This is the April 2011 newsletter to all our MSF School sponsors and supporters to thank you for your help. Please write back to us and tell us what you think.

How do you drink? Sravani, aged six, shows you how we do it in India. Bottles and cups are never put to the lips - from an early age we learn how to do it like this.

Most children bring bottles of water to school but we now have two water-coolers and she is demonstrating with the school cup.

We challenge you to try this yourself - right now! It's harder than it looks, so better not be wearing your best clothes.

Here is Vamshi aged four being taught his English letters by a class six girl, Mahalakshmi. Why English? Well the untouchables of India see it as a way out of the cycle of ignorance that locks them into the caste system. The English-educated middle classes with their keyboard skills find work, the scheduled castes/tribes (SC/ST) remain uneducated servants, labourers, street-sweepers.

A recent Times of India article puts it like this:
"The Supreme Court may have touted English as the flagbearer of knowledge economy but the role of the Queen's language as a "social leveller" is witnessing a renewed push for English education among weaker sections.

Six decades after independence, there is a newfound zeal among intellectuals that English will not only equip SCs/STs for "new economy jobs" but also aid them in breaking free from the pernicious caste system."

The school year finished mid-April, which left our building free for the school Principal Lavanya to run a six-week sewing class for local mothers and unemployed young women.

We have hired the two machines – treadle, because we don't always have power during the day – and in return for use to make their own clothes we ask them also to make up school uniforms for our children from cloth we supply.

We will probably hang on to one of these machines in future and use it in our 'evening classes' where we teach keyboarding and English letters to the community women.

Many thanks to our good friend Indira Burgul of Kukatpally. In February she helped to fund a two-day 'EYE CAMP' and every child in our school was checked by a team of Medical Optometrists, and glasses or eye-drops or nutritional supplements provided free.

Indira has also funded a special school lunch like the one you can see in our video here.

This is the sort of activity that is making the MS Foundation well-known far beyond the boundaries of our community.

We were asked by children at Saltwood Primary School in Kent to send a picture of our playground.

Well here it is after school time - the pink building is the school (behind the yellow taxi that brought me) and the boys are starting a quick game of cricket.

On the right is the hole the community have dug to get to the water pipe that passes through the alley, but it only flows for two hours every other day.

The girls are further down the alley playing a bare-foot game of 'cat-catches-rat'. Soon I hope to make video clips of their wonderful clapping games.