The newest thought process in D’s world has been “poor”, “why some people are poor”, “why they don’t have money”, “their mother and father don’t work?”, “poor people are bad or good people” and the likes. I have been trying to explain this to her without labeling a class of people as “poor”, and trying to imbibe in her that poor today does not equal permanently poor. Without divulging into the relativity of how less is poor, tell her in the simplest form I know, that anyone who does not have enough money to buy basic things like food, and sometimes don’t have a house to stay, are poor. If tomorrow, mummy doesn’t work hard enough, and our company’s customer’s don’t pay us, then we will also be poor. Making sure she does not associate “poor” with any class of society, and that we could also become poor.

Not being sure if she is old enough to address/understand this topic, I also wonder where she picks these from. I do however feel that the class difference is much more prominent in India than in the US. My cleaner in the US drove a better car than mine. I am not saying that US does not have poverty, but the poverty line is much higher in the graph and is much less visible than it is here, in terms of basics like food and shelter. Alright, in Rani Mukherji’s Dil Bole Hadippa style, enough philosophy jhadofied.. Time to get to the point..

Dussehra holidays started this past Friday. I had promised the kids some fun projects for the holidays. The kids wanted to do cutting, coloring, gluing and I wanted to get something tangible out of the time spent. After some thought and discussions( with D and Babio ), we decided to make some mathematics puzzle’s and memory game’s at home. And give them to kids who cannot buy them from stores. D’s curiosity level was at it’s peak and she was supremely excited. Tagged them along to the nearby stationery shop, got some chart papers, and pairs of animals and vegetables sheets to make the memory game. I am sure a sucker for hand made items, so instead of printing out the puzzles from the computer, D just ended up with her free hand drawing skills

A picture is worth a thousand words, so here goes…

Even the littlest one participated , though most of the time my job was to shield her from the older one’s. All in all, 2 puzzles and 2 sets of memory games were created in about 4 hours. We played with one of them a few times and are now ready to be dispatched. To whom, is the question. We plan to find out if any of the maids in this apartment complex have kids in the age group 5-10, and give these away to them. Based on the response we get, we plan to make more of these. Puzzling out India map and world map is next in line.

We also hand wrote some activity sheets. D was pretty excited to be on the creating side rather than the solving side. Some picture/word matching sheets, some phonetic sheets and some numbers sheets. All in all, it was great fun to watch her enjoy the process. She is now super excited to give them away, which I am kind of surprised, owing to her this-is-mine attitude. To top it, she said, the kids might not have pencils to solve the sheets. I have lot of them, so can I give one to each kid. What could I say?

There were few outdoor activities we planned for the holidays, but both the kids fell sick and I am home alone with the kids. So, they are parked for another time. Am happy we got some done however.