During May Mumbai turns into a different world: it’s becoming extremely hot and extremely empty (relatively meant). Many migrants from the rural areas of India go home to visit their families and to escape the urban heat. Our Youth Empowerment Program as well as the computer classes take a break until June to start fresh and enthusiastic into the rain season.

But our kids don’t want to take a break. They still want to learn and do activities with us. So we decided to keep the doors of the Community Center and office open for them. And we started with a lot of new specialities in our program.

One new project is the guitar class. After we asked our friends and fans on Facebook we happily received six guitars from our very generous supporters – thank you for this! On the 7th May we finally started with the weekly music session. Smit, a passionate guitar player who came up with the great idea of starting a guitar class, volunteered to teach 12 kids. “Some of them are very talented. I’m sure in just one month with regular practice they will play much better than I do”, Smit said after the first session.

The rest of the week the Community Center is open for the kids to use the library, computers and the new table games we have. Our new project coordinator Sana looks after them. A few times a week some kids come together to start Carrom competitions. For all Non-Indians: Carrom is a table game from India and is also called finger billiard. Two teams of two people each play against each-other and try to “pocket” their disks into the corners, using the fingers.

And since we realised in the last months how much the kids love to draw, paint and photograph and how talented they are, we expanded the art class to three sessions per week. Now our Office is more colourful than ever before.

Beginning of June the Youth Empowerment Program will start again but the activities won’t finish. In fact we are thinking about new activities all the time. If you have an idea or you want to start a project like for example Smit did, get in contact with us: [email protected]