Uttarakhand Relief Fund

After reading the Prime Minster’s appeal to raise funds to support the Uttrakhand flood victims in the newspaper, I was inspired to take the initiative to do my own bit.

I approached my family, friends, and my father’s business colleagues to provide monetary aid to the victims. I did this by writing a short appeal which contained information about the victims, the death toll, the present situation and problems over there which needed immediate attention. This appeal was presented to each donor and the donors were then asked for any amount of donation that they wished to donate. After visiting about 25 different donors over a period of 3 days, I was able to raise a total of Rs. 35,000. Immediately after the donations were collected, I went to the bank with my father to deposit the amount into the Prime Minister’s National Relief Fund (PMNRF). For accountability, each of the donors was provided with a receipt of the donated funds afterwards.

Having never done such a thing earlier, I felt satisfied like never before. This act would not have been possible without the support of my parents, who urged me to take up this initiative, and the donors, without whom the aid could not have been provided.

Shivanshu Gupta
Gurgaon, NCR
India

Tanzania 2013

It's August now and even though my journey to Tanzania was in June, it still feels like it was yesterday. Fernando Pessoa said in his famous work 'The Book of Disquiet': "Life is whatever we make it. The traveller is the journey. What we see is not what we see but who we are".

One can of course argue about that, but for me it is true. When the plane took off in Amsterdam in the direction of Tanzania, I didn't really know what to expect. I was excited, especially as people from our school who were on this trip before told all the time how amazing it was, and also I was nervous. You may say, I had great expectations. And yes, it was great. Maybe even better than I could have ever expected it. We were in an international school and it was almost a camp, as other schools from all over the world were there too. Berne, Cairo and two from Dubai. Our school was the smallest school, but in the end we all mixed up anyway, so the people from the camp couldn't really tell from which school we were. We just all mixed up and for me, those 10 days were probably one of the best 10 days ever. We helped in a school, painted a building, made desks, supported them with school supplied such as books and pens. We played with the kids and on other days, we went off to a village on the Kilimanjaro and helped there to plant Avocado trees.

We worked with the people and that was great. I actually became friends with people from my school I didn't like before and we saw as much of Tanzania as you could see in 10 days. We went on a 3 day Safari tour in different places, we saw native tribes, we visited a Massai village … I could go on like that for ages. But all I can really say that - it maybe didn't change my life, but it definitely made it better. As Pessoa said, it's all about how you see things. Who you are. Coming from a wealthy country where you've everything to a place where people have nothing is a huge difference, but this showed me to a certain extent how easy life can be. Free from responsibilites. Just … live. In the time I was in Tanzania I was happy. We were always busy working or talking or playing some random games. Call it back to basics if you want to. It was so different from your "normal" life, it was almost an escape. An escape where you actually do something to help other people, no matter if it's helping in a school, planting trees or visiting an orpahnage.

So before I go on like that forever- it was such a unique experience that will stay forever in my heart and I wanted to say thank you to my school and to our amazing teachers that made this trip possible.

Hugs.

Natalia
Zugerberg
Switzerland