I learned a lot of things in Ramana's Garden. If you talk with any of the volunteers they will tell you that being there can often be a humbling. We all go there with our own agendas: this might include to help, to support or even to find a kind of a 'family', to love and be loved, to feel useful and organically experience life within a community. And the kids know this. They are orphans, used to have people come and go off their lives, one day telling them to brush their teeth and the next one saying goodbye forever. But life is. And these wild flower are growing healthily and they get nurtured by peoples' cultures, their songs, their accents/ languages and their ways of behaving. They open and close like clapping clams. Embracing you, pleasing you, testing you, pushing your boundaries and loving you truly... Oh these kids, they know how to give so much. So rich inside they are. Encouraging them to receive has been quite a challenging thing.
There were many ways to help out over there, help at the garden, cafe, with tuition or other things, but from early on I decided that it was better for all that I won't mix roles up, especially the role of the 'teacher' with that of a 'therapist', so to the managers disappointment I needed to say no to that.
Things generally were not so easy in the beginning with getting things ιn a flow and I had to grow flexible to adjust with the organisation whilst keeping the standards high for a therapeutic intervention. You see, the right recipe for a therapeutic intervention asks for some very basic technical ingredients: an appropriate space, a scheduled time, props and obviously at least two people to attend it, a therapist and a client. All else can build from that. Well, when I arrived at the orphanage, there were no appropriate rooms for therapy, no specific schedule to arrange an appropriate time and no one available to help me sort things out.
To that, please add this to your picture: The kids along with the staff and the volunteers are all part of a community, which requires that every individual in it is working in several posts within its premises. This is crucial to its self-sustainability. So even if you are 10 years old and you have dramatherapy scheduled at 1pm with a lady from Europe, if all of a sudden another kid falls ill and it is required to take their place helping at the café, it is the latter that you will do indeed. You would leave the white dressed lady to dance her pirouettes and bite her plats (I didn't really have any) and help your community, wouldn't you? This is of course what anyone would do and what did happen - quite often... Please bear in mind, that we are talking about an organisation in India, which is not government funded and it really depends on donations and the hard work from its staff, volunteers and kids.
This is no child labour. Even you as a kid looked after your younger sibling, washed the dishes, cooked a meal or polished your dad's shoes every once in a while, no? So imagine this is a biiig family with lots of that kind of demands. And ok, it is true that the kids learn a million things and grow awesome skills through this eco-community structure. But can you imagine trying to schedule a therapy session in this context? Kind of a nightmare. In the end we found a system of scheduling the sessions that was failing us - let's say roughly - only about 35% of the time... :S But in the long term it did work well enough. The kids knew that they had their own scheduled time and that I was waiting to meet them at a particular appropriate room, at a particular time. And this is how the therapeutic context were met... :)
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