UNL journalism and advertising students discovering India
July 30, 2011 1 Comment
Video by Elisabeth Loeck
The Mamta School in Khanipur, India offers a unique education for local children. This school specializes in teaching young, underprivileged students about producing newspapers. By encouraging the exploration of various subjects, students are free to express themselves through various mediums. With this opportunity, these children have an outlet to use their imagination and creativity.
July 23, 2011 Leave a comment
Mamta students dream of careers different from their mothers. | Photo by Maricia Guzman
Story by Maricia Guzman
Mansi Raj, a 10-year-old girl from the village of Kalyanpur, attends Mamta School. The dust blue school building sits next to a rail line and highway an hour outside of Lucknow.
While Raj learned to read and write Hindi and practices basic English, other children with tattered or no clothing grasped at the iron rods of the school gate, trying to get a peek inside the school.
Unlike kids outside the school gates, she learns how to read, write, do math and use one of the seven school computers.
While her father works, her mother stays at home. But unlike her mother, Raj wants to join the police force.
“I want to be a policewoman because it’s good to be a police officer. You can help people,” Raj said.
Raj and many of her female classmates want to break free of culturally traditional female roles.
“Although this school is for all children, we work very hard to educate the girls,” said Ashok Agarwal, Mamta’s director. “They are usually at a greater disadvantage than the boys.”
Mamta teaches poor students from nearby villages. The teachers often face difficulties with attendance because students leave classrooms for fields during harvest season. During this time, girls are too busy with household chores, such as washing, cooking and cleaning to have time for school.
Mamta also loses some students to arranged marriages before they can finish their schooling.
“We have a few girls here who get married off when they are 13,” Agarwal said. “They aren’t even given the chance to go on and learn.”
In some more sinister cases, Agarwal said some families, desperate for money, will sell their daughters into prostitution rings.
Despite the cultural and financial adversities, these girls laugh, smile and learn.
Tanuja Singh, 10, also has non-traditional career goals. Singh wants to become a doctor.
“I want to become a doctor when I’m older because I want to help society,” Singh said while glancing over at a computer screen where she had drawn a flower using a computer art program. “I want to come back and help the people here,” Singh said.
Many girls want give back to their communities, whether it be through teaching, medicine, law enforcement or any other way.
“Our hope at Mamta is that teaching the kids to read and write will help them achieve their dreams and make them more explorative and curious,” Agarwal said. “We have to keep believing in the kids and expanding because it’s the only way to make a difference.”
July 23, 2011 Leave a comment
Chiranjith Kohr enjoys reading and writing in Hindi. She hopes to become a journalist someday. | Photo by Kay Kemmet
Story by Kay Kemmet
Chiranjith Kohr fidgets with a small key in her hand.
Unlike many girls in her class, she doesn’t wear a gold watch or nose ring. Instead she wears gold and diamond stud earrings. They probably aren’t real gold, real diamonds.
The key opens her bike lock. Every day, the 14-year-old bikes to a nearby village and the Rani Saraswati Vidya Mandir School.
She speaks softly, just above a whisper in her northern Indian Hindi dialect of Abadhi. An urban Hindi speaker doesn’t easily understand her accent and her volume is low.
But that doesn’t effect how much Kohr says. She talks about her dreams of becoming a journalist. She wants to report everyday conflicts between people in her village, corruption in the local and state governments and issues affecting children and women.
She said India’s worst problems are child exploitation and the illegal, but still practiced, dowry system.
After reading an article in Dainik Jagaran, India’s largest Hindi newspaper, she decided she wanted to cover social issues like these.
“After that, I was thinking about the difficulties in Indians’ society and knew I wanted to work with that,” Kohr said in Hindi.
Kohr is from Patdauja, a rocky two-hour drive from Lucknow. A career in the media is foreign to her farmer father and housewife mother.
But a twelfth-year student at her school, Priya Gupta is already doing mobile reporting about village conflicts. And Kohr is only three years behind her.
She doesn’t know where she would go to school for journalism, but she still dreams of being a video reporter.
July 23, 2011 4 Comments
Mamta School students learn to speak, read and write proper Hindi and English. Their native languages are dialects of Hindi. | Photo by Lorena Carmona
Story by Lorena Carmona
Booh, the girl with the short black hair and pierced nose, moves her tiny fingers across the flowing Hindi letters. She bows her head as she reads a Hindi storybook.
Booh is one of the many students who are being taught a new language at the Mamta School outside Lucknow. The school provides a place for under-privileged children to get an education that they may not have gotten otherwise. The 6-year-old is learning how to read Hindi and English and is in her second standard.
While at the school, the children go through many levels varying from science and languages to computer skills and social studies.
Many of the children who are at the second standard are around the ages of six or seven.
“All the students in this level have an equal number of books to read,” said Shikha Sikka, an events organizer for the school. She said they work with both languages.
The children learn many of the basics first when it comes to reading, she said. Letters, numbers and colors are all essential.
“It will take one year for the children to complete the course on languages,” she said. “By March of 2012, they will have taken their finals and moved to class 3.”
Many of the children have picked up Hindi while at home, so English is something completely new to them.
Many of the children said they liked learning English.
Booh’s hand reaches the last set of letters and she becomes quiet. The book, with its boldly typed letters and wrinkled pages, shuts. She grabs the glossy gray cover of the Hindi storybook, gently smiles and takes her seat.
July 23, 2011 Leave a comment
Shaheen Bano, 12, Anjani Singh, 12, Kavita Sagar, 12, Tarnuum Bano, 12, Zeenate Kuser, 11, and Sabiya Khatum, 13, take home science as seventh graders at Mamta School in Lucknow, India. They all want to be either doctors or teachers some day. “They have to fight hard,” said Ashok Agarwal, the school’s treasurer and business administrator. | Photo by Emily Walkenhorst
Story by Emily Walkenhorst
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