Chennai: Ambattur

From Chennai Photos 2010

The distribution today was held at the T V Nager Educational Society.

This school is run by the Rotary Club of Ambattur. It is a Tamil medium school with 570 students attending. The school has all the regular courses as well as a computer lab and a Home Theater for educational purposes.

When we arrived at the site there was a tent-covered area with a colourful backdrop where the pictures were to be taken. Once we arrived we were able to set up fairly fast as chairs, benches and tables were moved into place very quickly. However the problem of lighting up the beautiful dark faces of the children has been a problem for our photographers so a new “toy” had been purchased and we did not start for about one half hour as they played with the new reflector. This piece of equipment was able to reflect the outside light directly at the faces of the children making it possible to see the features of the children’s faces much easier.

We also did three interviews with three separate parents and their children. An interpreter helped us to communicate with them. The parent and child were shown the bedkit and asked questions about the contents and quality of the contents.

From Chennai Photos 2010

They also were asked what two articles will be the most useful to the parent and the child, how it will affect the child’s health, etc. They were asked if there were other articles they would like to see in the bedkit and if they would like to see different questions in the questionnaire.

It appears that all parents think all the items are useful to them.

During the time that the Ambattur Rotary Club has been involved with Sleeping Children Around the World, they have provided 62,500 bedkits and 8,215 layettes to needy children and babies.

As we were starting to clean up after the distributions, we were asked to present the Murray Dryden Scholarship prizes to the ten winners, the top student in each class. Of course we were pleased to do this. Each winner was presented with 2,000 rupees, equivalent to about $46 Canadian.

From Chennai Photos 2010

In the evening we were invited to take part in the Ambattur Rotary Club meeting. Both the ladies and the men in our SCAW team were dressed by Rotary members in true Indian style. We were all asked to say a few words and Tom gave his “going away” speech. Pictures from this event will be posted either with the blog or be added to the photo album.

We left this meeting about 10 PM and made our way to the hotel where we first helped each other get undressed so we could pack the clothes we had on into suitcases to be stored in a Rotarians home. We then had a couple of hours sleep and got up at 2 AM to catch a plane to our next distribution.

Helen Brown
for Team Chennai 2010

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