Shanti Nivas update

I have spent quite a lot of time at Shanti Nivas this year - visiting the patients in the Hospice, playing games with them and organising this and that.

The children of  Thompson House are as adorable as ever. The older boys are young men and the girls getting very beautiful.

Seeing them after 6 months makes their maturity  noticeable.The children come to my room after 'snacks time' and before homework time, to collect toys, puzzles and games..

 The shower curtains have been fitted and the children are getting used to using the showers and getting dried and dressed quickly in this "cold" season. where night time .drop to 14c but daytime temperatures are 31C or more.It is the weather that is blamed for the children getting coughs and colds!


The children are also enjoying  their beautifully illustrated Telugu books.. They sit with their packed school bags and shoes, reading the books until their auto-rickshaw arrives to take them to school. After school the children play with toys and games until it is time for their homework tuition .

The national Holiday of Republic Day on January 26th was celebrated at school and then the children had the day off.

The garden takes up a quite a lot of my time. I can't manage the digging these days but  checking on the watering and a bit of weeding are the norm. When there is no electric power to use the hose
 there are usually two or three little children at hand after schooltime, willing to water with a jug and bucket, filled from the new hand pump. It is a bit hit and miss as they splash  water here ad there, but it is fun for them and they are learning that plants need water to grow..

 The Shanti Nivas children are still going to school seven days a week . 'Mothers' of patients help around the campus, clearing leaves and sweeping, while Balram a patient, kindly waters the tomato plants near the kitchen by hand.

It is a busy time for Victor and the office staff preparing reports for the trusts who support  various projects. We have twice had to postpone my visit to Narasanapeta to the HIV/AIDS outreach programme but it continues to find new patients who don't know that they have the virus. We still manage to give some food and medicine parcels .The London Run in July 2013 monies were for this project, They are estimated to be 6000 pounds but we  need 12000 to run this project and prevent death by starvation.

The Hospice patients continue to enjoy playing with the games and reading books when they are not  resting or watching TV..

Patients watching a children's story CD on my laptop.

I now have only three weeks left of my visit to Brighter Future India.

The children are anxiously waiting for Director Uncle to announce the date of the picnics. The Rainbow Children always go first and Karuna Nivas, Prem Nivas and Shanti Nivas follow about a week later. We have to hire a big coach to take the children to the sea side. The price negotiations and booking must be done first.
I was invited to a birthday party - Durga's, so I am at Prem Nivas again for a few days.Brighter Future children's birthdays are celebrated with a cake and some children get presents from their sponsors. Indian birthdays, festivals and auspicious days are usually celebrated with

giving, rather than receiving. People buy  friends and colleagues sweets when they have good news,etc.


  I take the opportunity to check what needs repairing on the bikes and generally around the campus, as well as catch up with the children's news and progress.

The current  favourite sport seems to be volleyball so  Hari and Janaki  have  re-painted the badminton lines and added   'junior' size volleyball court markings.They are asking for a net and a volleyball too.Last week we bought them badminton cocks.

In the afternoons the fifth year of our primary school are revising their mouse control using the Paint programme and the second year children are seeing a few story CD's of fables and fairy tales on my laptop.The youngest children watch and learn nursery rhymes while I am at Prem Nivas.


To welcome me back the inverter for the dining hall, sick room and  my room had ceased to function and had to be sent for servicing. Luckily the guest room  had power and I moved in there for a few hours to have a nap with the air conditioning unit. It is 29C (84F) in the daytime and 13C (55F) at night here in Prem Nivas. My room has an asbestos sheet roof so it gets quite uncomfortable in the afternoons.

Balama Aunty and Satya

The other week Kalyani mamma, Ballama aunty and  Gowri, our teacher, joined in the gardening and proved to be splendid agriculturalists, rapidly clearing away weeds, digging and spreading compost..

Kalyani mamma  weeding and sunita carrying thee weeds away on her head. Prasanna looks on 

Tomorrow,Sunday, the children are off school so  we are going to try and make a couple of new beds for more vegetable growing.  The grass and weeds have to be cleared from the ground that has not been cultivated for years. After removing the grass the  ground has to be watered and digging can begin.

Watering the far beds is a concerted effort to avoid the existing plants.

Fire buckets have other uses!

Nagamani, Giri and Govind, carrying well rotted buffalo compost to the garden.

The picnic dates have been announced. Rainabow children on 16th Feb and PN, Kn and Sn on 9th!

The Extra Christmas Party Pictures I Promised!

Swathi came to join the Christmas party from her vocational training course

in Vizianagaram where she is studying English and computer and secretarial  skills.






The younger children decorated the new Christmas tree after the Shanti Nivas boys had fixed the lights on it..

The young  children played on the swings, especially the Rainbow children because they do not have space for play equipment at their home. Mahalaxmi Aunty kept an eye on them. Even the big children enjoyed the swings!

Other children played with the construction sets, games and toys until it was time for lunch. The main meal was in the evening after the gift giving and entertainment had taken place.

The Christmas Tata was Arun , a Rainbow boy, and  he is very good at amusing the children, running in ad out of the dancers, distributing sweets and generally being funny. Arun was Tata last year too.
After new clothes were distributed to all the children they received their presents and so to did all the staff. . Prem Nivas children gave little calendars they  had made to our guests.
The evening entertainment began. Each Home had organised groups of children to perform songs and dances and dramas. The children screamed their appreciation and clapped vigourously.




The entertainment concluded with cutting the cake and a candlelit  Silent Night

Then it was time for the sumptuous dinner.

Dinner for the older children was served around the bonfire. The young children and sedate elders ate in the dining hall.

Everybody at Brighter Future India would like to thank the local people who donated food and the UK sponsors who sent money  to provide the children with yet another wonderful Christmas Party.

Gardening in India

The Prem Nivas gardens, which the older children have planted with aubergines, lady's finger, spinach, tomatoes and coriander, have come on very well since I left for my visit to friends in North India. We have all now eaten coriander and the spinach from the children's gardens.

Sai's garden was one of the best

Santosh's spinach was the first that we all ate

The children compared their plots and could see that in some the plants were small because they had not had enough water, or because the seeds were sown too close together. They could also see that some of them had  weed free plots and others were overrun with grass because they had not done enough preparation.

Hari, Janaki, Sai, Sampath and Ashok have the best kept gardens and healthiest plants..



The spinach is not the perpetual variety that we have in the UK,  it is pulled root and all, so it is much smaller and more tender. It takes 4 rows to feed 36 children and staff, so I have sown the children how they can plant a lot more of it by intercropping between the aubergines and tomatoes before they get too big.

The first flowers are appearing on Sai's and Sampath's tomatoes.  I will take some of the smaller tomato plants down to Shanti Nivas when I go there tomorrow afternoon to see how their garden is coming along.






The children call the garden nearest the kitchen my garden because I dug and planted it.
I sewed beetroot for the first time, along with tomatoes and coriander, in my partially shaded area.
Some plants are ok,others, such as the tatakora, which I am assured is an edible leaf, seems stunted.




Our beans are up but not climbing yet..Ashok has planted more coriander for me because I said I liked it.

We have postponed the Seaside Picnics

Director Madam Mary's mother sadly died last week and Victor's mother is very ill so we have postponed the picnics for a week or two. They will take place before I leave Brighter Future India at the end of February.

The Prem Nivas Vegetable Garden

Chinnam and Sai use paras to dig their plot.

Prem Nivas is an area with water retentive clay soil suitable for rice growing. (Rice 'paddy' has to spend three months growing standing in water).To convert it to a vegetable growing medium meant a lot of hard digging and weeding by the children. They use a 'para' to dig with - a spade shaped blade at right angles to the short wooden handle - and bent double they hack at the dried up mud to break it up. We added water to help the digging. I can't do this kind of digging any more and have to keep encouraging the older children as they work on their 10ft square plots. Younger boys help dig out the weeds and smooth the surface with a 'panja' ready for seed sewing.  Hari told me that the girls do the weeding of the plots later on in the growing season.

Hari uses a triangular bladed tool to make the seed drills.

 The children were asked to plant spinach, aubergines and lady's fingers and some wanted to plant tomato seeds too. Two children decided to forsake the straight lines and made patterns with their seed sewing. I showed the plot owners how they could alternate the plants to give each large plant more space. Some remembered!

Santosh recruited Bhagwan to clean his plot!

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Durga uses an iron pole to break up the hard soil on a new plot for spinach.

Giri is the best of the younger workers, he used to go with his father to work as an agricultural labourer.

 In the previously uncultivated land we made a 30 ft.long bed exclusively for beans, of which we had three kinds. All grow upwards but are of differing colours and shapes. The boys made a little ditch on each side of the bean bed that could be filled with  water from the nearby new hand pump bore well. This ditch was also used to water the four banana trees that were growing nearby.  There are several newly planted fruit trees in this walled garden area.

Govind is also a good worker and helps his brother Ramesh.

The garden area nearest the kitchen was selected to grow coriander and tomatoes, plus some beetroot.

Everything should be up by now so I hope the children are remembering the watering!

The Christmas Party

 The children from Karuna Nivas came to Shanti Nivas for the Christmas party the evening before the event, as they had to travel more than 100 km. The Prem Nivas children arrived on the 22nd, an exciting trip in hired taxis. The older boys were hoping to be able to have a game of cricket before the function began but found themselves involved in helping with the arrangements, putting out the chairs, building the bonfire for later in the evening and generally being useful.

The new Christmas tree, which I had brought from England, was put together and the lights were wound around it. The primary aged children each hung a red or gold bauble on it and photographs of each child were taken.The children played on the slide and swings, danced to music from huge speakers and played games until the sun became too hot for them to be outside.They transferred to the inside of  Thompson House and played with the board and construction games until it was time to gather under the shade of the mango and cashew  nut trees to have their lunch.

The children sat in circles on the ground and were served by staff and volunteers from among the senior children.

After a rest time for the little ones all took their seats , along with hospice patients and staff, under the shade of a shamiana for the formal opening of the Christmas Party.

Prayers from two Pastors, a bible reading by Vasavi, one of our college students, and speeches from invited guests, were followed by the long awaited distribution of Christmas gifts to everybody.

The children each received a new set of best clothes  - designs for boys and girls, chosen by Mary Madam Director, as well as a suitable toy.  The children quickly ran to put on their new clothes and the evening entertainment started.

Each home had prepared a programme of songs, dances and drama. The dances were sometimes to religious hymns and some were to film music.  The dances of DMC and the Rainbow boys home were very popular, the children cheering and clapping along with the music.

Arun was dressed as the Christmas Father and he threw sweets into the audience for the children. He ran in and out of  the dancing in a funny way much to everyone's amusement.. The younger children were very cute and sweet to look at as they sang their songs and danced.The entertainment concluded with the cutting of the Christmas cake and Silent Night sung  by all,  the older children holding lighted candles.







The hospice patients were part of the celebrations and enjoyed the event, the dancing and the lights
strung up on all the buildings.








Dinner was served in the dining hall and outside around the bonfire area.Chicken biryani, sweetmeats, bananas and as much as they liked to eat!

It was nearly midnight by the time the children were packed into taxis and rickshaws to go back to their respective homes as they had to go to school the next day!







         Happy New Year to everyone!

from Manya, Victor and Mary, staff and children.

More photos in a few days time!