Annual Days Galore!

In Indian schools they have a celebration of the school and the children’s work once a year called Annual Day. Every class prepares an act, which is usually dancing, and it is performed in front of the parents. It is a very big deal and lots of preparation goes into rehearsals, costumes, staging, lighting and music. We ended up going to both the Annual Day at our school and at Sarah and Niamh’s school, which was fun!

Our trip to Sarah and Niamh’s school was quite unexpected, as were just told to get in the car by our host, and were given little information about where we were going and why. There were 4 people stuffed onto the back seat of the car, and the journey seemed to take forever, but the most exciting part was when it started raining! It was the first time it had rained since we got here, so we took full advantage of it and stuck our heads right out of the car windows. Unfortunately this meant that we looked like drowned rats when we arrived at the school, where everyone else looked amazing and so beautiful. It was quite a bit surprise on both sides when we turned up; for us because there was a huge stage with lights, music and hundreds of chairs, I don’t really know where we expected to be taken but it certainly wasn’t to this massive concert! The kids were also surprised because 2 more white people had turned up out of the blue! There was a lot of dancing, one of the best dances was definitely the one choreographed by Sarah with UKG, they were so cute! The dancing was so good though and all of the kids join in which is so nice.

Our Annual Day was a few days later, and it was pretty underwhelming compared to Sarah and Niamh’s. Vinay assured us that they usually do it a lot better, but they are saving money to build a new classroom, so they did it very low-key. There was some very sweet dancing and singing from the younger classes and 2nd standard did an odd dance which involved a boy dressing up as a clown. The older classes did a few very impressive dances as well. I think we know 6th standard’s dance off by heart now because we've seen them practise it so many times and they always make us join in, which of course I’m amazing at! When the dancing was finished, Vinay introduced us to the parents and made us sound a lot better than we are! According to him, all the children will be fluent in French by the end of the year and will be expert keyboard players!



The most exciting thing about our Annual Day was that we wore our first saris, it was so cool! We had to get Sandia to tie them for us because it’s quite complicated, I can’t believe so many women wear them every day! It took us so long to get them on right and they were quite awkward to move in. All the teachers and pupils were very impressed with the saris, but every female teacher that we passed, stopped us to adjust something about them!