Visit to Vatsalya Sindhu

Place: Vatsalya Sindhu
Date: 7th January 2006
Team Pankhudi : Sumanth, Ramesh, Klueless, Sandeep, Adept.

We the team Pankhudi, reached Vatsalya Sindhu by 11:00 am. It reminded us of our ancient “gurukul” system of education. The lush green plants, the cattle ,the children, lured us to such an extent that we couldn’t just come off that place and make it to the technical conference at 11 am:(The place was altogether a mini-village. When we were in school most of our mother’s used to call “Wake up! Wake up! Its already 7′o clock you will get late to school”.But, these children seem to be astounding.

They wake up at 5 in the morning, go for a jog and exercise till 6 ,then do their daily chores like washing their own clothes, gardening, taking care of cattle.( They do all of their work by themselves.) They go for a bath and offer `suryanamaskar’, have their breakfast and be to school by bus or auto. There are totally 22 children all boys (there is a separate home for girls too).Of these 22, 18 of them be to school. Most of them are orphans but, some of them have parents.They go to a Telugu medium school “saraswathi sishu bhavan”.Coming home they play around for sometime and study till night. These kids are taken care off by a couple.RSS also helps the home.

The kids introduced themselves and answered to our queries regarding their schooling and daily routine. We changed our `mantra’ this time…we distributed fruits A doctor visits the home once a week and the children are spruce and healthy. They entertained us with their melodious songs and even gave greeting cards on the occasion of`sankranti(pongal)’ festival which is round the corner. Now they remember our names too. This home is well-funded. They get funding from private organizations. After completion of their schooling I think we can sponser them for higher education or some sort of training like that given at `seva sadan’ at Bangalore. This reminds me of a famous quote..

“If you give a man a fish, you give him food for a day.If you give a man a fishing rod, you give him food for life.”