Last days at Rising Star Outreach

 

We were happy to see that the Star Program turned out to be a success! It helped teach the children ownership as well as improve their behavior at school and at the hostel.  Below is the line outside the Star Store on a regular opening day. The children are lined up based on their earned stars. The ones with the most stars earned for the week can enter the store first.

This is shortly before opening the store and the little ones are really excited.

These children have worked hard for their purchases at the Star Store and we think it is easy to see the excitement and satisfaction in their eyes as they earned their very own item in the store…
Below is Nagaraj with his new small soccer ball.

And here is Jennifer with her new bracelet. She was a real success. In the beginning of the program she got 0 stars for the entire week. By week five she was up to the maximum of 7 stars. For those of you who do not remember, the children are given one star per day for completing certain tasks and behave well. If they do not, they don’t earn a star. So Jennifer went from not behaving to behaving very well in a matter of weeks.

Amirtham with some beauty products.

Vimal Kanth is one of the kindest and most polite people at RSO. For example when we asked him “how are you?” he would answer “Fine. Thank you for asking”. How adorable is that!

 

Papitha got a gift for one of her relatives.

Some of the top performers in the Star Program decided to buy the most expensive item in the store – a field trip to a nearby town for Parothas (a popular local food) and a shopping allowance of 75 Rupees.  Below is the group of 10 that saved up 40 stars for this trip….

From left to right: Rajesh, Rahamath, Krishnamoorthy, Logeshwari, Karpagavalli, Priya, Malavika, Tal, Sujatha, Vijayalaskhmi, Anita, Pasitha.

We had an absolute blast!  The boys went with Tal and looked at things like toys and video games, while the girls shopped with Anita and Kristen for necklaces, greetings cards, and other girl things…

Below are Logeshwari, Priya and Karpagavalli with their newly acquired birthday cards for their uncles.

Krishnamoorthy and Rajesh shopping for the coolest guy’s stuff.

And below is Kristen with Sujatha, Malavika, Viajayalakshmi, and Rahamath. (counterclockwise)

 

Here are the girls and Anita looking for bangles and necklaces. We ended up getting matching necklaces we all wore at the Annual Day.

After a very gratifying shopping experience with these wonderful children, we all went to a popular restaurant and had Parothas… Below again are Sujatha, Vijayalakshmi, Malavika and Rahamath.

Anita, Karpagavalli, Priya, and Logeshwari.

We all had fun showing our purchases…

On the last week of the Star Store, Anita and I asked the top three performers in the Star Program to help manage the store.  They were so happy to help and did a great job and will actually continue running the store now that we are returning home.

Cole Hendershot (the son of the Directors) took over as he banker and loves his new responsibility. We were thrilled that he would be willing to help us carry this program on when the children get back from their summer break.  Poor Cole did not realize that being the banker in the Star Store is utterly exhausting as 150 children want your immediate attention and keep asking how much they have to spend etc. But he and Krishnamoorthy (who will assist him in the future) will do a great job, once they are used to it all.

Becky Douglas, the President of RSO, came to visit for a week.  She loved the Star Program and wanted to make sure it stays as a program at RSO for years to come.  That news made us really happy because we didn’t want to see something that we had put so much work into just fall apart when we leave.  Sarah Hendershot (Director at RSO) has taken on the management of the Star Program and the Star Store which we are really excited about.

On the 17th of April all of the parents were bussed into RSO to pick up their children. The children had prepared a program for “Annual Day” which included dances, skits, a magic show, and a keynote address.  Anita and I had the chance to teach the 2nd graders the “Wide Mouth Frog” skit, which they performed rather well.  For those of you familiar with this skit, you know how fun it is and the kids did such a great job being different animals etc.  (For those of you who do not know the skit, have Tal tell it to you when you see him next. It is worth the wait!!)

Here are a few pictures from Annual Day…

Below is Eswari with her father. Eswari, like most of the children, had been talking for days about going home. This was a happy moment for everyone.

The Kindergarten children performing a dance. It does not get much cuter.

The “boys” doing a dance. 

The teachers and housemothers looking on. We will miss these ladies a lot.

And yes we look gigantic next to Meera, one of the cleaning ladies. We loved her as she had some real spunk.

And this marks the end of our experience at RSO. We will miss the children and the staff and will look back on it with fond memories.

Ownership Star Program and Holi - Festival of Colors

 

As stated in a previous blog post, we have been given the responsibility of helping the 160 children at Rising Star to feel responsibility and ownership of their things, their lives, and their futures.

Because the children live on Rising Star’s campus during the school year, they are split into groups of 20-25 and have a full time “housemother” or “housefather” that acts as their parents away from home.  The children are able to see their parents once a month on “Parents Day” and they also spend their holidays with their families in the leprosy colonies. 

To fulfill these responsibilities, we launched the “Ownership/Star Program”, modeled after the Eyre family program that Tal was involved in when he was young. This program gives the children the chance to earn a star a day for doing four household duties in the morning and four more duties in the evening.  These duties include getting up on time, finishing homework, washing clothes, brushing teeth and obeying their housemother/housefather. 

The children have learned that they must behave in order to get a star at the end of the day.  As they accumulate stars, they can eventually purchase items in the Star Store that is open once a week. 

We set it up so that the children learn to earn their own things instead of getting free handouts. As it is with most of us, when we get anything for free, we don’t value it as much as the things we have worked for.

In the short time that we have been here, the children have shown us that they can improve their behavior during the day, accumulate stars, make purchases, and then take care of their purchases. It is something wonderful to see.

Below, Tal’s little sister Charity (on the left) and her friend Dani are helping to make the Star Program posters for  each room in the children’s hostel. These posters list the duties the children have to accomplish in the morning and evening in order to earn a star. The housemothers/father helped us with what these duties should consist of for each age group. In order to target each age group the duties vary slightly. Putting these posters together was a lot of work and we really appreciated Charity, Dani, and Sara’s work (and beautiful hand writing).

After the posters were completed, we placed them in each room where the kids would see what they needed to do daily in order to earn a star…

Charity then helped us make the first Star Banks.  The Star Bank comes into place at the end of the week when the children deposit their star earnings for the week. The banker (currently us) collects the cards and adds the points up for display at the Star Store.
This was fun to do with Charity because this whole system is modeled after the Eyre family economy/ownership system that also used cards or “slips” of paper that were deposited into a family “bank”.   

Sadly, Charity, Dani and Sara had to get back to the US, so we carried on our work without them.  They are still talked about around here as some of the best volunteers at Rising Star…

So, after the first week of the program, we went around to the different rooms of the hostel and helped the children deposit their cards into the Star Bank.  This was a great teaching moment because we were able to congratulate each child and ask them what they can do next week to get more stars.  The children have loved the whole system of earning stars and and are constantly telling us, with pride, how many stars they have earned during the week.

 

 

The Star Store got its current inventory mostly from Sarah’s mother, Janet or “Mimi” (on the right) who brought a ton of toys to Rising Star during her visit a few weeks ago. She was nice enough to donate them all to the store so that the kids could earn them in stead of getting free hand-outs. This is fantastic because up until now the children would get all these items for free from all the visitors without appreciating their value or really taking care of them. 

We set up the store with labeled index cards that tell the children how many stars each item costs. Below you can see mostly school supplies or coloring items.

Kristen, a fellow volunteer, helped us open the store and in the below picture she is showing the very popular “magic wand” which costs 10 stars. As you can see, the children are very attentive. Anita is the strict cashier and had to block the children from possibly entering the store on their own (see below). Once the children have selected an item for purchase, they need to pass by the cashier where their spending is noted.

It is so fun to see the expressions on the children’s faces when they look at the items in the store…

 

Below is a princess suitcase that is a big hit with the girls.  It is one of the most expensive items, so many girls are proudly saving stars for it. As you can see Tal, once a salesman always a salesman, is doing an amazing job getting the children excited about different items.  Also, take a look at Anita’s stern arm (lower left side) keeping the kids out of the store area. 

As part of the process, the children are learning how to “spend or save” and it is so interesting to see their thought processes. The big ticket items are either a really nice toy or a trip to eat ice cream in a nearby village. The biggest item is a trip to Chengelput, a town about 45 minutes away, to eat out at a restaurant and do some light shopping. This kind of treatment is a first at Rising Star and you will see on the picture below that some of the boys are curbing their immediate desire to save for a more expensive item.

It is exciting to see how they are learning the concept of immediate or delayed gratification and its consequences. We can see that these current experiences will help them later on in life with real money.

 

Holi – the Festival of Colors

On the first of March, Rising Star Outreach, as the rest of India, celebrated Holi. It was a day that will be remembered by all…Before we go into the details, we want to share a little background on Holi that we found on Wikipedia.

“Holi, also called the Festival of Colors, is a spring festival celebrated by Hindus, Sikhs and others. It is primarily observed in India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and countries with large Indian diaspora populations, such as Suriname, Guyana, South Africa, Trinidad, UK, USA, Mauritius, and Fiji.

The main day, Holi, is celebrated by people throwing colored powder and colored water at each other. Bonfires are lit  the day before in memory of the miraculous escape that young Prahlad accomplished when demoness Holika carried him into the fire. Holika was burnt, but Prahlad escaped without any injuries due to his unshakable devotion to the god Vishnu. Vishnu is the one of the supreme gods in the Hindu faith and is known as the preserver of good. This story then signifies the triumph of good over evil, and the death of Holika is celebrated as Holi. Holi is celebrated at the end of the winter season on the last full moon day of the lunar month Phalguna (February/March).”

So we got all of the children that wanted to participate onto the field and started giving them small amounts of paint powder… things soon got crazy…

I think Tal is telling a little guy (rather firmly) that he can’t take the paint from Tal’s pocket and that he needs to wait for his turn. 

They all wanted as much paint as they could get their hands on… All Anita remembers hearing is “Auntie! Auntie!” and lots of cute little hands coming her direction. We had to make sure that the little kids got their turn as well, since their hands could not reach as high.

The kids had so much fun! 

Fun was had by all…

We made it back to the Volunteer Hostel in one piece! It took two washings (clothes and us) to get all the paint off. And we were only handing out the paint!  Okay, we may have thrown a little… and received a little…

Many more stories to be shared in the future!

Sponsor a Child at Rising Star Outreach

We have now been at RSO for four weeks and have loved getting to know the children. As you have seen from our previous pictures, they have bright smiles, radiant personalities and sparkly eyes that make our hearts melt.
The other morning we had little Archana come up to Anita while we were eating breakfast. (See below)

Archana was starved for affection and hugged Anita for about 15 minutes. It reminded us of the effects of leprosy and how, for so many generations, leprosy affected people were shunned by society both physically and emotionally. Additional effects of this segregation were, and still are, poverty and low education. As a result of Rising Star Outreach, this stigma is changing for some of these leprosy affected children in India. Here, the children are not only loved and cared for, but are also becoming well educated and responsible which helps them to be able to break this cycle of leprosy. But, as with most non-profit organizations, without the help of people like you and me, Rising Star Outreach would not be able to provide all the education, housing, food, love and care to the 150 children that currently are under their jurisdiction.

We have decided to write this blog post about how you, our friends and family, can help a child here at RSO. If you are looking to give to a charity, there are of course many options worldwide, but we thought that our first hand experience here at RSO would give you some confidence that your money is going to the right place.

Rising Star’s sponsorship program makes it easy for you to make an impact. To see how it works, take a look at the RSO web site under “sponsor a child”, http://www.risingstaroutreach.org/sac There, you can see short bios of each child that is in need of a sponsor and then choose which child you would like to sponsor. The bios are fun to read and the current Sponsorship Program Director (Kristen, our neighbor at the Volunteer Hostel) does an excellent job. She is a natural with the children and the children love her. She knows each child personally and has written some great bios that really capture their personalities.

The cost to sponsor a child is minimal. It’s $30 per month/child and it covers all expenses from education, to food, to housing, to transportation, to supplies, etc. of that particular child.

The great thing about sponsoring a child here at RSO is that you will have a personal relationship with one of these children. The children are asked to write one letter every quarter to their sponsors while, you, the sponsor, can write whenever you please. This can be as rewarding for those that sponsor as it is for the children that receive the donation.

You can decide on the length of your sponsorship. The donation occurs on a monthly basis, but the ideal length of a sponsorship is a year or more. That way you can truly make an impact on their lives. You may like the program enough that you continue your support of the child you sponsor until he or she graduates RSO (around the age of 18).

Here are some recent pictures of the children at RSO…

Below is a picture of Rosemary, Tamil Selvi, and Ramya

Below is Ramya on the left and Sathya on the right

Sathya, the taller girl, LOVES Tal because he teaches her to play basketball. Little Rosemary is also hanging out with Tal.

The guy in blue Jazz jersey, Sathish, is the oldest on campus. He is a responsible young man and has a nice jump shot.

Below are the three Anita’s here at RSO. I don’t know how many times I have heard in India “Your name Anita? Anita Indian name!!” I am happy to know that wherever I travel, Anita is a common name of that particular country.

The two trouble makers at school. On the left is Moorthy and on the right Kanmani. But they are so cute you would never believe it.

Mymonisha, seen below, is always eager to chat with us.

Christraj loves the phone!

Let us know if you have any questions regarding the sponsorship program. Don’t feel pressured in any way, but if you have been looking to donate some money to a charity, we thought RSO may be what you are looking for.

Let us know if you do decide to sponsor because we would love to keep you updated from our perspective.