Journalism Workshop

Nidhi and I spent the past week with a group from an organization in Delhi that serves underprivileged girls who were here for a workshop on journalism that Nidhi's father had organized. There were about 40 of them, and they were all around 16. They were really nice, but unfortunately couldn't really speak English, so I wasn't able to communicate with them. The workshop was held at a private school up in the mountains, about 10 km from Solan called KTS (they said it stood for "Know Thy Self", interesting name...) and the 30 some-odd students there also participated. Nidhi and I went there every day and listened to the presentations (or fell asleep, in my case, I couldn't understand them, and so it was sort of boring) in the morning, and then in the afternoons we led Creative Writing sessions. We all waked out into the woods and sat down to write stories and poems and relieve the tedium of old people talking about their jobs. Nidhi and I split the group into two groups, those that could speak a little English (about 7 of them) and those that couldn't (the other 30ish).
My group was fun, I explained in English and then one of the teachers translated for them just to make sure it made sense. Then they translated their stories/poems for me and read them in Hindi for each other. Some of the stories were really nice, and I could tell that the poems were too, but those were harder to judge because so much of poetry is in the language, which I couldn't understand.
And afterwards we would play games, they taught me Cricket (everyone's obsession) which I've decided is the lazy man's baseball - you only have to run between two posts instead of all the way around the bases, and if you hit the ball far enough (the equivalent of a home run) they just assume that you would have run back and forth six times so you don't even have to move at all. But maybe all the sitting around and not moving was because half the time the kids couldn't hit the ball (not like I was much better. Whatever).
We also played Anthakshi which is a fun game in which one team sings a song and then the other team has to sing a song that begins with whatever letter the first song ended in. Of course I couldn't participate, but it was fun to watch.
The girls were really nice, even though I couldn't really communicate. They were all about our age, 16-17, but they looked so much younger. Maybe it's because Nidhi and I feel/look more mature after UWC (I have noticed that, even with other people. I think UWC does something to us, more than other places) but it did seem strange. There was one girl who looked especially young - she said she was 16 but I would have sworn that she was half that.
Sadly, they left a few days ago, and they were all tearful to go, but we promised to visit them in Delhi, so we'll get to see them again in July. Yay!