“Love All, Serve All,” 2008   

  Surili Sheth, 18 (Ohio, USA)

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 (Greeting) Card Project at Manav Sadhna, a vibrant NGO committed to the overall development of slum-dwelling kids near Gandhi Ashram and other welfare program.

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. Most of these children can crank out six or seven perfect copies of a sample card 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.

“Thanks to Manav Sadhna, this was probably my best trip to India so far, and I can’t wait to go back to India next summer.”

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/chhagado 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. However, he is 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 and where to go to the bathroom, and his right arm extremely infected, swollen, and pus-filled. A staff member took the boy into his home. Since then, he 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. (If the wind blows his carefully combed hair in the wrong direction, Rohan 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, thatservice 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 (social service).

 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.

2009: Surili followed up her personal promise by accepting a fellowship by accepting an important research challange. Her reaseach purpose is to perform a comparative evaluation of the efficacy of NGO (Nongovernmental Organization), NGO-public partnership, and (direct) public development program models. Here is here blog