Warm greetings from India

Dear Sponsors,

This update comes directly from Tiruvannamalai, there were SINAM and the children of the sponsorship programme are. I have been her for one and half month now, doing fieldwork on environmental education in schools. All the sponsorchildren are doing well, and so is SINAM.

To write you something from my own experience here with regards to the programme, it is the children’s parliament that I have been most impressed with so far. Through this forum, all children that live in one village meet regularly. They have assigned each of themselves a ‘government role’, meaning that each has a responsibility for a particular issue. They meet regularly, at a time and place they themselves decide on, and they take initiatives that are beneficial for the entire village, such as organizing a day where all children in the parliament clean the streets of the village.

This picture shows the new office in construction, where SINAM plans the children will live in the future.

Lastly, SINAM is involved in an initiative to organize a local action of the international 10:10:10 campaign. This campaign consists of local actions all over the world on the 10^th of October 2010 in relation to combating climate change. Here, 5 NGOs – most of which play an important role in my research and I know them well – are facilitating a walk around Tiruvannamalai’s sacred hill (14 kilometers) by children from many schools in Tiruvannamalai. Many students have shown interest and preparations are happening now, which includes for example arranging enough bullock carts to join the walk so children can have a rest on the cart when they get tired during the walk.

I am informing you of this, because funding has been a major problem so far. If you would like to support this initiative, any contribution would be very welcome.

Sunny greetings (although it’s thundering a bit and I expect some monsoon rains to start soon…)

Evelien