Toy Library at Rotary’s Community Service Project, Kusumpur Pahari, 16th March 2013, Delhi

An oasis in the middle of one of Delhi’s biggest slum clusters, this community project serves the women and children through vocational training, creche and educational services. They have around 130 kids in total from the age group of 3-14 yrs, and Toybank has ensured toys and games for all of them. :)

Around 10 volunteers from IBM, GENPACT and Deloitte were there to initiate Delhi’s latest toy/games library. In order to have a good volunteer-children ratio, we held two sessions, one in the morning and the other post-lunch. The morning session had all boys, who quickly took to the excitement of bowling and construction blocks. While the youngest ones were busy matching shapes and alphabets, the older ones tried hard at challenging puzzles and board games. The girls in the afternoon too showed similar excitement for all of the above and also created some amazing clay craft.

The most popular toy was a medical kit that made rounds as the kids took turns to play ‘doctor-doctor’ :)

One could feel a tremendous amount of learning going on in the room, as the kids worked on word games, map puzzles and strategy games like chess and ‘chakraview’. The volunteers showed a good far-sight by spending time with the teaching staff on some complicated games. We hope that the time and energy that everybody has invested in this initiative, reaps learning benefits for a long time.

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