Pagdandi

‘Head, shoulders, knees and tooooes, knees and toooes, and eyes and ears and mouth and nooose!’

Me, my best Indian-English accent and twenty children enthusiastically singing along to ‘Head, shoulders, knees and toes.’ Another day at Pagdandi.

Pagdandi is a project initiated by Swechha in 2009. It is run by volunteers and provides informal education and mentoring support to the children of Jagdamba Camp, a slum community in New Delhi. Twice weekly sessions are held on weekends and an interactive library has been set up within the community that the children can access. The aim is to provide the children with a safe and stimulating environment that allows them to become more focused, self-confident and ambitious. I might be biased because I volunteer with them but I can honestly say it is one the best, most effective and most needed initiatives I’ve come across since being in India.

Pagdandi helps every child to explore their individual potential and also teaches them life skills such as team work and leadership. Many of the older children take on the role of mentoring or tutoring the younger children and all of the children act as mentors for one another, constructing role plays, dances, songs and games around the session’s theme for that day. Activities are built around a particular theme each week that focuses on teaching the children about the wider environment outside of their community and what their roles and responsibilities are within that community. The children are also given the opportunity to learn new activities such as karate, bharatnatayam dance, painting, play writing and acting, all of which are led by volunteers, and there is an annual Pagdandi Festival where they get the opportunity to put on a show for the community and showcase these activities. Because of my limited Hindi I am often treated more like the new kid in the playground rather than one of the adults so that at times I am also not quite sure who is mentoring who. More than once I have been given an impromptu Hindi lesson by an exasperated child who is appalled at my bad pronunciation. At the start of one particular Sunday session I very confidently asked them all in Hindi what they had been doing that week. Their faces lit up and I was met with a stream of enthusiastic responses,

                ‘Banana!’

                ‘Gulab jamun!’

                ‘Roti!’

                ‘Dahl!’

 I’d mistakenly asked them what they had been eating that week.

Part of the reason for my writing this particular blog post now is that the Pagdandi project needs funding in order to be able to continue into the next year. Swecha is therefore raising funds through participating in Global Giving’s Open Challenge:  http://www.globalgiving.org/projects/empower-100-unprivileged-indian-children/

Through this challenge Swechha hopes to raise enough funds to ensure the continuation and growth of Pagdandi in the coming year. If you are reading this post then I really would urge you to go the link above and make a donation. Having seen first-hand what this project means to a large number of children I know how important it is that it continues. All the money raised goes directly towards Pagdandi project for the materials needed to run the Pagdandi sessions and the community library. 

If you would like to find out more about Pagdandi please feel free to write a comment on this post or you can go to the Swecha or Global Giving page directly.