Mom's 2 rupees....or Mom's 2 cents.  I notice that I have not contributed my fair share to this blog and thus a few words now.
My big passion these days apart from the family and video work on mental health is.....learning Hindi. The absolute joy I feel when people laugh at me/with me while I try to put sentences together is more fun than I ever remembered it to be. People are so kind and patient with me and I feel so grateful for that.

A highlight of visiting Jaipur was seeing fabric come to life

The language is confusing for the sentence structure is completely different than English. But the really hard thing is that I can not read Hindi so I can not read about the rules. I have been teaching myself with podcasts and the help of all of India. I have started to take a few private lessons and that is great. I only want to speak Hindi so it is nice to be able to completely ignore all the written stuff...who needs it??? Hindi will allow me to volunteer as a doctor, in some capacity, because the places I want to work have patients from all over India and most do not speak English.  In what capacity I can volunteer my doctor skills has yet to be sorted out....but I promise to blog when I know more.

But why learn Hindi? Doesn't everyone know English In Delhi?  Absolutely not.  The government schools only teach English at most 1 hour a day so, for example, many of the kids on the park do not speak any English.  Tons of people that work in Delhi do not speak any English.

India has severely underspent in Education as compared to many other countries, such as China.  India did put resources towards the top echelon with the creation of the highly competitive Information Tech schools that are impossible to get into.

There is a big trend for families to send their kids to private school, no matter how poor they may be, in part so that they will learn English. The private schools teach in English all day except for the 1 class of Hindi.  I just learned that often a private school can cost as low as $2 dollars a month. 

Recently the government rolled out a new plan and committed new resources for revving up primary schools but no one seems that optimistic.

Taking a break while  recently filming on global mental health  in a Township of  South Africa  

Warmly, Delaney