Trampoline Media in India has launched a podcast series worth listening to: “Indian Teens: Unfiltered”. It gives Indian teenagers a voice. Children from cities as well as teenagers from Janwaar have their say. The latter are surely adding a special “colour” to the series. Their answers are different from those of the city children. The […]
My focus in June-July was: Kitchen garden Open School Passport for the ladies Kitchen garden We began building the kitchen garden near the skatepark in April. Pappu, our local backbone, filled the land with the soil, added compost to the soil, laid out the beds for the crops and fenced the area. The objective of […]
Once again new shoes for the Janwaar kids and some elders. This time the package was shipped from Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Warriors Shanghai via my son Tim supported us. As you can easily see, the kids were in heaven! Thank you Warriors Shanghai!
This year the rains have reached Janwaar very late – it wasn’t raining until the third week of July. Soon after the first rains, Pappu and Kamla Gond, Asha’s mother, started to sow vegetables and plant trees. We have lemon, papaya, mango and guave trees along the southern end of the garden. Unfortunately the vegetables […]
Jalsai Bai (Anil’s and Arun’s mother), Siya Bai (Ramkesh’s and Durgha’s mother) and Kamla Gond (Asha’s mother) have applied for their passports! It took almost two years to get the papers ready, everytime we thought we had made it something new popped up. It’s quite a process to get a birth certficate, to have your […]
We’ve enlarged our open school project and include now ALL children of the village œ whoever wants to come is welcome. We’ve set up a range of online courses with two freelance teachers (Hindi and Math) and PassionGuru, an NGO working with kids in rural areas. The kids have selected spoken English, Karate and Creactive […]
After long struggles and with a fair amount of luck our Open Schoolers passed the National Institute for Open Schooling (NIOS) 10th grade exams. Lucky them! It brought relief to the parents and families, and of course to the kids themselves. For a couple of month it was very much unclear how the NIOS would […]
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In my earlier blogpost I pointed out the similarities between the Netflix movie Skater Girl and the Janwaar story. Now I’d like to focus on what is different in REAL life – and what is written below is based on Mannan’s thoughts while and after watching the movie. Mannan was with me in the days […]
Since the trailer and then the movie SKATER GIRL was released on Netflix a few weeks, a discussion is going on on social media and in various media outlets wether the movie was inspired by our story in Janwaar or not. While the movie writers/producers state that the SkaterGirl movie was an amalgamation of many […]