Women Of Action: Vaishal Nitturkar Part 1

Vaishal Nitturkar, Founder and Director of The Gyan Tree/Kidology

Interviewed by Kashay Sanders , VOICE 4 Girls Program Development Assistant

Vaishali Nitturkar is a Hyderabadi native who attended the Central Institute of Commerce and received her formal education in Commercial and Computer Practice. Vaishali and her husband lived in Kenya for one year, before moving to Sydney, where she pursued various corporate jobs. Always feeling like she wanted to serve others somehow in her life, she discovered her passion for kids after the birth of her own children. She soon quit her corporate job and began a daycare center. This spun off into her self-made organization Kidology, which promotes the free expression and the holistic development of children. Kidology is now the subset of another self-made organization, The Gyan Tree, which takes a broader look at the role all stake holders play in the child’s education. Vaishali estimates that she was worked with over 750 children. Her goal is to touch at least 1000 families in her lifetime. Right now, she is the only employee of the The Gyan Tree/Kidology and plans to keep it that way, as it allows her to continue making her children a priority in her life.

                          

What were you doing when you were in Australia?

Vaishali: For the first eight years I worked for different corporates in project management, accounting, admin and many, many things. My first venture with kids started with my own daughter. When my elder daughter was 1 year and 4 months and I cut her a papaya in two halves. Then I asked her, “What shape do you see?” and she responds, “I can see a pentagon”. And I thought, What? But a papaya is a circle. I asked her again, “What shape do you see?” She said pentagon. So, finally I asked her, “Show me the pentagon.” And she showed me the inner core, which actually is a pentagon. That was the moment I realized that we talk a different language than children do. Unless we match that, we’re really not doing justice to their thinking. We need to give them that platform and facilitate that learning which is beyond a circle.  I said, OK, now that I have my own child, I especially want to work with children. At that point, I resigned from my corporate job and started Kidology.  Kids teach us so much. They are such wonderful human beings. Somewhere down the line, with schooling and college, we lose all of that.

 

Was the decision to leave your secure job and step out on your own hard?

The decision to resign was easy because there was a trigger moment where I thought, my child needs me. When I resigned I really did not think, “What am I going to do?” I left and spent some quality time with my kids. I wanted money and meaning. It took 6 months before I realized I would open a daycare center. Getting kids to come to the daycare center actually wasn’t an issue. Some people loved that I was an Indian woman and would expose the kids to a new way of thinking. Other people did not like it—it was probably insecurity and unfamiliarity with my culture. But, once they saw what I was doing and that there was a change in their kids’ attitude, they were on my side. I was happy because I was with my daughters and able to earn something. So it struck a good balance.

Tell me a bit about your job running a daycare center in Sydney.  I know you said you wanted to make it unique from your average day care. How did you go about doing that? 

As a migrant in Australia, one thing I wanted to stress was an acceptance of other people. Tolerance and empathy are also important. A lot of the focus was on multicultural activities, like introducing the kids to different continents and cultures.  In one activity I conducted, I gave them two drawings of a landscape. I told them to color one of them in your FAVORITE color only. The landscape had about six different things in it: house, grass, river, the sun, mountains etc. The next time, I asked them to color it using the natural colors of the landscape. We put the pictures side by side and asked, “Which one looks better?” and all the kids said, “ The one with more colors is more beautiful.” They said that the picture with one color was boring because everything was only that color. I explained that, just like in the world, we are so different, tall, short, fat, skinny, lighter or darker skin—that is what makes the world so beautiful. If we were all exactly clones, then the world would be boring.

What tenets do you focus on specifically? As in, what ABOUT children do you focus on?

Vaishali:. Through the growth of kidology, I have streamlined, and come down to 5 “E”s that I’ve developed. They are: Empathy, Energy, Ethics, Enquiry and Enterprise. Ethics and Empathy are meant to address instances of violence and aggression. Enterprise deals with being resourceful, risk-taking, adapting quickly and not grudging and complaining. Energy focuses on spiritual, creative, physical and emotional energy. There’s a fitness part to it physically as well as mentally. And through Enquiry, we have progress.

Enquiry is about asking a question and not just accepting whatever comes in front of you.

Explain a bit about how and where you work. How did you start to build Kidology in Hyderabad?

I started by running reading programs for children. I do arts and crafts classes with children. I also do what I call “Person Development.” I don’t do personality development because personality covers only some of the attributes of being a person. But Person Development is inside, out. It is the complete development of being human. Then I worked with other organizations. For example, I am a visiting faculty member of the Center for Organization Development. Since I went there, I encouraged them to focus on schools. From there, I developed a school leadership program.  From there, we developed the workshops to train teachers, parents etc.

When we first got to India, I was helping my husband with his ventures and it’s only in the last 6 months that I considered scaling up Kidology.  Kidology now has become a part of The Gyan (Knowledge) Tree, which is also my creation. With Gyan Tree, I am trying to reach out to stakeholders, like school principals, teachers and parents. Kidology was focused more working with children. And then I thought I need to work with the other stakeholders as well so they in turn can develop the 5 “Es.” I needed to clone myself.

So my best shot was to create teachers & parents who would think and works like me! So I train and mentor them .

 

Stay TUNED for Part 2 of Kashay’s interview with Vaishali!!! 

Catching Up With Camp Counselor Manal Omer

Manal, counselor from Camp VOICE 2011.

Manal Omer is one of the amazing counselors that helped get Camp VOICE off the ground this past summer. She is currently completing her final year at Shadan Women’s College in Hyderabad, India and has been excepted to work with Microsoft after graduation.

We caught back up with Manal and asked her to talk about how Camp VOICE impacted her last summer. Her story is below: 

It was my first day at the camp  and as I entered IQRA MISSION HIGH SCHOOL I found little girls playing on the grounds. They all were almost half an hour early to the camp! I was quiet nervous actually. But little did I know that  these little girls are going to change me in ways I never thought I would and they were no ordinary girls.

At the end of that day, a group of girls from 7^th class came up to me and said “ We’re glad to have you as our counselor.”

That one statement made me realize that this was not just a summer camp for these girls , it was an opportunity for them to be something. To do something they were always told they could not!

At first, none of them would speak up. These girls were brought up in families where every minute they were told that “girls aren’t supposed to raise their voices or talk loudly”.  I knew that because I was brought up the same way.

My first move was to make the girls realize that my family had almost the same thinking as their family. Initially it was only me sharing my stories. However, as the days passed by I couldn’t get the girls to keep quiet.

It was so amazing seeing all of them glow when they knew the answer to something or when they had something to share.

I still remember the day clearly when we took the girls to Deloitte for a field trip. As we entered Banjara Hills all the girls were staring out of the windows and when they saw City Centre they went stunned. “WOOOOOWW” one of them said as she explained this was the first time she’d ever seen such tall buildings.

Visiting Deloitte in Hi Tech City  was an amazing experience. The girls had so many questions! Questions even I wouldn’t come up with.  After visiting Hi Tech City  more girls started coming up to me asking career related questions like “what do I have to do to become an engineer like my brother.”

As the camp was coming to an end,  I had many parents tell me how they could see the changes in their daughters. They told me how their daughters were already excited for next year’s camp.

The biggest take away for cap for me was when some of the girls came up and told me that they want to be like me someday.  They said they wanted to be a computer engineers and teach girls just the way I taught them.

That conversation was definitely the best part of the camp for me.  I didn’t know that duration of one month was enough to get someone thinking about what they want to do with their lives.  It amazed me that their ideas and dreams had been jump started.

Camp VOICE was more than me teaching the girls something. They  were  teaching me so much!

It would be completely accurate to say that camp changed the lives of so many girls last summer

I was one among them.

How India Challenged Me To Explore What I Thought I Knew

By : Averil Spencer , Graduate of Dartmouth College 

I don’t think anyone could have prepared me for the emotional and sensory onslaught of India. Life here provides me with everything I wanted coming out of university: challenges, influx of new information, and fluidity.

But, what I hadn’t expected was exactly how much I would learn, and how much the people here would challenge the feminist framework I have brought with me. In college, it was easy for things to be binary: black or white, right or wrong, good or bad. Real life isn’t like that and when I first arrived, I suddenly found myself interacting with 15-year-old girls who were engaged and would not graduate high school.

Even today their parents believe they are doing what is best for their daughters socially and economically, and while most of the girls want to go on to higher education, there are some that just want to get married.

Who am I to tell them they have to go to intermediate (11^th and 12^th grade) or get a job after school?

After 6 months of working closely with these girls in slum communities, I realized that my western education and expectations did not fully transfer to the lives and goals of girls in India. Go figure. I had to be patient and learn from them about the cultural and religious contexts that make up their lives.

While there are some practices here that I believe are blatantly wrong such as child marriage and domestic abuse, there are also practices that I thought were horrible but when immersed in the community I began to understand why women face these restrictions. The burka is seen as a symbol of oppression in the US but here, there are days when I wish I had a burka because it gives you anonymity to move freely about a city overflowing with people. It carves out some personal space in a country with 1.3 billion people and keeps the lecherous eyes of “roadside Romeos” off you.

Being in India changed the context within which I understand issues of gender and equality.

As a westerner, I wanted to apply absolutes to what I was learning and experiencing, but I couldn’t. I had to adjust how I looked at religion, especially Islam. I had to push myself to understand why communities imposed harsh restrictions on girls (generally related to issues of safety), but also not become complacent about the glaring inequalities facing girls.

Living and working in India transformed how I look at issues of equality and highlighted the fact that empowerment, the overused buzzword of development, cannot be externally manufactured.

Living within the gray space of feminism and women’s rights in India has illuminated my western biases, expectations, and beliefs, and showed me that as an outsider, all I can do is provide a forum, a safe space, where Indian girls can explore and develop this skill set. Giving girls information about subjects and their rights is important but not as important as the processes of conflict management, negotiation, and leadership.

Imbuing girls with these skills will help her negotiate the gray space she lives in, and allow her to being to shape her own future within any constraints and/or desires she might have. Once I understood this, my purpose in India as well as mission for VOICE became clearer.

There are still many aspects of culture and religion that I disagree with but living and working in India has allowed me to be more open to issues and try to understand multiple sides. My role now is to provide the next generation of Indian women with the tools to shape their own futures and decide their own course of action.