Smile for a Story

Im finally introducing you to the kids at Santhosha Nanban!(In tamil, this means''happy friend'').  They are incredibly smart, happy and sweet and I loooove my time with them, its great fun and hugely inspiring. I took tons of pictures from todays session, where Kanchana ( their full time teacher) and I told them the story of "The Thirsty Crow" and they excitedly started to illustrate the story! Ive just picked 10 pictures to share with you but if you want to see more let me know :)

the cutest crow

 Collage work from last weeks session, they absolutely floored me with their creativity!

We have about 20 kids in open school where Kanchana preps them for admission into a goverment school.

These are kids that have been found recently, in the middle of school year so theyre getting a good basic learning here! Almost all of them stay in the orphanage, and just a few go back to their homes in the evenings.

I mentioned before about what a lovely place Santhosha Nanban is, its an orphanage and they also educate street children and these kids are really well looked after, its been really heartwarming working with them. You can read more about them at www.sathoshananban.org.

A Little Bit of Hope!

In retrospect, things with my plan to do a chiildren's book are actually going well. I lost hope last week, but I am in conversation with a lot of good publishing houses and they all seem very interested! So hopefully I will have good news to jump around about soon. Meanwhile, I continue to make samples ! :) The illustration for this story is about an old Kashmiri man and his cricket bat workshop set in Kashmir.


The other little bit of excitement right now is that today is my first day working with a sort of Orphanage here in Pondicherry. They are called Santhoshananban and they take in street children and educate them, and also provide a home for orphans! Wonderful people and a beautiful idea. I am planning to work with the kids on art and stories! Lets see how it goes :) They seem like a very bright and happy bunch! I just hope I do them justice. Wish me luck!!


This work by amrita is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.