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