Thursday, March 31, 2011

Amaravati and Nagpur, Maharashtra - 2nd Feb 2011


We didn’t  get to spend much time in Amaravati. It was just a few hours, where we had a session with about 30 school children from Gyan Mata School Amaravati, and some college youth.
Most of them are more comfortable with Marathi, so this session has a different feel altogether as Allwyn, a Maharashtran local in our team, translated everything for us all. But I saw that language never stopped us is any session or interaction as there was always a local with us, and also because any idea or concept stays the same, regardless of which language it is expressed in. The young people here knew a lot more than we thought they did about different issues, but I know they also learned a lot today.
And they were very dynamic in expressing their views and one main highlight of the day was that they pledged to make their school plastic free by the end of the interaction! That spread a very happy feeling to everyone around..






And some of the college people asked us if we could arrange a camp like this session, which is longer and has more information and can help spread awareness among the people here, because they felt it was a really good thing for people to learn from and they needed more such programs. Deepika asked if they were locals. They said yes. Then she said that they could do it too. It doesn’t have to be just us doing anything, they could fix up something too. And all they had to do was ask for a little help from the authorities around and anything would be possible.

They promised to take this initiative us and arrange this camp for awareness.

This was probably one of the shortest interactions we had, but one of the most fruitful. We hit the road for Nagpur with happy hearts and minds.

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