Surveying

Day 2- June 10th 2009

Today Juhi and Ria joined in and we actually started surveying the community ourselves…my reflections are pretty much the same… people had the same reactions… however today we visited a predominantly muslim area….. I found that most of the families sent their children to urdu schools (schools of the Islamic religion) and considered this formal school…. Girls who had studied till the 7th std…were also not sent to school anymore… it seems to be because of male teachers….This is because of one of the questions asked by the mother of a 12 year old daughter… when asked why she had dropped out of school… the mother as well as daughter seemed content with the amount she had studied… which was merely 9 years…. Contrastingly… in another house… the daughter was in the 9th std… and even though she had older brothers….. her mother mentioned that the daughter was the brightest on the house…..

Another lady seemed to be mocking us… she started talking to another little kid…and kept telling him…. That were were here to come and take him away to study…. The poor kid was scared and went away from us… this I feel wasn’t very nice of the lady as it discourages the purpose of the school and makes us seem like bad people whereas we were only here to help….