April 4th, 2009 Jo
Well, it doesn’t actually. Here’s Anne’s explanation:
The thing about the word ‘ceilidh’ is that it’s in the process of evolution. It’s Gaelic, and means a getting together, usually for an evening, to dance and sing and tell stories, say poetry, play instruments, anything anyone wants to do really. But over recent years it’s being shifted to mean a certain type of Scottish country dancing, less formal than the ‘proper’ dancing my mother taught, and certainly not Highland dancing. So people talk here about ceilidh dancing, but they also talk about holding a ceilidh, and both meanings are understood. Ask Bridget – she’s the new version, I’m the old one.
Anne and Bridget volunteered with us as speech therapists - Anne is in her sixties, Bridget is in her early 30’s. Both are from Edinburgh and both, though different generations, are kindred spirits. Lisa - also from Edinburgh! - has just arrived to carry on the tradition. . .
But back to the Ceilidh. 
Ever since she left a year ago, Anne has been plotting her return - and along with herself, she is determined to bring some much-needed equipment. To raise the money, she organized a Ceilidh in her city - a festive evening of music, dance, food and great company. Again, in Anne’s words:
The Ceilidh was on Saturday - it was a delightful occasion, with adults and children all joining in with the dancing, a band of musicians from a Scots Music Group evening class (and therefore free), who at one stage outnumbered the dancers, bagpipe players, harp players, samosas, pakoras, a raffle of various items including silk sent by Aarti. It was a very Scottish occasion, and lots of fun.
We projected on to a wall of the hall a loop of photos that I took while I was with you (168 of them!) so people could see what it’s all about. My brother Alastair has a company who do marketing and design, and they designed the poster for us for free – though actually I sent them a big bag of chocolate Easter eggs as a payment.
And the kicker:
Then on Monday the group who helped with the organisation met over a glass of fizzy wine and some chocolate cake, and counted the cash. £1500 is pretty good – we plan to raise another £500 with the intention of ordering dedicated software and, with your help, a computer specifically for the children to use.
We would be thrilled to get Anne back just with her little suitcase of clothes and books and her amazing, imaginative, creative mind full of new approaches, wisdom and experience. The idea that she is coming with £1500 of computer software as well - well! Here’s to Anne, the Ceilidh, and all her wonderful friends who made it happen.
Posted in Bright Ideas, Gratitude, Volunteers | 1 Comment »
March 16th, 2009 Jo
Lauren is our newest volunteer. She’s an art teacher from Philadelphia where she works in a school for deaf kids, some of whom have other learning difficulties as well. She’s fluent in sign language, which automatically makes her a fascinating character to us, AND she’s an artist in her own right. (You can check out her website in which she showcases her beautiful pottery here). Her maiden name is Ingalls and yes, you guessed it, she is a descendant of the wonderful children’s writer (Little House on the Prairie) Laura Ingalls Wilder.
This picture of Lauren kind of sums her up for me: charming, graceful, wonderful sense of humor and full of surprises. (The pup, whose name is Lassi, is a little street dog which she and her husband Will have adopted for their duration here and have found a home for when they leave.)
Lauren has been moving throughout the Foundation, observing at first and now fully immersed in the classroom work, bringing her special gift for art and the creative life to what we are already doing with the kids. She told me that her main thing is to support what is happening by enhancing it, helping the teachers to develop and deepen their lessons by adding fun projects that the kids love doing.
At Latika Vihar, for example, I found her doing an amazing newspaper sculpture with the children (it brought back a memory I had totally forgotten of building a beanstalk from newspaper with my Mom - oh, gosh, 43 years ago!):
Here’s what she had to say about the project: It got the kids thinking about balance, structure, shape, line and weight. They figured out that the triangle is the best base shape to make for this project and built from there. This kind of work also forced the kids to work on their fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination, and tapped into their creativity and imagination. The final sculpture was bigger than some of our 7 year olds.
While this way of working fits right in with our educational philosophy, we still have so much to learn from someone like Lauren about how to actually make it happen. It’s easy to fall into set patterns of teaching and interacting with the children, to use the same tired props over and over again, to play the same old games, sing the same old songs and recycle the same old themes year in and year out.
Kids thrive on repetition, yes, and many actually require it to absorb new information, but spicing it up with variety and new approaches is also essential. If only because the kids move on to the next class but the teachers are still there year after year - they get bored too!
Posted in Bright Ideas, Volunteers | 3 Comments »
October 19th, 2008 Jo
If you think Bridget looks golden, a little sparkly and shining, you’re right. It’s new love (his name is Sarfraz) and it makes her bewitching and delightful to all of us older, more experienced types whose loves are more measured but no less deep. It also makes her just a little hard to get on the phone as he is invariably already talking to her. That phone grows out of her ear and it is part of the syndrome that she loves being teased about it because it gives her yet another reason to talk about him. Ah! Youth!
She does have a professional persona as well, however. Bridget is a talented and dynamic speech therapist, volunteering with us here in the Foundation for three months - and we are squeezing her for every possible ounce of knowledge she can share while we’ve got her in our midst. Yesterday I sat in on the tail end of a workshop she held for the teaching staff and wished, as I often do, that I could start my career over again and become a speech and language development therapist instead of being a fundraiser, administrator and blogger.
What an amazing field! Human communication is such a vast and complicated subject and the more one learns the more one realizes how connected it is to every other aspect of our development. For example, so many behaviour problems originate simply from an inability to communicate. When a speech therapist gives a child a way to “speak” (it can be through gesture, symbols, signs or pictures), many of the troubling and difficult behaviours disappear. And it works, I gather, the other way around as well: when we learn to communicate in different ways we become more intuitive in our listening and understanding, as well as in our ability to make ourselves clear: that helps children know what is expected of them and behave accordingly.
Speech therapists, as a tribe, just seem to believe in the innate goodness of kids, in their desire to learn and to do the right thing. And with their unique skills and understanding, they give kids the skills and understanding THEY need to do it.
Posted in Bright Ideas, Volunteers | 2 Comments »
October 12th, 2008 Jo
Shelley Hubele has been working with us as a consultant writer for the past three months. She is a friend of Cathleen’s from Boston College where she majored in Theology and Creative Writing. After graduating this past summer, she decided to take a year off before doing a Master’s degree, and that gave her the time to spend five months here with us.
Shelley is incredible. As in, I cannot keep up with her. I give her a writing project on Monday morning, thinking - “That’ll keep her busy for a week,” - and by that afternoon, she’s back, saying “OK, now what should I do?” And when I go over what she’s done, it’s pretty much spot on.
She thinks about her writing as few people do - for her, it’s a craft and a passion: how does this voice work? Why this word and not that one? If I tell it from this perspective, will it work better than that one? It’s fascinating to watch.
She is also amazing with children. Owen and Enzo are both crazy about her. She plays with them constantly, the most inventive and interesting games - Electric Slide, Name the States, the Rhyme Game, and a host of others. Both Lucy and I have blessed her name more than once!
Posted in Volunteers | 1 Comment »
August 2nd, 2008 Jo
Memory is a fluid, mysterious thing and often what we think we remember may be incomplete, in error or totally backwards. Sometimes a piece of important information can be left out of the story and when - by luck or design or happy discovery - it surfaces, it can be an occasion of wonder and amazement.
While I was with Dad last month, Lucy found a box of letters she and I had written to Mom and Dad over the last 35 years. I haven’t even begun to get through them all, but one I picked up by chance astonished me. It was written in 1994, the year we started Latika Vihar, but before Karuna Vihar opened.
In it, I talked about Moy Moy, then five years old. I said:
I think I have found a good school for Moy Moy. Ravi is going to check it out with me tomorrow and if he likes it too, we should start her from Monday. Though it’s not ideal, it’s quite good. The student-teacher ratio is excellent (6 to 1) - the problem is that the space they have is too limited for the number of children they have.
Another possible problem is the number of different handicaps they deal with. There are deaf kids, children with Downs, CP and autism and many seem more handicapped than Moy. I am not sure the experience will be the best in terms of what she picks up from the other children. I would rather there were a better mix of normal and handicapped kids so she could imitate a higher level of behaviour. It is also difficult for me to send her to such an obviously “special school” I keep wanting to say “But she’s not really like those others!” It’s so hard to know what’s true and what is my own inability to admit the truth.
Some of this I remembered, and it has always been part of my story about how we started Karuna Vihar. In my version, though, I didn’t like the school at all and certainly never considered sending Moy Moy there. In my version, I recognized right away that it wasn’t the place for her and that’s what set me on the road to starting KV.
But as I read the letter I sent my parents fourteen years ago, I realized that wasn’t quite the way things unfolded.
I continued:
We had some unexpected guests last week from Hawaii - the woman works with Jan Hanley and Jan told her she had to meet us if they came to India, so they did. They were lovely people - both are physical therapists who have gone into Public Health and want to volunteer in India for the next year or so.
I had totally forgotten about them. They had stayed in our house. I couldn’t remember a thing about them. Anand, though, recalled that the woman had helped him with his algebra homework, teaching him an amazing method that got him all the right answers but which baffled his teachers. Cathleen remembered they taught her how to hula-hoop.
Slowly, it all began to come back to me. Ravi did go with me to visit the school but we still weren’t entirely sure. When these two showed up, I now recall, I asked them if they would mind accompanying me as I made one last attempt to decide whether or not to send Moy Moy there.
They willingly agreed and I watched as they asked questions and observed the children, the teachers and the activities of the school. I didn’t realize it then, but what I was seeing was professional rehabilitation evaluation for the first time in my life.
As soon as we were on our way home, and without having conferred with each other, they both said “Jo, it’s not the right place for Moy Moy.”
And then, a few minutes later: “Jo, why don’t you open a school yourself?”
Duke and Carin Duchscherer. No photograph. No address. I’m looking for you. I want you to come back here and see what you started.
Posted in Bright Ideas, Inspiration, School Days, Volunteers | 1 Comment »
May 23rd, 2008 Jo
I caught this moment at the farewell party - Anne saying goodbye to Chhoti Manju in such a lovely, ashirwad sort of a way: it seems to me to sum up what her time here with us was like. Anne, age 65, brought not only her professional expertise as a speech therapist - she also came with her years of wisdom, maturity and experience, and she created an atmosphere of calm assurance wherever she went. Everyone loved her. She was full of energy and good humor, endlessly adaptable and accepting and a wellspring of the most amazing ideas about communication, stories and language development. During her stay, we got a glimpse of what a really good speech therapy department might look like and we’ve set our sights on creating just that in the near future. Anne has promised to return next year and we look forward to continuing this wonderful friendship. Thank you for everything, Anne!
Posted in Volunteers | 1 Comment »
May 13th, 2008 Jo
This is Katie, one of the Dream Team who came to Dehradun last year to volunteer (the other two were Noorie and Aileen, both designers and the ones responsible for our amazing annual report and various other marvelous projects). Technically, Katie worked at PSI, but she also spent time in our projects and, since she lived in our house, I think of her as one of our own.
Well, this is just to report her latest great news: this morning I heard that Katie was admitted to medical school! She will be attending Wayne State and since I wrote one of her letters of recommendation, I think a good share of the credit should go to me. Ha Ha.
Seriously, it was a pleasure to write the letter because I just feel so certain that Katie will be a wonderful doctor, one I would want to have for myself or my children or anyone I cared about. We are all so proud of you, Katie! Jeete raho!
Posted in Little Notes, Volunteers | No Comments »