Love all, Serve all: "Love all, Serve all" 2008

The Card Project (aka Earn N' Learn)

I looked up from my sloppy handmade card to see Vijay throwing me a dimpled half-smile and diplomatically saying, “great job, Didi!” In a few minutes, I knew, he would discreetly fix my mistakes. Vijay, a ninth grader, is part of the Card Project at Manav Sadhna. Many of the project’s children find the heavy burden of being the sole income bringers for their families placed on their shoulders at the age of eight years old. Their childhood is ripped away as they are forced to drop out of school and beg for money or polish shoes to feed their families. However, as part of the Card Project, they are able go to school in the morning and come to Manav Sadhna around 1:30 in the afternoon Monday through Saturday to make handmade stationery while laughing and playing. They are paid for their work, and are also provided with a pre-approved nutritious snack. Staff members lovingly repeat lessons of hygiene, cleanliness, service, studying diligently, and respect for all religions to the children every day. Of course, not every child is as patient with my imprecise sample copying skills as Vijay—whenever I sit down to help Ashwin make his cards, he sarcastically raises his eyebrows while giving me a wide grin and charmingly convinces me to go “help” another child (so I don’t ruin his cards). Ashwin’s little sister Manisha, however, can always be counted on to give me a brilliant, beaming smile while pulling on my hand, sitting me down next to her, and giving me simple shapes to cut while she chatters away. Most of these children can crank out six or seven perfect cards in the time it takes me to make one slightly skewed card.

At Manav Sadhna, the forty or so fifth to ninth graders in the Card Project immediately swept me up into their lives and their laughter. My main project was to teach them basic English while throwing some games and dhamaal-masti into my classes. Duck duck goose, I found, was a crowd favorite for the five-second-attention-span younger children. Simon Says was a great game to play with the older children when teaching them human body vocabulary. For a few shining hours every day, I taught my classes on the back porch of Manav Sadhna. I administered tests regularly, and with the added prospect of winning prizes for getting the best grades, the children were eager to learn while making fun of my pronunciations.

In the mornings, I often accompanied staff members on other projects. One of my most memorable experiences was in going to the Civil Hospital with staff member Ajay Vaghela and a boy named Rohan to get a disability certificate. The three of us would pile into one shuttle riksha with six other people (not including the driver) to get to the hospital. Once there, we spent hours each morning running from department to department, waiting in endless lines, and collecting scraps of paper with hastily scribbled notes from doctors that would supposedly help us get the two or three signatures we needed for Rohan’s certificate. Rohan is an almost blind, deaf, and mute nine or ten year old. He is also one of the most intelligent and well-behaved children I have ever met. This orphan was found one year ago by Manav Sadhna begging on the streets, naked, with no sense of when or where to go to the bathroom, and his right arm severely infected, swollen, and pus-filled. A staff member, who lived in the slum with his family himself, took the boy into his home. Since then, Rohan was named, his arm was operated on, he was taught proper hygiene, and he had two operations on his eyes enabling him to hazily make out light and dark colors. He recognizes everyone by touching. Rohan has a hero’s style, never without a handkerchief in his pocket (which he immediately uses to wipe away any stray speck that has the misfortune of landing on his face). He makes sure to pull his pants up and take a large step over any mud or puddle in his way, and if the wind blows his carefully combed hair in the wrong direction, he grimaces and immediately sets his hair back into place. His smile lights up the world.

My experience at Manav Sadhna is unparalleled to any other occurrence in my life. I learned from the staff, side-by-side with children full of spirit, that service is only true when one does it with one’s heart, with love and the selfless desire to help another human being simply because he is another human being. Amazingly, I found the most happiness in the place where I found the most poverty. Never have I seen so many smiling faces and experienced such pure-hearted seva. I plan to go back to Manav Sadhna next summer to find more of myself by losing myself in the mass of selflessness and love that is in each and every staff member, volunteer, and child at this NGO.