Time for some social work.

First of all I am thankful to my dharam fiancé who reminded me, that I had not blogged since long time, and I should write a post soon. I have been busy in office, and also had some minor health problems: cough and cold due to weather change. However, I have a long weekend now, almost 4 days and here I am with my new post.

I have always believed that you must give back to your society in some form. Last year I did some monetary donations for various causes. However, I always wanted to do something non-monetary too, devote my time for some social cause.

‘Outreach’, is Cognizant’s social work entity. They send us regular emails of activities performed by them, and asking for volunteers. I had registered last weekend to go and teach in a school, however I got placed in shift and could not go. This weekend too they sent mail, I had night shift the day before but I was determined to go as I had 3 days off after.

Another factor was that this time it was in my locality, so transportation would not be an issue. We had to go and teach English in nearby government school as written in email. I registered for the event, and got the reminder for the same. I went to the school and met other volunteers, there was a bit of change in plan. We had to actually do survey in the local village.

We were given some forms for the survey. The aim was to encourage villagers to send their kids to school. We were targeting kids between 6 to 14 years. We went to each and every home, an asked them if there are any kids at home in that age and if they are going to school. If not we would encourage them to send to school and take their details for admissions purpose. Surprisingly majority of the homes where kids were there did go to school, it was good to know!!

Couple more questions we asked in the survey. First being if there is toilet in their home or not. Second being do they have water supply. Everyone had water supply, and few did not have personal in-home toilets and used common toilets.

We were split in two teams, each team having 4 volunteers. We roamed for couple of hours in the sun. I had just finished night shift, which was hectic. When I came home I was feeling very exhausted, however I was happy that finally I started what I wanted to do apart from my daily work. Something for the social cause. It made me realize how lucky I am to have a good home, good education and good job. It made me happy that I did some work at ground level, and worked with colleagues to make a difference in the society. As I have said once, ‘There are a lot of talkers’ and takers in this world; we need more of givers and doers!!’