Hello friends – here’s another update of all that’s happening at Seem these past few months:

Higher education & training

Mahi & Akanksha joined the BA (Hons) programme at Banasthali Vidyapith on 03 July. They have adjusted very well and are participating in various activities including music, dance & taekwondo.

Gaurav joined BSc (Hons) in Mathematics at the Shiv Nader Institute of Eminence, Greater Noida. On the basis of merit, he secured a full fee waiver and has settled down into college life in a very different and challenging environment.

Trainee Chef Deepak – has started a 6 month ‘on-job-training’ with Hotel Clarks Avadh, Lucknow with specialization in Chinese cuisine.  Jaya and Atul visited him during their recent visit to the city and were very happy to see him in a professional environment.

Abhilasha – enrolled in BSc Nursing course at Haldwani in Nov 2022 and is now in her 2^nd year. She keeps in touch and visits the library whenever she is in the village.

Tuitions – have continued as usual during the quarter. Since July, we have inducted Ganga, a young girl from Nauna village, who also attended Vijay’s tuitions at the library, as a trainee for assistance with the toddlers.  In addition to Jaya, we now have 5 staff members at the library.

Young learners

Taekwondo – This activity is a major draw and almost 45 children from Class 3 upwards look forward to it every Sunday, spending more than 5 hours training and playing games.  Some of these children represented their schools in some recently held district level sports and taekwondo competitions and did quite well.  While Neha has been selected for the state level taekwondo competition to be held in Bageshwar some others have been shortlisted for the district level athletics to be organised at Haldwani.

Let’s Workshop ( 13 – 17 July ) – a very interesting workshop was conducted by Alka and Sanket supported by Samarth & Devashish.

The workshop started with a very professional performance of Bhooka the monster, so realistically portrayed by Sanket that some of the smaller kids started crying!! 

They were then divided into 3 groups of 10 children, each of which developed, wrote and illustrated a story using the words generated through a magic box exercise. These were then colour printed at Khairna and each group learned how to bind and publish their own stories, complete with a bright cover page and credits, that included their names. Each participant was then given one copy of their own, which they now proudly display to anyone who visits.

The last day was reserved for each group to enact their stories. They’d watched Sanket present a story on day one, had since got to know the “monster,” and were thrilled to show him what they too could do.

This workshop was a great learning for both the participants and the facilitators and Alka is planning on arranging more such workshops in the near future.

Nature Vidya –  Shruthi, a friend and learning buddy from Green Life Conservancy  has started a nature education project for a group of 13 children aged 10 – 12 years since July. Held every Friday, it includes film screenings, storytelling, creating art, bird walks and games for children. It has helped the children get a basic understanding of varied natural habitats, bird features & behaviour.  The library and its surroundings provide areas abundant in the natural environment to facilitate such learning.

In Shruti’s words – “we aim to encourage the innate curiosity of a child to learn, explore and seek clarification, aid socio-emotional learning through nature, personality grooming and confidence building through interactive forms of learning as well as to help in academics through practical/hands-on learning and exploration. ‘Learning through ecological immersions’ aims to build young leaders, innovators and achievers who take inspiration from the rest of nature!” Shruti also trains Anita and Rita, our library facilitators, to become educators/ learning buddies henceforth and to more children.

Nature Vidya

Rakshabandhan 2024 – as usual the children were eager to celebrate the festival and tie rakhi on their “dadda”- and  this year Shiv was an add on!!  They all came over and tied rakhi complete with ‘ teeka & aarti’ and got small gifts in return.

Rakshabandhan

Volunteers –

Devashish – who started volunteering in early April was so involved with all the activities with the children that he continued till the end of July. He was a great help during the busy summer months and handled the computer room with the beginners as well as the older children, in addition to all the other activities that he was assigned. We hope that all volunteers will be as comfortable with all age groups & as sincere as he was and look forward to his stints every year.

Bye- bye Devashish ‘dadda’

Divya – an graphic designer from Mumbai, volunteered at the library for a month in August. She conducted activities with paper collage compositions – papers pieced together to make characters, animals and landscapes. With another group she produced a very artistic calendar. She also assisted Samarth with his art workshops taking a few sessions on visual mapping and identification.

She completed the long overdue documentation by compiling data on volunteers and activities, and using her expertise developed some print material for HCL.

Divya  teaches art

Math Workshop by Shiv – once again Shiv came over for a third though relatively short time in August.  He continued his exercises aimed at de-mystifying maths for young learners. We feel blessed that educators and experts like him take time out every year during their breaks to visit HCL.

Shiv interacts with the kids

Comics and Art Workshop – Over the last 4 months, the children participating in the Comics and Art Workshop have been steadily familiarising themselves with various media and learning to think visually. The activities of this quarter had a greater focus on Art than on Comics, with the intention of providing opportunities to express themselves in different mediums and then go deeper into exploring one specific medium.

The younger group termed Level 1, has been working with oil pastels. Over the last 3 months they have shown great enthusiasm and their confidence with using oil pastels has significantly improved. They have been working  largely towards visual sense-making, learning to use the imagination to impose ideas and meaning onto abstract shapes.

The older group, level 2, has been trying to understand how to think in images by attempting to communicate emotions, ideas and instructions. They have been using paints, not only to realise how different people paint differently but also that different viewers interpret their work differently. They have been making visual maps and routes of their surroundings and the village. It challenges them to ensure that the reader is able to navigate their way without hesitation and to think about how the reader is interpreting their visual cues, further raising the question ‘can we get someone to see the world as we do?’

 Art based workshop

Sonal visits again –  the children were very happy to see Sonal on teacher’s day this year! She took time off from her busy schedule to spend 3 weeks with us at Seem. Sonal is a wonderful facilitator, with a keen interest in art, nature education and science and has always brought with her a spirit of inquiry and curiosity which encourages the children to approach any subject in ways they haven’t done before. She worked with children of all age groups and also collaborated with Samarth for co-conducting a proposed science fair by assisting the children with planning their displays for the fair that is planned during October.

Sonal works with the children

Aahvaan music   – the library was host to Vedi and Sumanth, who started the Aahvaan Project, a folk music and storytelling collective. They conducted a three-day workshop on writing and    composing stories and putting them to music. It concluded with the group of 30 children from Class 7 – 12 doing their own piece and enacting the same.

Health Camp –   Rotary Club Haldwani   held an eye and gynecological health camp at the library on 29^th Sept. Dr Sameer Verma, and his team attended to about 148 patients, of which more than 30 were diagnosed with weak sight or requiring further treatment. The club will provide spectacles as required and treatment suggested free of cost.

Dr Veena Verma conducted the gynecological consultations for almost 50 women and girls. She advised them on related hygiene and the importance of proper nutrition.

Considering the negligible medical facilities available here, such a camp is a boon and we are proposing to arrange for more such health camps in the future.

Health Camp

Visitors – as always a number of friends and acquaintances visited the library and interacted with the children. Jyoti & Venkat, our friends from Chennai along with Sudha visited for a few days and conducted sessions with the children in reading and vedic math. They have very kindly presented the library with sets of bharatnatyam jewelry all the way from Chennai, which will be very useful during the annual day performances.

Usha,Vibha,Sangeeta & Parag – came from Mumbai and spent time with the children reading, dancing and playing games. Each child was gifted a decathalon day bag with stationary items, which the children now bring to the library daily.

Amaya- a friend of an active HCL associate, Manjari, came from Ranikhet.  He brought a drone, explained its working and operated it for some of the senior children, taking some beautiful photos and videos, that the children now share with their friends and relatives.

Drone shots of the library & Seem village

Sky & Joe – two young and accomplished young people who have made Auli their home for the past two years visited the library in mid- Sept. Joe, a keen musician and pianist played & explained music for the children for more than two hours, with some of them also getting to handle the keyboard.

Joe plays at the library

Khili Buraansh Samooh – the women continue their work on a regular basis.  Shubhangi completed her 6-month stint with the samooh in August. There has been marked improvement in the women and they have gained in confidence and are able to handle their affairs independently. They have also had some interaction with a group in Delhi to supply hand knitted material to them. This will increase the diversity of products and give them a bigger platform for scaling up.

A very heartfelt THANK YOU to all our visitors & resource people – from one recently compiled report, we were pleasantly surprised to learn that more than 150 visitors & volunteers have visited the library and worked with the children in their areas of interest in since the start of the library.  The figure doesn’t include those who have visited a number of times year-on- year. This has given the children a very wide range of exposure which reflects in their confidence.

A Big “Thank You” to all our visitors and volunteers