Incentive

This is a working motorized car, made entirely out of recycled materials.

I have an 11-year-old friend in the basti. He's had some incredibly difficult circumstances in his life, including losing his father among many other trials. Perhaps as a result, he has hardly attended school, and can't read at all. But he can put together pieces of trash he finds here and there and make a car that runs!

Okay, it didn't run all that well. But it really did motor itself down the alleyway in our slum!  I was a really smart kid, and I never would have even thought of doing this. He paid a junk dealer 10 rupees (20 cents) to get a toy motor attached to some wheels from a broken and discarded toy car...and proceeded on his own to collect batteries, wires, a switch, a second set of makeshift wheels, and a styrofoam block and then put in all together in a way that the car actually runs. It took him a few months to finally do it after he first got the little motor, but he did it.

If you have any ideas or resources to help Aftab continue to improve upon his cars, he would love to hear them. I started teaching him to read Hindi a few weeks ago, and he's recently been motivated by the promise that if he learned how to read then he'd be able to learn more about making cars. So any material you come up with would help in more than one way. (Don't worry about it being in English – one way or another I'll figure out how to translate the relevant points into Hindi).