Helping hand from Vancouver

In an unique instance of noble venture, some of the school going kids in Vancouver Island in Canada decided to use some of the money they saved to send some gifts in the form of schools supplies to their brothers and sisters at the Singpho Pre-Primary School which is being run at Ketetong at Margherita subdivision of Tinsukia District of Assam, India. Moreover the church congregation of St. Andrews Anglican church provided a financial assitance towards the renovation of a building to be used as the school building for the Singpho school. Members of an internaitonal NGO Fertile Ground Mr. Kel Kelly and Mrs. Peggy Cartswell along with their local facilitator for Assam Ms. Pompy Ghosh recently visited the school and delivered the gifts to the students and the donation to the community. The students of the school also staged a nice show by singing Singpho songs and dancing Singpho traditional dance.I really appreciate this noble endeavour by the small children from the Vancouver Island to support their counterparts in the Northeast India. I hope this venture paves the way for a lovely bond between the children of two different countries.

Working towards Education for All

In an effort to promote the Mother tongue based Multilingual Education Programme for the linguistically disadvantaged tribal minority children, a Singpho Pre-primary school has been set up in Ketetong, of Margherita subdivision under Tinsukia district in Assam in September 2009. The school aims at basic literacy skills to the Singpho children in their own mother tongue. Later it will help them to transit to the mainstream education through a transitional programme. This is the result of five years of hard work in the form of conducting baseline surveys on the community,conducting awareness raising about the necessity of MT education, training the community members to write small attractive story books in their own language which are being used at the school, preparing a culturally appropriate curriculum for the children, mobilizing resource for setting up of the school etc. This school is being run collaboratively by the Singpho Multilingual Education Programme Committee along with Department of Linguistics, Gauhati University, Summer Institute of Linguistics International.