For once the destination was more beautiful than the journey. This was the second day of the road trip and Susheela Ma’am came to pick us up at 9 sharp, almost to the second :). We were headed to visit the boarding school that Samata runs for the tribal kids under its program called Balamitra.
The two story rented building was in quite a scenic spot, and doubled as the Samata’s office in the area too.

“This is Ram. He’s another one of our backbones here. We have many backbones in Samata. That’s how we are standing tall.” Sushila Ma’am said as she introduced Mr. Sitaramraju to us. There were quite a lot of surprises in store for us today, which i guess is the one thing most definitely expected from this experience.
The school is in sagar nagar, and the session for the year had just begun with kids still coming from their villages.

Painting the hall(in which we had volunteered to give a hand too ) and washing the floor was      going  on.
While going around the building, I was struck by a beautiful sketch of a tree done with pencil, with  strokes so perfect that my drawing teacher would have been proud. We were told that all the  sketches and paintings were done by the kids there. The use of color and the exquisite effects  produced in them, were probably aptly summed when krushi said “It’s like photoshop stuff you  know.  Its that amazing.”

Later we interacted with the kids, who weren’t that shy of strangers anymore. The volunteers who come from Germany every year to teach them, and their stay in the city for long, had made them quite open to us. Janaki, Maheshwari, Sita, Rajeshwari, Venkatalaxmi and all the others, told us about themselves, and then we tried to explain to them about us. I so wished i had known telugu a bit, but later i was pleasantly surprised when Ma’am told us that some are good with english, and yeah it was fun.

We sang songs together, and they knew songs in more languages than the number of languages we know. As ma’am had told us they know more than 300 songs and none of them from movies. And if you are an indian you know that’s a big deal.

After this we had a tete-a-tete with Anna, one of the german volunteers who had been working with Balamitra for about nine months. She had travelled extensively in the tribal belt, and it was an opportunity for us to gain something from her experience.
“Outside the people are nice to you because they are supposed to be so. Here they are nice because that’s how they are.”
That’s a statement i’ll remember, and am sure will have more reasons to agree with, by the time this trip ends.

It was a school, and their first school day. I am sure we were the ones who learned the most on that day, and maybe more from the students than the teachers.