Wednesday was the first “work” day. In the morning we had a meeting with some important people from the CSA. The director, project managers and our coordinator were present. The director Jonhy Joseph had some proposals and thoughts about our projects and discussed them with us. He started with the two Dutch girls from education and they are going to work at the schools in LR Nagar were a lot of children go who sponsored by CSA. They are going to teach some subjects to the children like biology and history. Then he talked about the German girls who study speech therapy. They are going to work with children who have different disorders like speech disorder, concentration disorder and other children who have difficulty with learning. They will be working in the Transit school located in LR Nagar. At last he talked about my assignment for CSA. I will be working on a website for the joint project called ‘LR Nagar’ between the HAN and Christ University/CSA. This will be a site to promote the project and attract more student volunteers in the future. Next to that I will be working in the Computer Centre located in LR Nagar. This is a center where children and women can learn the basics of the computer. Until now there is no teacher there but CSA says that there will be a teacher soon.
After the meeting we had to wait for some time, as usual in India. Then we had lunch and went to the LR Nagar slums to visit our future work places. Unfortunately the Computer Centre was closed because there were no lessons. This second time in the LR Nagar slum we got a good impression of how we should navigate in the slums and were the different projects are located.

Thursday we were supposed to go to work and we did. In the morning I went to the CSA office to work on the website, since the Wi-Fi did not work there I had to work on a PC in the office which was very slow and I could not really install anything on it. But I made a start on the website idea so I’m happy with that. In the afternoon I was supposed to be at 14:00 at the Computer Centre but when I was working at CSA this morning I got a message that the children had exams and would be there at 15:00 instead of 14:00. I made sure that I was on time at the Computer Centre so I arrived at 14:50. Unfortunately after waiting for 50 minutes (what is almost normal in India) I called my coordinator and he told me to come to the Transit school. So I went there and he told me they would start at 16:30. At 16:25 I went back at the Computer Centre and I met the teacher who started working there. When the children came in they just sat behind their computer and started making figures in paint. After some observing I asked the teacher what the lesson for today was and she answered me that it was paint. I was blown away… Of course I get that you have to learn the basics but the problem is that the teacher is just sitting behind her own computer and the children are drawing things in paint over and over again it is the same kind of drawing. Basically the drawing existed of 4 things. A background color, some shapes (most common were hearts and stars), a color for the shapes and then there name in a font. For the children it is nice to play with the computer this way and explore but I was surprised about the fact that the teacher does nothing but sit there and sometimes answer a question when a child asks.
So yeah my expectations about the Computer Centre were of course way too high.
After one hour the fist batch of children left and some older children came in who luckily started working with some kind of typing program. This was much nicer because they could learn how to type. Their typing skills were lacking but it’s a start. Next to typing and painting nothing else really happened. I think that I can compare their computer knowledge to that of a 5 year old child in the Netherlands. I really hope that I have a chance to teach those children something but that is definitely going to be a challenge. Luckily I was not the only one who had struggles with their first working day. The other girls were shocked about the schools as well and told me that it was a big chaos in the classrooms. I hope that I will be able to come up with a program that will help the children and create some stability during the lessons.