Previous blog entry – in case you missed
The Finale
Books were handed out to the schools, but the training was yet to happen. It meant we had one more trip to Narayanpet. The next few days went in working with Amzad to figure out training dates, the teachers who needed to attend the training , venue for the training and many more logistics. Thanks to the Alokit team at the ground headed by Amzad all the arrangements happened at a fine pace.
28th October 2022 – was the day of our training. We decided to drive over the same day and do the training and come back. Narayanpet was around 170km+ and to drive the same day meant we had an early start. But then the previous night we heard that there was a “paada yatra” (Foot pilgrimage) of a central opposition political candidate and hence we could not take the main highway route. But that did not deter us. The early start became an earlier start. I took my car. Shiney, Sailaja, Pramod accompanied me and we started around 5:30am to Narayanpet for the training. It was a long drive and an adventurous one. We had to go through several side routes and through several village roads in order to avoid the traffic blocks. But the plus side was we got to see some really beautiful scenery interspersed with small villages. We reached Narayanpet around 9am and reached the venue for the training which was a government girls high school at Dhoolpet.
The session started after introductions and the headmaster of the school gave a speech on the importance of reading books and inculcating the reading habit in children. The training was a one day workshop, covering the topics of leveling books, interactive read aloud technique, basics of library management best practices, running classroom library (since most of the schools did not even have enough classrooms) and handling struggling readers. The teachers were engaged during the sessions and found the sessions useful.
By the time our training was scheduled there was a change of the collector for the district (!!) . Shri Koya Sree Harsha also was supportive and came to watch our training for a few minutes. This motivated the teachers even more who realized that the management considered this very important. The collector distributed the books to all the schools that were donated by Sakku group (Thank you once more Sakku for enabling this). The training ended around 4 pm with the assurance from the teachers that they would put the books to good use.
Explaining our methodology to the collector Sri Harsha
The press report regarding the program from the collectors office
It was 5pm before we could leave. But ofcourse how could we miss the famous Narayanpet sarees and not treat ourselves after a long productive day. We were guided by the teachers to a local weaver who has been in the handloom industry for several generations. Sailaja , Shiney and myself after buying sarees left Narayanpet around 630pm along with Pramod who was happily sitting in the car and working while we were saree shopping. We reached Hyderabad around 10 pm in a happy mood after having a very productive day.
You must be wondering ok what next – check out our next blog post from Narayanpet again.