More similar than different…

Rajat, Gouri, Ashkay, Sameer, Amol, Ankar, Sanket, Vikrant and Laxman are students at a rural school in Shiragon 100kms from Goa in Maharashtra, India. They have gathered today at the SOLE near their school.

Isabella, Liat, Talia and Rebecca are Year 6 private school students in Melbourne, Australia.

Differences: language, environment, culture, economic background, religion…

Question: Who cares?

They chatted on Skype for half an hour and began to get to know each other. This was the first time (due to the time difference) that there has been an opportunity for a genuine connection between kids at my school and one of the SOLES. One previous interaction between kids was a once-off set up by Suneeta with a group who didn’t speak English, so the chat was through her translation. I thought it was wonderful at the time, but this is going to be even better!

They were bubbling with enthusiasm and kept saying how exciting, how much fun, how cool…They learned each others’ names and asked about school and sports. They sang their national anthems to each other. Best of all they arranged to meet again the next day. The second time was more relaxed and natural and I left them to it. I know that among other things, they talked about musical instruments and Rebecca is bringing her guitar to the next interaction! But the girls will write the next post themselves…

Some comments from the Australian kids:

• They’re not that different from us! (R)
• All kids have fun and learn stuff! (L)
• Instead of learning about them, we talked to them. (I)
• It was fun to talk to people who we thought were completely different and find how similar they are to us. (L)
• We’ve done the introduction now, we’ll be able to talk about more things next time. (T)
• I thought it might be difficult to talk to them because of cultural difference and background but it wasn’t. (R)
• You get nervous meeting new people anyway, and they’re across the world, but it was easy and fun.(R)
• My impression of Indian children was that they were all starving… I didn’t think about how similar they might be to us. (I)

I’d love to get some from the Indian kids too…