Young India @ The Orphanage

Elementary classroom

The company I travel with has a foundation to give back to the world we travel. A bit of money from each trip goes into it to support cultural or charitable causes in the countries we visit. In South India it is an orphanage outside of Tanjore that we stopped at a couple of days ago. There are twoo children there age 5-17. There are also about 60 elderly people who are poor and have nowhere to go. The kids go to public school. The orpanage gets a small amount of money from the government and the rest come from privates sources like ours

The project we are paying for is toilets! Our foundation is big on sanitation. I have visited privies we've built in many countries now and even used one.  The school currently has 5 toilets and plans are to build another ten and the ten more as funds become available.
The kids here are not all true orphans. Many have been given up by families who couldn't feed them. More girls than boy as girls are seen as a liability. They require a dowery and will not be able to support parents in their old age..

The kids were lively. You could see the effects of prior malnutrition in their small sizes but the all seemed bright and OK now. We only saw the elementary kids as the high schoolers were in class in town. the elementary classes are held at the orphanage.  I interacted with a group of 5 or 6 boy. as always my iphone was a great icebreaker. They like the pictures. They were very intrigued by the pics of pizzas my family had made. They said their favorite sport was cricket which they loved. I demonstrated American foot ball and how the quarterback throws the ball. Even though I know no Tamil and they had very little English we managed to communicate as true sports fans!