So, we headed to Junkiri Community School, located at Sankhu. After two hours of dust and bumpy roads we reached there, and to say the least, the school was really isolated and in there was a perfect environment for young minds to develop. We then prepared in brief for our session. We were accompanied by 52 children from grades nursery to the fifth and 8 teachers.
Having worked with children a few times, we all thought it would harder for us to keep them focused on our session here, if we talked a lot. So, we used a more practical approach; we devised all of our activities into games so that it would be more a fun session than some random strangers speaking things. However, to our surprise, the children were highly receptive of everything we did there.
Our primary focus was to make sure everyone knew the six steps of hand-washing and the importance of hand-washing. So, our session comprised of games and short instances of us speaking, and a very fun time of us all washing hands together.
Luckily, after the session ended, we got a chance to meet the founder of Prisoner Assistance Nepal, Indira Rana Magar. She told us all about the program she was running.
Prisoner Assistance Nepal was founded to provide basic needs and human rights to prisoners and their children. And in Junkiri Community School, such children were housed and taught both academically and in basic life skills, eventually to become better citizens. Indira Rana Magar, who is also a social activist believes that, the youth here in Nepal, are associated to criminal activities because people don’t talk about things that are right and wrong as they were growing up, so she believes that it is necessary that the concept of wrong and right should be cultivated into the minds of children.
At the end of the day, we all headed home tired but with a sense of accomplishment. We had successfully held the event and not just the event, but our encounter with Indira Rana Magar made us realize about the hardships of being an activist, where people make judgement at your every single move. But, in the end we all had experienced our hard work and expectations come to fruition. Of course, this is a small step towards a better future but this is where we have started and we all may go our separate ways but we will always work for the better future that we all have envisioned.
Thank you Ayush for coming up with the blog.
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