Thanks to the enthusiasm of Thishya and Karan, the children had a great Sunday morning doing origami, the art of making forms by folding paper. Over three hours, they made enough to fill up an entire gallery. There were some very quick learners who were thrilled with this exercise and can’t wait to try it again.
This are a series of notes written to me by Rajesh Kurien who took up the project of introducing music to the inpatients and their caregivers. This was to be posted earlier, but i missed it! Sorry Rajesh! In your words, I am confronting your “Lack of time syndrome”!
(Written by John Ransley, a friend of Swami Yogaratna who visited the ward to see one of her yoga classes for the children)
I am an Australian visiting Bangalore to meet with old students and devotees of Swami Muktananda, who taught yoga in Bangalore from 1978 to 1985. Together with Swami Buddhananda she established the Atma Darshan Yogashram which still provides yoga programs to this day.
Today was an unusual day at Samiksha. Five of us were there to tutor, read, talk to or share our time with the children at the ward. Only a small group of them showed up. Most were new faces. We talked about this among ourselves, as we realised that we needed to supply fresh school supplies and material for everyone there. We then decided to go around the ward and introduce ourselves to the new inpatients and their caregivers. As we went around we found many beds empty and cleaned out, it was quieter than usual. Truth is that most of the children in the ward had been discharged!
Today was a big day.
In a conversation with one of our tutors, Mrs. Hansa Rau, one of our children had expressed a desire to meet the actress Ramya. Mrs. Rau learned that Ramya was at a shoot in her neighbourhood, and grabbed the opportunity with commendable presence of mind. Much to our delight, Ramya immediately agreed to visit us.
Kaleidoscope Classic is a pattern based puzzle game, with pieces of different shapes that must be fit into an 8 x 8 grid. There are red, black, blue and yellow squares on each of these pieces, and they are fit together to make a pattern or picture. A booklet is provided with 101 patterns of increasing difficulty.
We have a lot of new children who have joined us this quarter. It was heartening to note yesterday that many of the moms of the older children were
a) trying to get their own kids to be serious about their studies with us around so they could make good use of us being there and
b) advising the new kids’ parents to bring in their schoolbooks so they could continue learning here.
Today we played an interesting game of scrabble. When i asked if i could join 3 others playing the game, they smiled and said yes happily. In a minute i realised that they played the game differently!
It was one of those days that seemed to be extremely busy at the ward…and extremely dull for us. Very few kids were ready for our program when we arrived. Manjari and I went about talking to the staff, parents and children, trying to gather them for some activities and lessons. We did manage to gather about twenty children, many of whom were newly admitted.
14 year old Deepa (name changed) has just started the tenth grade. I asked her if she had her textbooks and schoolwork with her, and she told me that, since she had been diagnosed and moved to the hospital, she was not going to school.
