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Volunteer with DE

Want to get involved in the DE initiative, but unsure where to start?  If you are in a city which houses one of AIF’s offices or chapters, then contact staff or volunteer leads to learn about volunteer opportunities. AIF encourages volunteer involvement in program outreach, fundraising, office management and collaborative project support. We also encourage direct involvement with our DE centers. Contact us to find out how you can get involved!

A Letter from Volunteers…

August 22, 2006

Dear AIF,

We both would like to thank you for giving us the opportunity to work at Sundatta School during our recent trip to India.  We valued our time spent there immensely.  Not only did it provide us with a unique opportunity to experience a school with which AIF is involved with, it enabled us to interact with five very intelligent children and build relationships with them.

Frankly, we were unsure as to what to expect and if anything meaningful could be achieved in the short time period we had. When the AIF representatives told us that we should work on a presentation about “Nuclear Energy” with the students, we were intimidated as we did not have a background on that topic and had never studied it in school.  We also had no idea as to who these kids were except that the school served children from an underprivileged background.  Did they even want this interaction?  Did they know how to search the internet for information? Did they even know what nuclear energy was or for that matter what a power point presentation was?  Our biggest fear was that the kids would not be able to understand our English and we would have difficulty understanding them, which would have made communication difficult.  To prepare ourselves we spent a few hours looking for information so that we could have some background on the subject. When we got to Sundatta school, we were welcomed warmly by the school principal (Mrs. Sujata Kate) and introduced to five beaming children (Anuprita, Priyanka, Siddhesh, Kalpesh and Ganesh).  They all seemed eager to accomplish the task ahead of them. We made the computer room our study area for the next few days.  Once we started working with them, we were very surprised at the amount of English they spoke, how quickly they grasped concepts of nuclear energy and how to use the internet to get information.  We had fun teaching the kids how to download pictures from Google. We learnt that Rahul Dravid was their favorite cricket player and used him as an example of a topic to get pictures.  After a week they had a presentation ready and were all set to present to AIF staff and school teachers.

This was the first time that they had done a project without relying on memorization from websites and textbooks. We worked with them to create bullet points on the slides (not sentences) and to use these as a cue in their presentation.  It was a bit awkward for us as they got conflicting messages from other instructors to memorize their materials.  We know that this is what the students are used to in the Indian system, but it made it a little bit harder for us because our goal was to get them away from this system and explain that by using their own words they can demonstrate that they really understand the information.  We were really proud and impressed that during the final presentation they were able to adapt and were able to adjust to a new way of presenting information. 

Overall, we think all the children should be very proud of themselves because they were able to take a huge task in a short period of time and exceed what was expected of them.  We were very inspired by how they were able to work with people that they had never met before and in an unfamiliar language. 

This interaction we hope is just the start of more things we can do together. We have some programs at our school in the US which we find very beneficial and may be of interest to Sundatta. One such program is ‘peer tutoring’.  In this program, older kids aide the younger kids in whatever subjects they need help in.  This provides an excellent way of saving resources as formal tutoring is expensive, and peer tutoring helps both the tutor and student.  We discussed this and other ideas with the principal and AIF staff. A suggestion made by the principal was that we could potentially serve the role of English tutors on our next visit and focus on conversation skills.  We would definitely like to pursue this and will stay in touch to brainstorm on how to put this project into action. 

Our time spent at Sundatta High School really stimulated us to think about our own lives and the opportunities we are given.  We must say that after working with the kids we really do not take our opportunities for granted anymore because they seemed to be so appreciative of the fact that they attended an English medium school which had facilities that would have been unimaginable to them.  Once again we thank you very much and we look forward to visiting Sundatta High School again next year. 

Sincerely,

Anjali and Tara Jotwani