BEBOOK and ART WORKSHOPS

Though most of the venues were closed for vacations, workshops continued in Hamara School, Panaji with Arundhati and Denise working around some innovative ideas. There was a special workshop with 2 guests who are vets. Dr. Sacheen and Dr Aparjita who talked about the environment and importance on saving frogs.

Diviya and Arundhati also took children of Hamara School for a concert at Don Bosco School, where Bondo, Goa’s famous drummer and a percussion player was doing an interactive concert with children. The children loved it and also got a chance to play drums with the master.

JAMYANG SCHOOL

We began with the Fukushima projects this month wherein we aim to show our solidarity and friendship to the children in Japan who recently faced a severe earthquake and have been shattered from their daily life. We plan to send painted t-shirts, cranes, songs, and paintings to them from children from India. Our volunteers Johanna, Wyba and Lena started the workshops Jamyang School in Ladakh. The students enjoyed doing the paper cranes and also painted t-shirts for children in Japan. Lovely songs and videos were also recorded which will all be sent to Japan with one of our volunteer support.  

Our volunteers also conducted some wonderful toy workhsops where children made lovely toys from cloth.

The children in Jamyang school are also happy to receive our boxes of Story books. We sent lovely picture books of stories that have involved them in reading and channelizing their imagination.

LAMO CENTRE, LADAKH

For our partner, the Lamo centre in Ladakh, Tara Trust conducted workshop for our 1000-Crane-Project (Fukushima), where the children recorded some lovely plays for the children in Japan.
The monkey sock workshop, conducted by our volunteers, also interested the children there and even the grand mothers participated in it with full enthusiasm.

SHALINI FELLOWSHIP

Our volunteer Johanna also did workshops for the 1000-Crane-Project (Fukushima) at the Udayan Care, Homes for Boys and home for girls. The children did lovely T-shirt paintings for the kids in Japan.

On April 16th, Tara Trust conducted a sock-monkey workshop with Muslim girls from a slum pocket in Margao. The girls loved it and we had great fun making monkeys from a pair of socks. All of them want to continue making more monkeys at home! We are planning to continue our involvement with these young women, not all of them allowed to visit a school and will provide them with books in regular intervals from our mobile library.

Anwesha Singbal has joined our team on April 11th. She will conduct workshops, organize readings and manage parts of the project. Welcome to Tara Trust, Anwesha!

The arts exchange projects:
Writing about “my India”, puppet theater and making Easter cards were part of the workshops till mid-April. We will now take a break in most projects in Goa with our arts exchange workshops, since school exams are over and summer holidays started. In June, with the monsoon, our work with the children continues. However, workshops will be held at the orphanage Care and Compassion till May. 

The big event of this month has been our first Charity Art Auction, organized by Rajendra Usapkar, Diviya Kapur and the BeBook team to fundraise for a bus for our mobile library. More than 40 local artists contributed to our cause. We have been very moved by their generosity towards the BeBook project of Tara Trust! Angira Arya from Mumbai, a professional auctioneer, conducted the evening event, which took place at the Goa Marriott Resort in Panaji. Many thanks to the Goa Marriott Resort, supporting our cause by providing us with a free venue. The event was a great success – more than two thirds of the art objects have been sold and more than 200 guests enjoyed the evening on the beautiful lawns of the hotel.

The arts exchange projects:

Wiebe and Johanna from Germany continued with their beautiful arts projects at different venues in Goa, doing pencil shading, making dream catchers, doing letter painting, etc., etc. The workshops are prepared at the Tara Trust home office in Benaulim and conducted by the volunteers in projects in South Goa and Panjim. Have a look of what they have done in Care and Compassion in Panjim, Loyola slum school, the mobile school of Don Bosco and Daddys Home for mentally and physically challenged children!

The NGO Goa CAP is doing a photography project with Colvale migrant kids we are working with. The kids enjoy the involvement, especially since Anjuli, who has done regular reading events with the kids, needs a break these days.

The Jamyang School:
The Jamyang School in Ladakh – a boarding school for the most deprived children that Tara Trust is supporting, has admitted 50 new children! We are urgently looking for new sponsorships to finance the education of these kids! Contact us!

BeBook – the mobile library:
On February 6th the BeBook team has organized a fantastic charity event, we called it “Fete”, at Literati bookshop. Stalls with food, clothes and jumble were set up, games for children played, information on our trust given, a lottery organized and in the early evening a music band played for our visitors. It was great fun and the donations of the event will go toward the mobile library project BeBook, headed by Diviya Kapur.

  The arts exchange projects:
Workshops on being a double-animal, making bookmark-leaves for a dreaming tree, creating sets and other workshops were done in South Goa with kids of four projects, conducted by Wiebe and Johanna.

The Jamyang School
It is freezing cold in Ladakh and the school is closed for a winter break. It will reopen in March with 50 new boarders from the poorest villages being admitted for a free education.

BeBook – the mobile library:

Diviya Kapur and the Northern volunteer team worked hard all January to prepare a charity event which will take place in February: celebrating, playing games, having a jumble in the garden of Literati. Linda continued to cover our library books and started labeling them – a lot of work to be done single-handedly. Anjuli continued her readings with the migrant children of Colvale – her talent to mix all the languages and bring the stories across is unbeatable.

The arts exchange projects:
With the children of Care and Compassion we are creating a book – a huge map with hands on was created as issues around identity were tackled.

In Loyola Slum School a huge world map was created and other fun creative arts classes conducted.

Wiebe, Laura and Lotta continued the theater play and did canvas painting with the kids in Daddys Home.

With the mobile school of Don Bosco in Margao, our volunteers did facility books, letter painting and West Bengali folk arts.

Arundhati is continuing her weekly workshops at Hamara School in Panjim on nutrition and theater.

In the North of Goa, we are planning to revive the children’s library in Saligao together with Giselle and Asha from Saligao. A first workshop organized by our volunteers Wiebe and Johanna – canvas painting on nature took place with orphans from Calangute. Once the library space is ready for readings and further workshops, we will continue our efforts.

Our team of German volunteers, Hanni and Laura, ended their internship and left India in January and February. They introduced our second team – Wiebe and Johanna – to the projects. Wiebe and Johanna will continue the workshops and contribute with new inputs and ideas to the creativity of the children! 

Construction of our solar greenhouse, which has been financed by the German Embassy in Delhi, is finished and allows the school to grow vegetables even in the deepest winter.

Greenhouse Children of Jamyang

A few new sponsors for the Jamyang children were found. It is very cold in Leh these days, minus 20 Degree, and the children are having a winter break, re-uniting with relatives in their villages. They sent us beautiful Christmas drawings to greet their sponsors and wishing them a happy New Year.

Drawings by Jamyang-children

On December 3rd, Hanni and Laura organized a group of children for a workshop at Arts Escape in Benaulim. A group of folk artists from Bengal gave the children insights in their tradition and painted with them.

Folk artists from Bengal with Margao slum kids

After this amazing experience the children had some fun at the beach and were driven home in the evening.

BeBook with Colvale slum kids

Our volunteer Arundhati continued with the support of other volunteers, continued with her workshops on theater and nutrition with the children of the orphanage Hamara School. 

Workshops at Hamara School

She is developing a program on healthy food which will be beneficial for other children we are working with as well.

Our German volunteers Hanni and Laura continued with creative workshops till the Christmas-school-break, which started December 21rst. They did book-readings, art classes and theater as well as crafting Christmas decoration with the children in four of our supported projects: with the Slum School of Don Bosco in Margao, in Daddys Home, a school for mentally and physically challenged children in Margao, in a slum school in Margao and in the orphanage Care and Compassion in Panjim.

Workshops with Hanni and Laura

on Tuesday, November 2nd, we have done, among other things, a small fashion-show with costumes of newspapers, created by the children of the orphanage Care and Compassion.  Wendell Rodricks, Goas most famous fashion designer, followed an invitation of BeBook and visited the orphanage fort his event. The children produced a dance, a small theater-stand-up and songs. Wendell promised to organize a weaving workshop fort he children and will present them two weaving looms and two sewing machines.

on 2nd and 3rd of November a TV-documentary about the BeBook workshops has been filmed by a German producer. Among other things, the children of Care and Compassion painted a dream journey on a five-meter canvas.

Weekend-Workshops continued throughout the month. After the Diwali holidays end of November, we will start many workshops again, among other things with Don Bosco in the slums of Margao and Colvale, in the orphanages Care and Compassion and Hamara School, in a slum-school in Margao and in a home for mentally and physically challenged children in Margao. There we will also engage a Yoga teacher to help the children with some breathing and yoga exercises.

In the early morning hours of August 6th 2010, due to a flash flood in Leh, hundreds of people lost their lives. Another 700 people were severely hurt and more than one thousand families lost their life essentials, including houses, cattle and crops.
Internet and telephone access was cut off for five days. Fifteen schools, the local radio station, the telephone exchange and the government hospital, as well as five major and twenty minor bridges were damaged. This was the biggest natural disaster in history of Ladakh that the people recalled.

The German Tibetologist, Nike-Ann Schröder was staying in Ladakh to conduct some research, when the flood hit the region. She agreed to cooperate with Tara Trust (India) / Freundeskreis Tara for children and women e.V. (Germany) to start relief projects to help the people most affected by the floods. Thus, Tara Trust started a call for donations. A substantial sum was collected by us: 9200 Euros were donated to our German trust and more than 3,00,000 (approximately 5000 Euros) to our Indian trust. Most of donations have been sent to Nike for emergency relief 9see list below), another 4000 Euro are going to the Jamyang school in Leh, to pay for the most essential needs of 15 new children that are genuine flood victims and will be allowed to study and live in the school.

Nike-Ann Schroeder has been doing all her work on a voluntarily base. 100% of the money collected has been invested to help the Ladakhi people in need in uncomplicated and efficient ways.

With your donations and those of the Bodhicitta-Verein in Hamburg, who also supported Nikes work with several thousand Euros, Nike has established the following aid, in cooperation with local people and institutions: 
Relief-kitchen: 3 warm meals per day, for 250 -300 homeless people at the Reliefcamp Choglamsar.
Basic Requirements (clothing / blankets / kitchen utensils) for families, who have lost everything in the floods.
Emergency Money (1000 Rupees per Familiy) for all 80 homeless families in the camp.
Medical Care and providing for medical expenses (the practinioner Dr. Makkar from Great Britain offered his help on a voluntarily base). Two Medical Camps, in a retirement centre in Choglamsar and in close quarters to the refugee Camps. The latter was held in cooperation with the local hospital and the focus was set on post-traumatic stress syndroms.
Basics for 11 shoeshiner- and beggarfamilies (blanktes, food).
Establishment of a food stock fot the wintermonths to provide fort he homeless
Payments for the emergency repairs in 31 badly affected households (1000 Rupees per family).
Construction Help for the repair of partly damaged houses. With the help of the families, damages of several houses were repaired, one house in danger of collapse was stabilized and sanitized. One house was cleared of mud and the walls and roof were repaired. The construction help aims at properly rebuilding one room per house to be prepared for the winter to come.
Single support for women and families in greatest need, because of the floods. We are financially supporting three of the families with a monthly allowance for at least one year.

Our support of the relief programs organized by Nike-Ann came to an end in October. Nike-Ann Schröder showed an incredible and untiring commitment and effort and we thank her and the local people involved for the great and successful work they have done. This engagement, however, would not have been possible without the appropriate funding – thus we would like to thank all donors for their generosity.
In spring 2011, during her annual visit to Ladakh, Dr. Katharina Poggendorf-Kakar will revisit all projects set up by Nike-Ann to find out about the wellbeing of the people.

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