St.Theresa’s Picnic

“Great opportunities to help others seldom come, but small ones surround us every day.”

Date : 19th March 2006

Place :NTR Garden, Tank Bund.

And we, the Team Pankhudi at Hyderabad realized this on the 19 of March, when we took a group of 17 kids from the St. Teresa’s orphanage to a picnic to NTR gardens.

It was a bright and sunny day to start with and this worried us because the kids were too young to be taken out in the scorching heat. But when we saw the enthusiasm shown by the little ones, we put our worries on the back burner and started out from the children’s Home at around 3 in the afternoon.

The journey to the picnic spot was marked with the kids yelling “There goes a big bus”…”Look at the traffic light. Red says stop, Yellow says Wait and Green says go.” They were so excited about the trip that they sang to us throughout the journey.

Once we reached NTR gardens and ushered the kids in, we were faced with the dilemma of where to take them first, there were lots of rides and fountains and playing areas. We finally decided to let them have a ride on the merry-go-round. The kids had so much fun on it that they wanted to have another round on it.

After that we made the kids sit in the lawns and play a game called “Postman”…they thoroughly enjoyed it, even though they didn’t really understand the game very much. We arranged for some snacks next.

There is a toy train ride in the park. And the kids were very eager to get a ride in it…so we arranged for a ride for them on the train…the ride lasted for about 20 mins and once the kids were back from it they were full of stories about what they had seen during the ride.

Later we clicked lots of snaps to keep these memories fresh forever, relaxed a bit in the lawns there and distributed chocolates to the kids. It surprises me to see how little it takes to make the children happy.

At around 6 it was time to leave and it was hard to leave the adorable kids and go home. But all good things must come to an end and we decided that we would do this again whenever it was possible.

There are only two ways to live your life.One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.

And that is what we learnt from the kids today.