Teaching Asha Staff

While the rest of the team were at Kalkaji being creative with the kids, Clare, Janet T and I were at Asha HQ where we had a day of teaching.  We had morning and afternoon sessions with different audiences but the same content.  The audiences were made up of the Asha staff along with Community Health Volunteers from various slums.

I started off - talking about diabetic lifestyle advice: Exercise, weight loss and diet.  I had a "good" table and a "bad" table where I asked them to sort out various foods I had bought. It was good fun - and I hope we got an important message across!

Clare then went on to talk about backs, knees and pregnancy, giving good advice about looking after ourselves, and then some simple exercises that we can do when various bits are aching!  The audiences were very receptive.  Clare was clearly talking about problems that they all experienced!

Janet then introduced them to issues of deaf awareness.  Most of them knew people with hearing loss but clearly had limited understanding of how to help or what services were available.  Janet shared her own experience to help them understand how deafness can be isolating and can be a barrier to education etc. We needed to explain why people born deaf cannot develop spoken language, and showed them some basic Indian Sign Language.