Rising Star Day 10 and 11

Alright so Rising Star has been awesome, as usual but I would like to dedicate this post to telling you about our experience on Wednesday. 

The Indian government randomly makes holidays so Wednesday was a random holiday and the kids had school off. When the kids at Rising Star don't have school, our schedule is a little different. So we took a field trip to a place called The CARE Foundation. This is a school where begging children are sent. The man who started it basically finds children begging on the streets in India and tells their parents that either they send him to his school or he'll turn them over to the police (begging is illegal in India, but of course like everything else, it isn't enforced). The kids go to a school and stay at this place and visit their parents pretty often AND the organization gets them through school and also send them to college. I'm not sure the funding behind it or how stable it is (I want to get more information on that) but one thing's for sure. The kids love to be there. 

When we got there the kids ran to us and kept hugging us and they were so cute. At one point they went around and had the children introduce themselves and the group leaders went first. They were the older kids. And when they were up there smiling and talking, I almost lost it. Normally I'm not an emotional person in public but I had to try so hard to fight back the tears. I was just looking at their faces and imagining them begging on the streets, because that's where they came from. One little boy was brand new to the school and he didn't know like any English but he was so smiley the whole time. I can only imagine the circumstances that they came from. Maybe you had to be there but I have never felt so sad and happy for little children. 

This organization is super interesting and I'm going to find out more about it. When the children come there, the owner just observes them for 6 months before they are enrolled in school. There are a few social workers who work there all day and teach the children normal social skills that they've never learned. It's a different kind of education. An education on how to live. One thing that I find so interesting is that the children here are so much more open. In normal Indian culture it's against the social norm for girls my age to interact a lot with teenage boys and it's really frowned upon if guys interact with teenage girls. But because these children haven't been raised learning these things, they were so loving and touchy and all the children of all ages and genders wanted to just love you. They were so starved for attention. They were beautiful kids too. They were also so so so much more creative than the average Indian child I have met. Maybe because they are learning to express themselves, but it seemed so easy for them to create and I think it would be interesting to do a study on that. 

LOOK AT HER. 

It was an awesome experience that I will never forget. 

So much color.