I’ve been asking friends and friends of friends to volunteer at the center. Today we had a volunteer from Meghalaya come into the center. In the past I’ve noticed the learners are somewhat insensitive towards other cultures, especially referring to them as “Chinese” and mocking their language. I was quite nervous how this interaction would be for them but I’m really glad that it happened. As expected the learners had all sorts of questions of this new volunteer - whether she was Chinese, what language she spoke, where she was from etc. We have had this India map puzzle that many of the children have done at the center and this came in very handy when she had to explain where Nagaland and Meghalaya were. There was also some amount of mocking and laughing via the Chinese language that the learners had picked up from TV. None of this was really malicious and mostly just general curiosity and their jovial nature and it was nice that the volunteer too took it this way. It also really offered us a great way to have dialogues about how we can be more sensitive to other cultures.  It was awesome to see by the end of the day the learners lost their initial inhibitions and were quite happy to connect and engage with this volunteer. I also felt that perhaps the learners had learnt something about a different culture and I’m really glad that they had this exposure.