This is our occasional newsletter
to all our MSF School sponsors
and supporters to thank you for
your help. Please write back to
us and tell us what you think.
Our banner shows you the delivery we make of fruit for all 190 children on Saturdays. Nutrition plays a very important part in the life of our school because the diet for low-caste children is mostly just boiled rice and pickles, with occasional lentils and very little vegetables and hardly ever any fruit. We are fortunate to have the support of Kushal Schofield in London, who makes a monthly donation in memory of her mother, Mrs Amarjeet Lehal and we thank her.

The school put on a show for the community for Republic Day. Here is the opening scene, and you can see a big picture of the audience if you click here - but you will need to scroll sideways to see them all.

School uniform is very important in India because it shows the unity among the children and mothers will make sure their children are neat and clean to go to school every morning.

When an adult enters the classroom the children always stand and say "Good morning" and remain standing until told that they can sit down again. Do schools in Europe do the same?

This is Hema Latha. She is 13 but is in a class of children aged about 9. It is because she has missed several years of school so she should start in Grade one to catch up. She is one of our sponsored children and is still finding it very difficult to be at school and will not speak.

Before this she used to work for other families to earn some money. Now she came to Yellamabanda to her grandmother because she learned that she could go to school here which they could not afford before.

Even now she must get up at four or five o'clock every morning to do housework and she also does extra work when she finishes school. The life of poor people in Hyderabad and in all India is very bad and especially for girls.

Lavanya Maam took the older children to the 'Open House' at the local Police Station. Here they are listening to a traffic policeman, but they also saw inside the Police Station where there are lockups for people waiting to be questioned.

The police system is very modern with many computers and a very good system of radio connections to all the police on duty and to the Andhra Pradesh headquarters.

They even showed the children some of the guns they carry - how they load and work and explained about the bullets.

This is the school toilet to serve 190 children and seven staff - it has no taps or running water. THIS IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH. We do not have the space for a room with basins and we get all our water by hand-pump and carry it indoors in big pots.

The childrens homes will be like this too, so moving water in big pots and washing by dipping a small jug into a bucket is normal for a family and years of practice mean it is reasonably clean. Some families do not have even that and must go out into the rocks and undergrowth and do their business there.

With so many people sharing you can be sure that we are extra careful and have regular inspections.

Here is Archana, 11 years old, teaching a nursery class their English letters. Local languages are written in the devanagari and telugu scripts, but in modern India all signs use English (Latin) alphabet and teaching in schools is very often in English because the Government and the Courts and many shops and practically everything nowadays uses the Latin alphabet. Even in offices they write the Telugu language using the Latin alphabet. This means that lower-caste people are at a disadvantage unless they know it.

In India it is common to use older children to teach the younger ones. We cannot afford teachers for all the children who want to come to our school, so we do the best we can.

"Hello. We are Akhila, Archana, Prashanti and Manisha showing you the first potatoes that we have grown in a small box that we have in front of the school. We want to grow enough vegetables to feed all the school once every week.

These potatoes are very small because we couldn't wait for the six months for them to grow properly because we were so excited to see the plants growing. When we have lots more space we will grow many more and we will leave them the proper time.

Now we are planning to give all the school a proper lunch every Wednesday. It will be a vegetable soup which will be something new for the children and we will give out the fruit afterwards.

Hello, we are the editors, Shrawan and Vennela. We are psychology students at Nizam College and work for Tom Holloway in our spare time maintaining the websites we have set up for charities.

We kindly request you to print this newsletter and give copies to your relatives and friends and ask them if they will sponsor a child. If you have something to tell us email us at vennela@holloways.org and shrawan@holloways.org