From 8^th - 12^th Feb 2002, the spotlights were on puppets, music, scripting and bread making at Namma Bhoomi! The Director of the "Bread and Puppet Theater" Peter Schumann and his daughter Maria Schumann led the workshop which helped children to explore their inner selves as well as their external environments.

The workshop was an eye opener to all the children and adults on how a lot can be achieved with waste materials, dry leaves, clay, colours, twigs, hay and grass. All these are available in plenty at Namma Bhoomi, the Regional Resource Centre of the Concerned for Working Children (CWC) where the workshop was held.

cWC is a secular, democratic, national, private development agency in Karnataka, India, which works exclusively on the issue of child labour and children’s rights. Namma Bhoomi (our land), houses 100 ex-child workers who learn vocational and life skills – and return to their villages, equipped with a viable vocation and a rights based education. Exposure to a wide range of performing and fine arts are an integral part of their learning experience. Renowned national and international artists have interacted with children in this process. Children have formed ‘Bhima Kala Ranga’ (Bhima art forum) at Namma Bhoomi and have many productions to their credit. Their Yakshagana performances based on mythologies and plays on the themes of ‘Plastic’ and on ‘AIDS’ have been repeatedly performed on public demand.

During the Bread and Puppet workshop, children worked in small groups simultaneously to prepare story lines, traditional hand puppets, masks and tall puppets – some as big as 12 feet – with papier-mache. They prepared musical instruments with broken tubes, pipes and discarded plastic bottles.

The finale was a workshop, which ended with a show. The show started with a long procession among the villages adjacent to Namma Bhoomi inviting the people of the community to attend the show. At the head of the procession was a big puppet cow operated by three children, followed by a couple of giant puppets unassisted by any visible operators! The show also had a hand puppet show and the programme ended with ‘Kanta stories’, which is a traditional form of story telling from painted narratives. The show ended with bread eating which was made by Peter – German unleveled bread that is been a tradition with him for long ages.

Peter said, " This is my first visit to India. The children here in Namma Bhoomi live and work in a very serene and tranquil environment. They have far less adolescent problems compared to what I have seen in the west in the present days". He encouraged children to work with their own environments, " I would say the more you approach the environment, you think of it as something that is as important as your words or as your own persuasions. When you allow it to do something, it persuades itself".