MEWSIC: So after a short and sweet meeting with Darshan and Emily from Innovaid who run Mewsic, it was agreed that I will help to give their music teachers some training in how to set up the classroom, give appropriate praise to the children, and some ideas to make the classes a bit more fun and keep the children coming back for more.
On Tuesday I was joined by Hanifa (who has kindly agreed to be my translator) and Darshan in Govandi slum - I have never been to a more dusty place in all my life. The mewsic centre is located on the edge of the Govandi dumping ground, a huge mountain of rotting waste, where rag pickers including around 1300 children work, collecting recyclable rubbish in exchange for less than 100 rupees a day (about £1). Here's some pictures of the surroundings - it's quite a challenge to take photographs around this area for obvious reasons.
The Mewsic centre has been open for 2 months and is still experiencing some teething problems, which I going to try and help them address over the next few weeks. There's little consistency in who turns up for the music classes, and the children are largely illiterate which the teacher is really struggling with, as his method is very focused on letters and numbers.
Wednesday was spent with Hanifa again, this time in Dharavi Mewsic centre. This couldn't have been much more different from the previous day. The surrounding area was clean, not at all dusty and the centre was neat, tidy and fairly well equipped with 2 additional staff to help the children with their practice. It was really touching to meet such polite, sharing and motivated children. The atmosphere was one of concentration, pleasure, and the kids definitely knew why they were there, and were making the most of the opportunity. I'm really looking forward to going back and doing more work with the teachers to see what we can achieve.
Dharavi River
egg transport!
Woman drying chillies in Dharavi street
The entrance to the trapdoor of the Mewsic Centre in Dharavi
In the evening I went off to Dharavi Rocks with Ayush and Abhijit, who spent the session working on a couple of new songs. Despite a really noisy disco going on outside, the group managed to focus and learn the songs as best they could. Singing certainly isn't a strong point of the group, so I'm going to be encouraging them to do more rhythm work in the coming weeks, including body percussion, junk percussion, and some cup music...more to come!
My favourite day of the week, however, had to be Thursday. Ayush invited me to come to 2 of the Muktangan schools he teaches at. Muktangan is an integrated community school set up by the Paragon Charitable Trust, training local women to teach in a forward thinking method for children from the local poor community. Music is included in the curriculum, which is unusual in your average Indian government school. We played music with and for 8 classes over the day and the response was truly fantastic. The children were really happy to be singing and were fascinated by the violin, truly relishing seeing one in the flesh! Ayush is a really great person to be working with young children. His gentle, caring approach really suits the job and I am really looking forward to seeing him develop his style as he becomes more confident and develops some more diverse material for the children.
More to come....!
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