Riju International Pre School

Riju International Pre School is at 6/11, Tansi Nagar in Velachery. It’s a busy area of Chennai, so there is always something going on outside. Inside the school, though, we try to keep things a bit more focused. We have two floors, with the littler ones usually staying on the ground level. There’s a small porch where the kids leave their sandals before coming in. We’ve got shelves full of old books and toys that have been used by many kids over the years. The walls are covered in their drawings, some of which are just scribbles, but we keep them up anyway. Lunchtime is the loudest part of the day because everyone is talking at once in the common area. We have a small sink for the kids to wash their hands before they eat. It takes a long time to get twenty kids through the line, but we make sure it gets done every single day without fail. Velachery can get quite flooded during the heavy rains, so we’ve had to deal with that a few times, but we always manage to get back to normal pretty quickly. The teachers are local ladies who know the families in Tansi Nagar well. We don't have a big corporate office or anything like that; it’s just us here on the ground. We spend our time making sure the children are learning their basics.