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To Succeed Take Up A Challenge!

by Bala
(Mumbai, Maharashtra, India)

Sujatha was a ROMANTIC type of personality. She could become friendly with people quite easily but when her boy friend began to IGNORE her over the past few weeks due to reasons best known to him only, it became very difficult for her to concentrate on her work. She also lost her usual friendly outlook in life.

One EVENING as she was going home from her office she learnt from some old friends that a few NGO’s were conducting different types of voluntary services for the benefit of the slum children and called for volunteers.

She offered her services for the same since she had read in some magazines that doing such voluntary work enabled people to get their tension and worries RELEASED.

She became a volunteer for teaching English and mathematics to the slum children in her locality in the age group of 5 to 7 years.

She was a commerce graduate working in a private firm as an accountant.

The NGO staff had briefed her on how to go about it since she was a first time volunteer. But they also told her that based on certain guidelines they gave her and the syllabus containing the lessons for the children, she can teach the children in her own way also as long as she was able to motivate them to pick up the subjects quickly and retain them.

As per the terms of service she had to conduct classes for about 2 hours per day for at least 3 days of the week for about 3 or 4 months at a time. Even though it was quite INCONVENIENT to do such work 3 days per work adjusting her office timings, she was ready for it.

During the last 4 classes she had spent with the children, some of them became quite friendly with her, while some others were a little shy, but a majority of them appeared to be undecided whether to become friendly with her, whether to make the efforts to understand what she was saying and try to do the work she gave them or not etc.

The work she gave them was not heavy. It was quite light only, but even that was quite an effort for them. She understood the PROBLEM, since she knew that the children were from the under privileged sections of the society and so she had to be highly patient to produce any result from them.

She found out that they had already attended school for sometime in the past intermittently only due to their domestic conditions and due to such patchy attendance in school, they had only a shallow knowledge of both English and mathematics. This information was useful for her to plan how to proceed further.

For the English lessons she would give a list of words such as TREE, HOUSE, car, train, plane, rain etc on a piece of PAPER and also show a picture of them if possible.

She would ask them to construct a simple sentence using some or all of the words given by her.

She would also give the idea of how to form the sentence in the present tense, past tense and future tense using those words WITHOUT taxing their brains much.

She realized that making sentences in 3 tenses may not be easy for the kids but she was experimenting with them as a way of providing some challenges thrown at them and how they managed them.

In mathematics classes the progress was very slow since the children did not like the subject and were afraid of even trying to understand it, so she would try to make learning the subject easy by showing different types of toys, pictures, sketches and showing how to count them by arranging them in different sets. But she found the task quite tough as compared to teaching English.

Well, such is the status of life she thought.

People from middle class are not aware of the situation of how the people from poorer sections of the society lead their lives and so she was trying her best to face the challenge and come out with as much success as possible.

The End

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Mar 24, 2012
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Thanks
by: Bala

Thanks Ms Menon for your kind comments.

Sorry for the delay in my response since I was busy with some urgent home assignments and hence was not surfing for a few days.

The writing prompts systems you have given us is a good stimulant to generate ideas in my opinion and so aspiring writers can try to utilize them to create a short story. I will try to write some more stories also in the near future utilizing this feature. Hope my stories will turn out to be interesting for the readers.

Mar 19, 2012
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Great attempt!
by: Lakshmi

Bala, you've become an expert in making stories with writing prompts. Very interesting and a good exercise for the brain.
All the best.

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