animals. It was a great learning experience for them.

We have four teachers that are Rajan, Jaipal, Jyoti and Betsy. James is no longer working with us. We are in need of two more teachers.
We have around 45 kids in this new session.
We also have adult literacy every Friday evening. We have the average of 5 to 10 women who turn up to study Hindi and one of them requested that they want to learn spoken English as well. So after the Hindi session we also teach them spoken English.
Keep praying that we can make an impact there and we need teachers who would like to help out.

With love
Betsy