I tried something today that didn’t work as intended but it was great to learn something about the children. We’ve been having some complaints about some children smoking “beedi” at the center and many others have a fascination towards smoking. We quite often find them burning paper and pretending to smoke. We have tried to have some conversations around this but the children typically deny ever smoking. They understand that it is frowned upon and that it causes cancer but we never really have been able to properly discuss it at all. Today I tried to show the children what happens to our body when we smoke. We put some cotton in a plastic bottle and connected a tube on one end of the bottle. On the other end a lit cigarette was placed in a hole. The idea was to show the tobacco gathering in the cotton and see the tar that cigarettes leave in our body. I had seen some YouTube videos of it and the children were all excited to try this. We all went to a shop to buy a pack of cigarettes. The children were really excited about this and children we typically haven’t been able to connect with were all super curious. It seemed as though they were thrilled that an adult was willing to work with their curiosity around cigarettes. We lit a few cigarettes but we were not able to observe much of the tar gathering. We decided we would try again tomorrow before drawing any conclusions.  Though the intended result didn’t come through, I realised that during the time the cigarettes were being “smoked” by the bottle we were able to have a lot of conversations. Even though we weren’t able to see the tar the children were quite turned off by the amount of smoke that gathered in the bottle. They also noticed how bad the bottle and the cotton in the bottle smelled after the cigarettes were done. I learnt a lot about how much the children knew about these things and in some ways we had dispelled the taboo around the conversation. These children who are also not particularly interested in participating in many of the other center activities were all happy to sit around and try different things with the cigarette experiment. I feel that we really need to think of activities that the children can get excited about; if the interest and curiosity is there we can do so much more. This is something we’ve seen time and again.