Rainbow Primary School

I carried maximum of 6 bricks at a time to the construction site - check out this GUY! A Bangladeshi who proves South Asians are awesome.

Usha Madam and I got on the phone today. She was in the school, the ROAR of the students was in the background! I got to say hello to all the teachers. We talked about how one year ago (today) was the forth standard girls' visit with former President Kalam. Here is that picture again: And we all talked about how we missed each other. I heard from the new teachers, Ashoka (5th standard) and Srinivas (4th standard). Both are university graduates. Boy, do I miss those kids. Kalam's trip to Hyderabad 2 December 2007

I am very proud, very proud to report that Kalpana, co-founder of the Rainbow School, just told me her father published a very important book with Oxford University Press. Judge Reddy served on the Supreme Court of India from 1978 to 1987. His excellent book outlines the history of the court over the past six decades. I had the honor of sharing some time with him, and he is an outstanding human rights thinker. Judge Reddy is so proud of his daughter, and so am I. You can buy his book, The Court and Constitution of India: Summit and Shallows here, in India: http://www.oup.co.in/search_detail.php?id=144755 And here in the United States: http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Law/ComparativeLawandNationalLegalSy/?view=usa&ci=9780195696998 Thank you, Judge, for all you do for India. And thank you, Kalpana, for all you do for the Rainbow School, the Madhapur School, and the rest of our Hy-Tech area schools. You are a real treasure and we all love and thank you.

We have a LOT of teacher's unions in our school district. They all held a strike in October-November for more transparency in the promotions process, among other things. The high court requested the teachers go back to work even though the government and unions did not reach an agreement. (The picture, left, is of the beautiful high court building in Hyderabad.) The strike is over! That is good news for the Rainbow School. Our Usha Madam is back at work. Bad news: No settlement yet. More bad news: There are sharp differences between leadership in the unions. The management troubles will not be over any time soon. This comes at a time when A.P. has a critical shortage of teachers and needs new teachers fast. In a few cases, some government schools do not even have a university-trained teacher. The Rainbow School is lucky to have Usha Madam. A short list of unions in the area is below (there are a few I have not heard of before). For a 2008 World Bank study on A.P. teac...

*****UPDATE***** MH and her team made the papers! Atlanta Constitution Journal - see the story here: http://www.ajc.com/search/content/metro/stories/2008/12/07/india.html Mary Helen, my old buddy who lives in Atlanta, did an amazing "preschoolers-to-preschoolers" fundraiser last year. ( Rainbow Primary School: The Future of Philanthropy: Small Individual Donors Connected to the World") She's at it again. Superwoman Mary Helen organized an event last weekend to help raise funds to electrify the new preschool building in the slum. GOOD LUCK and THANK YOU!! For more on the Preschool, including the history of how we built the building, see these pictures (below) or click here

I LOVE this blog - it talks about NGO operations in a great, plain-English way. One great post (post before last) has this to say: "Missionaries don’t try to do any soul-saving at first, spending a minimum of six months learning local language and culture. Mormons are renowned for their language skills. And once they have learned it, they stick around, spending years or even decades in country. They devote themselves to work in one particular place. Compare that to your average expatriate working in development, for a donor or implementing a project. The expat lives in a little bubble of fake-home, cushioned by consumable shipments, huge shipping allowances, and hardship pay. With air conditioning and heating to ensure they’re even in a different climate. And they stay in once place for approximately 35 seconds. Good people don’t have time to get great, and average people don’t even have time to get good. Complicated programs suffer as a result, and funding is biased toward thing...

In January, our private grant (the green part in the pie chart) is about to shrink down to half. We are ready to absorb cuts. But, there is one area where we really do need help: salary for the cleaning ladies. The grant covered their salary costs over the past four years. Each cleaning lady costs 1,000 rs a month (USD$23.00). If anyone is interested in funding one or both cleaning ladies, we'd LOVE to hear from you! leighanne(at)gmail.com or usha.rainbow(at)gmail.com

A new visitor to the school, Jennifer, gave us these great pictures to share, click here. The Naandi Foundation project team just finished the building. The pictures show the main building is all painted and beautiful! I heard from Usha Madam that she hired two new junior teachers, both with university degrees. This is a phenomenal increase in the teacher talent! Now she is training them to use child-centered methods. Thanks to fundraising by the Jayabheri families (thank you, Lakshmi and TT!) and Google Hyderabad Ex-Pats, Usha Madam was able to put windows on the preschool and lay new pipes to fix a problem in our waterworks. Q3 is looking good!

www.rainbowprimaryschool.com 21 August 2008 This is crazy cool! http://sarkari-naukri.blogspot.com/ A private individual is trolling all the Indian government websites for government job openings, including school teachers. He then puts them on a website for anyone to browse. *Then he offers readers a subscription option to feed these listings to anyone's mobile phone.* That helps overcome some of the barriers to finding this information. Here is an example, note that there are 600+ openings in the Punjab. In Andhra Pradesh (the state where the Rainbow School is located), there are thousands of openings. We need teachers. http://sarkari-naukri.blogspot.com/2008/07/teacher-recruitment-for-ssa-punjab.html

The reason why it took two years to build the school building was we never bribed. OK, from time to time, we bought lunch for the police who protected the land from various mobs the slumlord sent around. But we never "bribed with cash." Not even to get an electricity connection. You can imagine how crazed this made my Indian staff. They had to spend long hours explaining their "crazy American" to other Indians. I carried around a copy of the 1978 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and pulled it out from time to time. I talked about getting deported if I bribed. I got the impression some people did get a giggle out of the theatrics. Anything to amuse my bureaucrats! In the developing world, NGOs are vulnerable. They require either political godfathers or they have to bribe. This article is a great example of this: http://yoomilee.wordpress.com/2007/09/10/the-unwelcome-costs-of-running-an-ngo-in-india/ If I didn't already have the greatest job in the world (...

Here are the latest pictures! Q2 2008 Pictures

www.rainbowprimaryschool.com 23 July 2008 So I was driving to a winery with my friend Ward. We were discussing his friend in East Africa, a school headmaster who regularly researches and sends along suggestions to Ward out here in California. The headmaster doesn't use his own email address, just the internet cafe's email address. We talked about how this kind of casual, catch-as-catch-can internet use in the third world will really help our work! The next day, I got a note from Gowri teacher who is struggling to serve as the temporary headmistress while Usha Madam is visiting her son. It was from an internet center, sent by the owner of the center for Gowri (who never really got comfortable typing). "today M.E.O (Mandal Education Officer, Sharma Mohanchary) visied (sic) our school and charts,reports,dairys (sic),big books, visied (sic) registers,food,all good. M.E.O sharma sir. all teachers making lesson plans,activities." How cute is that!! Love Gowri teacher...

Generally, things are just chaos right now. Usha has been gone, we've had unexpected turnover with two teachers (for great reasons, they had to resign), there are more students, there is a huge water shortage and residents are out siphoning off our water, etc. etc. etc. Jenny went by to take pictures and see what is what with the situation on the ground. I miss the kids! These pictures are sublime. http://picasaweb.google.com/jenny309/RainbowElementarySchool See here for a video walk-through of Gowri teacher's class:

Yesterday, there was a fantastic article about youth giving to help kids in developing countries. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/14/MNON11I593.DTL http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif If you like that one, I've got a story that you'll love. PRESCHOOL school kids in Georgia raised funds for the Rainbow School! My second oldest buddy, Mary Helen, was my back door neighbor growing up. She is a college professor and mom now, in Georgia. Back in the day, we had a lot of hang out time at her house, and she drove me to school when we got to high school. Since she was two years older, had great legs, and did whatever she darned well pleased, she was my personal hero. Every holiday, when we're all back home, our kids play together in the driveway at her mom's house, still the back door neighbor to my parent's house. While our kids were whacking at a Christmas pinata in the driveway over December, we got to talking about the Rainbow School and...

A HUGE shout out to Indiacorps, which is addressing the near-intractable problem of bad/no delivery of public services: http://www.indicorps.org/volunteer-work.php?page_id=4 To my stateside Desi community - I highly, highly recommend this one!

www.rainbowprimaryschool.com By popular demand, stories on three of the students, "my kids," are republished here in shorter form. More pictures can be found at: http://picasaweb.google.com/leighanne/OurStoryInPictures 1) Baleshwari, (past) leader of the Alpha Girls of 5th Standard (far left, below) The harsh politics of having a girl in a very conservative Hindu area is that dowry is enormous. To marry off a girl will likely put a family in debt for twenty years. As such, lots of little girl babies don't make it past their first few days in the slum. If they do survive, with somewhat considerate parents, they are still worked from sun up to sun down. The incentive is to make them into perfect little servants to give their future in-laws no trouble. Spunky girls have it rough. Baleshwari, 13 years old, is an incredibly bright girl with a lot of common sense and spunk and striking light brown eyes. Her mother tried to send her off to work when she turned 12, but she...

www.rainbowprimaryschool.com My buddy Ross is capturing important knowledge on how to help kids get access to quality education in Hyderabad: http://rossbaird.wordpress.com/ Read his blog!

The Rainbow School's headmistress (principal) is here! She is in California visiting her son who works at Hewlett Packard in Sunnyvale, California. I took Usha and family bowling, we've visited a few times at her son's house. Friday, I took Usha Madaml her husband (Rao Sir) and her grandson (Vivek) to my house to make Biryani . We went shopping for herbs (cilantro) and peppers at the local grocery store, too. At the store, she had her first face-to-face with a Dungeness crab and talked to the sushi chef, Benjamin. Usha is so curious, so fun to be with. She says "I love America!"

I wanted to give a shout out to my awesome buddy, Anna Somos Krishnan at SKS Microfinance. She is still in Hyderabad, tending the vines out there. The stories in the link below are about three of the 1.3 million clients SKS has in Andhra Pradesh. Medak, where these stories take place, is a direct, one-hour drive north of our slum. Some parents of students at the Rainbow School are from Medak, others are from Maboobnagar. These people are true economic refugees. SKS is helping to keep others out of the slum. These stories are about people in rural villages that created small, sustainable industries thanks to microlending. Click here for the SKS Microfinance Client Stories. SKS is funded, in part, by UNITUS which is back here in California. Big props to UNITUS and SKS and Anna.

I met with Usha this morning, and we talked over the first cup of chai I've had in months. Her amazing daughter-in-law (also Usha) is a physicist and pretty darn good cook. Usha told me the government did not come through on its promise to pay for two more vidya volunteers plus the Early Childhood Education Center teacher (preschool). Maybe this is just a delay, but I'm a bit worried. I contacted our India partner, and she will work with our new mandal education officer, who is a terrific man and gentle soul: Chary! He worked as the number two at the district office, we talked daily. I don't have a picture of him, he was gone, but you can see the rest of the government officers in this photo album: http://picasaweb.google.com/leighanne/RangaReddySSAPersonnelApril2008

This is a fantastic article from the NYT today about life in communities just like Masthan Nagar. "Outside, the Slum." pdf Something that always troubled me, the housing for high tech execs was billed as "safe," but as the maids and security guards came from the slum just outside, all the health issues in that slum were brought into this "safe" place.

I will post pictures next, USHA IS HERE! She is the archetype South Indian lady, all saris and sandlewood. Our very own headmistress, Usha Rani, is here in Sunnyvale, California for three months to visit her son and grandson! We're going to have a party (end of June) for all the American supporters to see her.

A few of our end users! With the school, there was a lot of "letting go." We had to let go of assumption. We had to listen to the end users: our students, their parents and their teachers. We had to let go of grand plans and develop a vision of a school that met real needs with a real small set of resources. Backyard veggie garden? Goats ate it, we couldn't afford a fence to protect it. Classes for slow learners and gifted students? No floor space for both - we had to pick one. The school is now a collaborative, beautiful, resilient end product. It is far from the grand visions, but far better. The experience taught me how to think; letting go gives limitless creativity. Holding on too tight made for brittle thinking, it made me afraid of outside opinion and challenges. Letting go is sad, it is tough, it was wrenching for a Westerner with control issues. But letting go gives freedom, it gives limitless possibilities. We found the best ways to serve our end ...

The number one lesson learned: Get partners - rugged, go-to, and knowledgeable partners – then leverage the partnerships to meet needs. None of us can go it alone. We always have a list of the partner organizations is posted (right hand side), and pictures of our partners and the government in our photo albums (right hand side). We have many kinds of partners: financial partners, silent partners, volunteer partners, even a handful of Zen-like district government babus. This post is dedicated to the: "TOP TEN PLUS ONE MOST AMAZING MOMENTS IN RAINBOW SCHOOL PARTNERSHIPS!" 1) Number one is Ravi-Srinu. Ravi and Srinu are our silent partners. They're connected. In a good way. They know the honest people in government and how to work levers of power to make things happen. I met Ravi through friends. He is casual for a huge, big land baron. He introduced me to Srinu. My favorite moment from this partnership was the first time meeting Srinu in his office. He guided me ...

I am sad to report my days here in India are fast running out. The school and the staff are in good hands with our many, many partner NGOs. To take the worry wrinkles away, I'd like to introduce the Rainbow School supporters to our bureaucrats. They do the best they can, promise! http://picasaweb.google.com/leighanne/RangaReddySSAPersonnelApril2008

We're moving into "Monitoring!" Any visitor can help by answering these questions when they visit the school Monitoring Masthan Nagar Government Primary School If any answers are NO: contact Leigh Anne Gilbert, leighanne(at)gmail.com and describe the problem. 1. Are the teachers present during working hours? 2. Are the teachers engaged in active teaching? 3. Are the teachers using activities, playtoys, games, charts, etc. – the child-centered methods? 4. Is the Headmistress present during working hours? 5. If no, is she off on school business or on leave? 6. Are the facilities clean? (including the bathroom) 7. Do you see drinking water for the children? 8. Is the school full? 9. If not, why are there fewer children? (holiday, case of fevers, or no answer?) 10. Was this monitoring fun? Thank you!

Here is a link to a fantastic, fantastic article on our district collectors here in India. Must read!

Plot #2 for the school was the result of Plot #1's small size. We've got 90% of the approvals, the last one is incoming!

This flier is from our local government Revenue officer, she is fantastic! She is supporting the MV Foundation's work to get all children to school, including in Masthan Nagar. It says that it is illegal to hire children under the age of 15 for work, and those who do will be prosecuted. Thank you MV Foundation!

To quote "The Anchorman," Stay Classy, Masthan Nagar! First there is new building, and someday we will have paint on the walls! And the mid-day meal is now delivered by the Naandi Foundation, I had lunch there on Wednesday it was fantastic (spicy). Now we have the maximum number of teachers the government will pay for (five) plus private teachers, so all the kids are happy and well tended to. This is a long way from our first days on the dirt floor in the bamboo shed in 2005. We classy now! Then Pavan came! He's amazing. He's the only certified Montessori teacher in INDIA for birth to teens. Others have certification for other ages, he's the only one for all ages. I found him on-line. I was searching for Montessori tools in India. www.pinkpentagon.com NOTE: Shameless Plug Below He came up on the right hand side as a Google adwords advertisement (thank you, Google). RESUME BLOG POST Thanks to an anonymous donor, we were able to order a ton of Montessori to...

WOW. In less than one week, the government bureaucracy delivered all four points from the DC. 1) We have electricity at the school. 2) Usha Madam gets to stay at the Masthan Nagar headmistress post, she will not be transfered back to her previous post at our sister school. 3) 2.4 laks for the building on Plot #1 is in writing in our file, sitting at the SSA Engineer's office, ready for disbursement when we give him the bills. (Thank you, Raja.) 4) After one year, we received confirmation from the Joint Collector's office that the boundaries for Plot #2 are secure. We can start to move forward on the preschool!! Here was the text message today from my new favorite government officer, the Second Joint Collector. "I got the report from the RDO regarding plot no.2. I will process it today." ... he is very good.

We got the call, the DC wanted to meet at 3 PM on Wednesday. Ismail and I ran to the district office, met with everyone at the SSA office, then tracked down the DEO to walk over to the DCs office. The Joint Collector was there, the DC sat us all down, went over each of the four points and BOOM. We got everything. I'm not shocked. Praveen Prakash is very good. After six months, I think he trusts us. Usha stays at Masthan Nagar another year, we got a new electricity connection, 2.4 laks more for the building fund (the toilet block was expensive, $2,000 U.S.!) and the Joint Collector will come and see about Plot #2 on Saturday at 11:00 AM. NEXT UP? The DC hasn't seen the last of me. See http://rangareddyeducationgroup.blogspot.com We are two months before a ban on transferring bureaucrats (due to Indian election laws, forbids any transfers one year before elections). We have NO SSA officer to run the SSA program for the district. We request the DC to get us a new SSA of...

Here is what I gave the collector last night: Here is what happened: The DC's office went on tour of a far, far away part of the district, so the usual Thursday 11:00 AM hearing in the conference hall never happened. I came back at 5:00 PM, sat my usual seat in the waiting area, and chatted with the usual sweet-natured, competent front office staff. There was a crowd by the front door, which is not unusual. I spoke with SSA staff waiting to discuss the latest with the DC, then I made a new friend who is a bureaucrat with a tax office. At 5:05, the union boss for the office workers showed up. He demanded the front-office staff leave! As per their union rules, the work is 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM, but the DC works his staff until 9:00/10:00 PM. The union boss 1) either thinks this makes the rest of the office look bad or 2) thinks someone is actually unhappy at the DC's office. The little fellows of the front office shuffled all the paperwork into bundles for the overnight safe...

We have enjoyed 2008 very much. There is one - big - item left on our to-do list. There is a plot of land, 182 sq yards, we received permission to build on in April 2007. We even got money for the construction (from the government). We've waited 10 months for permission to build. Why? This land is next door to land that belongs to a State ministry (tourism). Our district collector may solve the paperwork stalemate tomorrow. Keep your fingers crossed! Here is the video on the whole story.

2008 is "The Year of Enormous Change" for the school. The building will be ready on 1 February 2008. We're a moving on uppp, to the sky.... to a deluxe school building in the skyyyyy!!! Many, many, many, many, many thanks to our new contractor, Vijay Kumar (Usha Madam's brother-in-law). Here he is with the Naandi team, including Bhartee, our Naandi engineer. We are only one month behind our original schedule. (Our old contractor walked off the job in October 2007, long story and it wasn't really anyone's fault.) THANK YOU VIJAY! THANK YOU VIJAY! THANK YOU VIJAY! THANK YOU VIJAY! THANK YOU VIJAY! Classes moved into the first floor already. The poojas took place on 2 January 2008: a "Christian Pooja" and the "Hindu Pooja." Prayers were said in many languages and coconuts were cracked to scare all evil spirits away Here is Kalpana teacher cracking her coconut at the Hindu pooja. That same day, the Naandi Foundation started delivery of...

The International School of Business, lower school, visited the Rainbow School and brought GOODIES! Thank you, Carole Farrand and family, for arranging this!!

Please click below for a wonderful Financial Times article on our main partner organization, the Naandi Foundation. Naandi is headquartered here in Hyderabad. Financial Times Article