Sarnath

Sadly in Sarnath I got some sort of bug badly for the first few days. I didn't even have the energy to walk the little bit down the street to Dr. Jain's guest house for meals. Unfortunately those first few days were the ones where they visited the village schools and interacted with the children. I was able to see the main school in town and a performance done by the students, but I was unable to interact with them. Fortunately I was able to talk to Dr. Jain and learn a lot from him.
Dr. Jain set up these school to help the people in these small communities that have a poor literacy rate because many can not go to school. Even though there is a public school here, it would be far too far for them to travel to every day. Also the public schools here are not very good so many people who would want to send their children to schools would want to send them to private ones. But his are free. It is also a less jarring experience for the children to go to school in the same environment that they live in. They are not going far away with people that they do not know.
At his schools the children learn Hindi and math as well as English. They even have cultural activities like dancing and music. They do not have them as much as he would like and if he were to have more money available to him he would like to give more extra activities like art, sports, etc.
One very important thing that Dr. Jain has in place is at night there are older students and teachers to help the younger children with their homework. This is very important in areas where the parents are illiterate and unable to help their children. Without this, a lot of time would need to be spent the next day in class helping the children with the material they did not understand, which would cut down on the new material the teacher could teach.
Here even though the children are poor and do not have the same opportunities as the richer children, Dr. Jain is still helping them to learn skills for them to move forward in life.