Mangalore breaks the ice!
This Sunday was a momentous day for MAD Mangalore. The day Rakesh the Thunderman sent us all an emotional msg stating that this was the day we’ve all been toiling for, training for, waiting for…and lo! Here it was already! The Icebreakers for the kids and thus, the start of MAD classes atlast!!
The volunteers were grouped according to the two orphanages we were to look after… One in Ullal and the other in Jeppu.
The orphanage heads in Jeppu, Meghana and Nikita, divided the kids into batches of 10 and allotted two volunteers per each batch. Infant Mary’s is an all girls orphanage, with girls from the grades of 1 to 7. The icebreakers were fun as all the girls were a delight to be with! They were bursting with action songs and dances and skits that they wanted to perform. Initially the plan was to get the volunteers to teach the kids something new to act out, but the bunch of highly enthusiastic lil ones ended up teaching the volunteers instead! The finale of the icebreakers was a stage performance of all the groups to which the kids gave colorful names like “gulabi” and “number one” and “lil angels”. Watching them demonstrate all that they learnt gave us volunteers a good glimpse of the enthusiastic response we hope to receive in the classes to come 
The volunteers in Ullal had a different experience all together. St Aloysius Boys Home is known for a bunch of quite mischievous boys, and so the volunteers were exposed to a bit of havoc when they got there. Kids were teeming all around, pulling at the volunteers, hitting and tugging each other, hanging from the volunteer’s arms etc. A few even taught some of the volunteers kabbadi, to which our volunteers got beaten miserably… little did they know that the kids were zilla level kabbadi champs!! A nice coincidence was a tiger dance that happened to be performed by a travellin troop, during the icebreakers. It left all the kids quite fascinated. Getting the kids to settle down with a scout clap was quite effective as their response was immediate. Volunteers distributed sweets and then shared conversation with the groups, getting to know kids better. It was heartwarming to know that all the boys were eager to learn English, stating that though they “read English” in their classes, they haven’t really “learnt it”.
And so the icebreakers set us off on a good start…putting MAD Mangalore’s volunteers on an enthusiastic path to teaching, after being affected by the children’s happy eagerness to learn!
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