Last Saturday, I was looking at a video made by Aarthi when she visited a village in India that we [Association of India's Development (AID)- Clemson Chapter] are sponsoring ( Visit: www.clemson.edu/~aid, if you want to know more about what we do) . I felt bad to see some of the kids who were badly malnutritioned and were in a sorry state. Worse part was that their parents were not much bothered about it.
It really makes me think about my country.
When I was in India, I was never concerned about looking beyond myself. I was very happy enjoying my day-to-day activities. Its a general attitude amongst many of us... why to bother about things that are not directly related to us?... I was one of those.
It was winter of 2001... some of us started discussing about children in remote villages in India ( mine is one like that, even though I rarely go there ) who do not get any kind of exposure of today's world. They are denied an opportunity to get quality education just because their parents do not have that much of money/ they do not realize the importance of education. Many of such kids waste their lives in doing odd jobs in their villages. We thought of doing something about it from our side. Afterall, its not a fault of those children that they are not sent to school.
Most of us were in our early 20s that time, had just passed out of colleges...in short, we did not have too much of monetory support. But still we started a Student Adoption Scheme (SAS)... to help some children with their education ( books, school fees, uniforms, etc). We collected some money from people we knew and they thankfully trusted us. Our ideas were clear and we knew what we were doing. In it's first year, we sponsored 10 kids, and we were very proud of ourselves that we were contributing in some way towards our community. 3 years back, SAS was a huge success in itself.
Then I came to United States. SAS is still going strong, this year we sponsored 48 students. Sadly, being in USA, I am not of much help to them today.
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