As a part of outreach program FOKE is proud to announce a temporary learning center for children of a Brick Factory workers situated at village Balia, Dist: Hooghly, West Bengal. It is being held jointly in association with Kaikala Chetana, an NGO working for the betterment of these children. Coming mostly from the migrating worker community of Bihar and Jharkhand here they have ample access to pollution, dust and soot, but not proper education or nutritious food either. Even very few are enrolled for a formal school education in their respective states. Thus we decided to launch a six month long educational cum upliftment program for these children from Jan ’23 till June ’23.
The prime focus of this camp is not just to impart some bookish knowledge to these beautiful minds, but to take care of their well being in a holistic way, even if for a span of six months. In this timeline we aspire to habituate them to introductory formal education along with health awareness, hygiene and lots and lots of fun.
The center works four days a week from Tuesday to Friday for two hours a day from 11 A.M. to 1 P.M with the help of two part time teachers, Ms. Manju Shee & Ms. Limpa Santra. Forty Nine children were enrolled at the beginning and 4 more children joined soon thereafter. According to the trend, highest number of enrolled children is expected to be around 60 and the average attendance on every class is expected to be around 50.
We are also very fortunate to serve them with some healthy tiffin every day, which is necessary to at least partially compensate for their nutritional deficiency and also as an incentive for attendance and continued interest in learning.
This short video below tries to capture the essence and goal of this endeavor of ours-
In a nutshell, through this small venture we aim to bring them along with the progression of our society, because as Swami Vivekananda said-
“Educate and raise the masses, and thus alone a nation is possible.”
