How to Keep the Attention of Fifteen Kids Without Speaking Their Language

Our day two class

We have started our English lessons for the small ones who live in neighboring slums. We started yesterday, Monday July 24th. It was a quiet beginning in every sense of the word. We had only three students. An eight year old and two four year olds. We recited the alphabet so many times I lost count. We sang songs with hand motions. We counted. We went over names of body parts. Not one of the children said one word the whole hour and a half no matter how much they were encouraged. Even bribing with caramel chocolates did not work. One of the four year olds fell asleep and almost tipped out of his chair.

The shorter of the two is one of the three students from yesterday.

Such beauties!

Then there was today. Again the first students did not show up until after 9:30 even though we have been telling everyone it starts at 9:00 (India time). Everything else was very different though! We had fifteen students in an age range of two to ten years old. One of the older boys has already learned some English and helped to get a good number of students to repeat after us. Again we sang lots of songs, using "Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes" to move into more body parts. (By the end, two of the older boys could correctly name what I was pointing to most of the time.) We went through the alphabet over and over. One of the older boys was restless and picking fights with the others so I dragged him up and made him be my pointer as we went through the letters again. This amused them greatly and all the older boys insisted on having their turn as the pointer.

Faye (on left) continuing to go through the alphabet (she is signing the letter P in ASL) while I distract them by taking pictures. The woman on the right is a local who will be taking over the teaching when we leave.

The age range makes it a challenge. The older ones get bored with too much repetition, and are ready for more challenges. The young ones do not speak, and some cling to parents afraid of the strangers. We are working bravely to find the way to keep them engaged and behaving, while also getting them to learn English. There is the added pressure of having many parents watching and evaluating us.

Hiding behind Mama's beautiful skit.

Pastor cares so much for these kids.

There was a school here last year that I thought we would be assisting at. However, most of the children who were going to those lessons lived in an area that was demolished over summer holidays. The people in slums are more or less squatting on government land without permission. Some slums have houses made of scraps of wood and tarp roofs. Other more permanent ones have concrete structures with second floors, electricity, and running water. Whether a slum has been "notified" or recognized by the government can make a big difference, because notified slums are far less likely to be bulldozed for new building developments, and by law the government has to supply running water and sewage to notified slums. The slum that children were coming from was leveled to make room for a new high rise apartment building. Once it is finished, all the former slum families will be given an apartment for free. They just have to wait five years for it to be built.

 

The kid on the right is the most outgoing and the one who already has English skills. When I snapped this it was probably right after he had said "Teacher! Teacher! Another photo!" for the seventh time.

The new school will be different in more than just which students are coming. The school will be in English instead of the local language, Marathi. Most adults I have met here speak at least three languages, their local language or mother tongue, the national language, Hindi, and English, the language used in all colleges and most books. If these kids can learn English well, they have a much better chance of getting into college and building a future better than what their parents had.

 

One of the silent ones.

For tomorrow, we are planning to do more of the same. Lots of "action songs" (what they call songs with hand motions) to keep their attention, with some of them, such as the alphabet song and "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" also being useful for English and some of them mostly just to keep them awake and engaged. We will also introduce more body parts. Neck, face, and fingers will likely make their debut. We will go through numbers and letters. And finally, we will introduce vocabulary based on objects in the room, door, chair, whiteboard, table, book, etc. I hope by the time I leave they can answer "What color is the floor?", "How many fingers am I holding up?", "What is my name?", and other similar questions.

Pastor Diwakar thanking everyone and inviting them to come tomorrow.

Trying to get them organized, facing the right way, and smiling was no short task.

Until next time.

Teacher Yana

Please lift up:

• Good teaching sessions for the kids.
• More kids to join.
• That the quiet kids would start to talk more. An English lesson will be much more useful if you are speaking.
• General safety and health (so far so good!)
• That we would be a help and encouragement and not a burden to our host.

Worship in a High Rise

Hello Loves. Sorry I have not been as communicative as I normally am when I am away. South Africa was utterly amazing, and terribly exhausting. It has also thus far been largely indescribable. I have tried to put in words what happened there, but the right words will not come. In the weeks and months to come, after I have had more time to process and think, I hope to share more stories with you about my time in prison ministry, and the country of South Africa in general. For now, let me tell you about India.

We just got in two nights ago, but I am already falling for the people and the place. Last night we went to a prayer meeting in an apartment tower. We started out at half past seven, driving through congested streets that had dark shadows and endless headlights at the same time. I have never before in all my travels heard so many car, rickshaw, bus, truck, and motor scooters honking at the same time. India is sensory overload on steroids. Their stop and go traffic is going from zero to thirty miles an hour in six seconds and them back to a dead stop less than a minute later repeated over and over.

On the far right you can see a little of the colorful outfits of the women here.

After thirty or so minutes, we wound and jerked and u-turned our way to a potholed brick road and after leaving the car, entered the ground floor of a high rise. In India, the ground floor is not synonymous with the first, the first must be attained by climbing stairs or riding in an elevator. The floor you enter without stairs is the ground floor and is designated on elevator buttons as 0. From floor 0 we rode the elevator up to the twelfth floor where we had a cup of delicious tea with the church treasurer, his wife, and their two daughters. After chatting for a bit and finishing our tea, we went back down to the seventh floor for the most beautiful prayer meeting I have ever been a part of.

The meeting started with people entering in ones and two, with each new attender going around shaking everyone’s hand while giving the greeting “Praise the Lord!” Then the worship started. It began with the most beautiful and touching singing I have ever heard. The whole setting was so intimate and lovely. We were thirteen people in a room so small that even though more than half sat cross legged on the floor two still spilled out into the hallway. Each one of the older women wore a vibrantly colored dress, mostly saris with scarves wound round their heads. My favorite was a magenta sari with a mustard yellow scarf wrapped round a new believer, the first in her family.

The tan in India only serves to highlight how bright the rest of the place is.

Once the singing was finished, I gave the short message/encouragement/teaching on prayer that I had been asked to give. I worked off Luke 11:1-13 and the story of Job. In the Charles Spurgeon book on prayer that I am reading right now, Spurgeon praised the beauty and argued the importance of praying for others. He noted that when Jesus taught His disciples to pray, it was a communal prayer that starts with “Our Father” and continues with “give us our daily bread, forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us...” Prayer was never meant to be self centered. From later in the chapter where it talks about asking, I encouraged them to invite God into every part of their lives as He will not go where He is not welcome. Finally, I told them to trust God in suffering. As a good father, He does not let us needlessly or pointlessly suffer. I told them of Job and how he said, “though He slay me, yet would I trust Him.” Just as a good teacher must correct their students, and a good parent must discipline their child, our loving heavenly father lets us go through painful and/or challenging times without rescuing us. It is always for our benefit to teach us a lesson, convict us of sin, grow us stronger, or to bring Him praise.

All the pictures I have so far. More will come.

After my short message, we went into the time of prayer which was finished with the pastor anointing with oil the woman of the house, a young widow, followed by anointing her son, her main door and living room, her bedroom, her bathroom, and finally her kitchen. This has motivated me to study anointing from the Bible sometime soon. There are over 180 versus that contain the word anoint, so it might take a little while to study them all thoroughly, but I am looking forward to it!

We finished the night with a meal of fresh dosas and chapatti. The widow sells them to provide for her and her son, and she should do fine with how good they tasted.

That night alone felt worth the travel here.

I hope you all are well!

Love,

Yana

Prayer Requests:

• For inspiration from God, and the help of the Holy Spirit for all the messages we are being asked to give.
• For health and safety.
• For protection from spiritual attack.
• For good rest and recovery from jet lag.
• For no offense to be unintentionally given because we are unaware of the culture.

Auntie Charmaine

Last Saturday, I got to meet a woman I consider my newest hero. She is known to everyone around as Auntie Charmaine, and everyone is hardly an exaggeration. Many, many groups greeted her, and us, as she gave us a tour of her neighborhood. This woman is like the village grandmother. Her outfit was not stylish, but practical and simple. The soup pot in her kitchen that she declared as too small to meet her current needs would feed closer to two hundred than the ten that her family would naturally be. However, this woman was not born a saint. She was not a model of young adult life. Her parenting of her own children in the early years is not an example to follow. Auntie Charmaine is an ex-convict. The first time she left the country was to pick up drugs she would deal in her neighborhood. She is an abandonment survivor, who gave up her own baby girl to be raised by others before she went to bring her home again.

After eating a late lunch (which was multiple courses and delicious in the way grandmothers' meals usually are), Auntie Charmaine took us around her neighborhood to pray for sick people and get to know the community a little bit. One of the reasons we were sent to visit with Auntie Charmaine was because her township, and others like it, are where most of the offenders we will be working with grew up. As we started the walk, we came across this group of young men blasting music who were more than happy to pose for the camera and dance for the visitors.

You have to love a street corner party

 Setting up a scarecrow in the new community garden.

Seeing all the people outside on their steps and in lawn chair chatting, and the children playing freely on the streets gave it a welcoming and safe aura. But that was the surface, I lost count of how many times Auntie Charmaine pointed at the ground in front of us and said, “Last week a young man was shot dead here” or “Three days ago two men were shot here.” or “I had to call the police because someone died here after being shot recently.” She also rolled up her sleeve to show us the scar of the bullet wound from when a bullet hit her in her sleep, in the “safety” of her own bed after flying through her wall. She pointed to one wall explaining that most imperfections were old bullet marks. Yet this woman goes out boldly to serve her community. She makes giant pots of porridge for the children to have for breakfast. She cheerfully stated, “I used to have four children, but now I have five hundred.” Her soup pot, which is probably ten times the size of the biggest pot in my house, is troubling her because sometimes she runs out of soup or porridge before she runs out of children who need feeding. The new bigger pot she wants is R4,000 which is about $306. Not much to most of us, but she does not have nearly the money she needs for it. She is trusting God that if He is giving her these children to take care of, He will also send the money she needs.

DeeDee Riding the Mary-go-Round Built on Pavement Covered in Glass

This is the private hospital that is too expensive for most families who go instead

 to a free government hospital.

Auntie Charmaine in her current service shows beautifully what a powerful Godly woman looks like. Her being in full time service wearing aprons with giant pockets and serving endless ladles of porridge does not mean she is not a force to be reckoned with. She told off some kids for posing for me with gang symbols. She also told us of recently going to confront a mother who had sold the uniform Auntie Charmaine had just provided for her son. She told the mother that her son better have his uniform back by that afternoon, and he did. Her house did not just have food or school supplies, it also had random bulk items that she was planning to break into small units and resell. Red nail polish, clothes pins, gallons of soap and juice, tubes of lipstick. This woman does so much!

"Say no to Crime and Drugs"

"Gee Teng Ons Straat" Take Back Our Street

Now I am going to tell you a tiny bit about my experience entering prison for the first time. We went to church in the young men’s section of a prison. As we first walked into the compound, I instantly noticed the powerful, rhythmic, pounding noise. It took me a minute or two to realize that it was the opening worship at the church service we were about to join. I do not think I have ever heard such manly worship before. Part of me was a little nervous before coming of how I would feel towards the guys. I am working with people who have done the worst things people can do. On first meeting them, all I felt was love. After a week more of helping facilitate a program with another group of young men, four at my table, and twenty four in the program, love is still the biggest emotion I feel towards them. As a group, they have been friendly, cheerful, and respectful. Even though the guys at my table are over twenty, there is something about the whole group that exudes the aura of a vulnerable little boy. They grow in me maternal feelings of protection and instruction. I see so much wasted potential, and it breaks my heart. As they pour out their stories, I can see how they came to be where they are. So much childhood trauma in one little group. It confirms in me the desire to work with kids. Just one person in their childhood who stopped them from joining a gang, or called the police on their abusing father could have changed their lives enough to have kept them from prison. The townships here are crying out for more adults who care in every sense of the word. I feel like maybe I have found my first home after college.

Home Sweet Home?

Please be Praying:

• For the young men in the program who's families could not come to family day. Pray that these families will have the chance to speak openly in the future.
• For the rest of the trip. Now that my main project is almost done there is some flexibility for me to chose activities. Pray that I will pick the right one.
• For rest. We are all in desperate need.
• For spiritual protection.
• Praise that eight guys committed to leave the prison gangs and two became Christians!

You can still support me financially for my South Africa trip. The church will keep donations open until my work here is finished. If you want to give, go to this website, select "STM South Africa", and put Tatiana Martin in the optional memo (You would get a tax receipt for this)