Children's Parliament

Heard of it?

I came to know that it is very successful in a lot of places in Tamil Nadu but I never had heard of such a concept before and was excited to interact with the Speaker, the Prime Minister, and the whole bunch of cabinet ministers of the village.

The Age of all of the MP's was in the range of 8 to 14 years. You have to see it to believe it. :)

The roles..

The Speaker.. Getting together all the MP's for meeting in the open area of one of the houses. Generally its done by going in front of each of the houses and yelling the name.

The Education Minister.. Making sure all the children go to school regularly and recording and finding out reasons for any absentees. Weaker children are provided assistance by school seniors . Occasional counselling is provided to parents so that they don't stop their children from going to school.

This counselling is much more effective since it is done by a group of children. So sweet :)

Be it the Health minister, Environment Minister,Cultural Minister, Sports minister or the Prime minister each of them have a role defined and they all take enormous pride in what they do.

The meeting in the Parliament starts with a Welcome Speech. Games are played songs are sung etc after which they have a review of what happened in the previous month. The proceedings are recorded for further reference.

A vote of thanks is proposed and the date for next meeting is decided.

It was so nice to watch all this happening so nicely and the amount of interest it generated in the parents of these children that I imagined how it would be if it were replicated to all schools across India.

It gives the children the confidence of speaking in public, feeling of brotherhood and unity.

It instills a sense of responsibility towards the society right from the childhood.

They say the Youth of India are too busy in their own selfish goals and are passive towards the issues faced by the country.

I am not sure whether these children as the next citizens will make a drastic changes but they surely will be a very potent force that will be much more sensitive to social issues and hence will be much more active.

This NGO is giving me a lot of exposure to things never heard of

Yet another day of feel good and lots of learning.

Much more to come

Heard of RTI?

Wait and watch for the next post..

My First experience with an NGO

First of all why did i bump into an NGO?

Yes i have an inclination to work at grassroots level. Was not getting anything great to do and had a lot of spare time. And I curse every moment when i have nothing to do.

Was looking around and asking almost everybody of some ideas and opportunities. And when i got it I pounced on it.

We read about Self Help Groups in Economics and how they manage their funds, how they give out loans to individual members in emergency or for starting some business etc.

I actually saw a group of 15, half of them illiterate, manage a fund and was amazed by the professional way with which they handled it.

President, secretary, treasurer, minutes of the meetings, attendance registers, cash registers, credit registers etc were not words i associated with illiterate rural women.

And the most interesting part was they all spoke in Tamil which i don't understand much and the English of the translator (the NGO representative) who was accompanying me was as good as my Tamil.

So the whole communication was through Body language Signs Facial Expressions aided by some English words which he knew and Tamil words which i know.:)

I guess ill learn Tamil quickly in the process.

My perception is changing everyday as i learn new things.Its been only two days as of now and i look forward to seeing what a Children's Parliament is and how it functions.Pretty interesting concept and new to me.

Details about that? ill write about that in my next post.

As of now its pretty good first two days with an NGO.