Habitat For Humanity: A nice experience of being part of building a house

After doing a number of Anganwadi visits through DELL Youth Connect with the help of Akshara foundation, I got another chance from DYC to have a very different kind of experience in my life. On 11th of March, I got an opportunity to work with the members of "Habitat for Humanity". The work was to help build homes for the poor people. People have already got lands from government long back but as they are so very poor that they are not able to build a single room house in that land.

Let me give a brief about “Habitat for Humanity” (HFH) here. “Habitat for Humanity” picks up really needy people and especially family which are headed by women (not always. They do help all kind of families), where women are the soul bread winner and helps them by building a two room house for them. All the building material, masons, civil engineers and labor are provided by Habitat for Humanity. There are many more activities that this NGO performs.

Now coming to our part, Dell teamed up with HFH to donate labor for their work. The HFH team selected the Hegde Nagar area in Bangalore for the 11th March event. There was around 30+ resources from Dell. The day started with dividing all into 4 teams for 4 different sites. I was part of the team where the site has already a structure built in it. We started by refining the sand and using the refined sand to prepare mortar by mixing with cement and water. There was one civil engineer from HFH who guided us in all the activities. Also, we had a mason who was doing the plastering work for the walls. The mason was not able to understand anything except Kannada but then I now have learnt how to communicate even without knowing the language, thanks to my experience with anganwadi kids. So, till lunch the team was preparing mortars and carrying them to the mason who was plastering the walls. The mason was kind enough to let me do a part of the plastering work as that was not at all an easy job for us. One needs to be really skilled to do that.

Then we broke for lunch and it was a nice experience to sit with the team on a road inside a coconut grove to have the lunch. After lunch, I shifted to a site where the team was digging the land for putting the foundation for the structure. I started with so much of enthusiasm there but then the sun took toll on all of us. It was the toughest job of all on that day. 10 minutes of digging and we used to take rest for next 15 minutes. That made me realize how tough it must be for the daily labors to do their work every day and that too for around 200 rupees a day. We really take a lot of things for granted and even if we see others struggling for their daily bread we never realize how blessed we are for everything we have in our life.

Finally, the day’s work was over around 4pm and we all got back to our home/office. The day was so much tiring but there was a certain kind of satisfaction of being a part of the team which helped building house for someone who needs it badly. HFH guys told us that we might think that we have done very little but such little act of donation makes them possible to build houses for the people who need those. The best part was the gratitude shown by the people for whom we were working there. That made my day. We have more such activities planned for the next 2 months and I am looking forward to those dates eagerly :-)

A day with the anganwadi kids - I

I got an opportunity to visit one of the anganwadi in Bangalore through the DELL Youth Connect program. Dell has tied up with Akshara Foundation to support the anganwadis.
I had the opportunity to visit the anganwadi in Pattandur Agrahara, near ITPL. The visit to the anganwadi was a very nice experience for me. We had kids there aged between 3-5 years. Initial few minutes we did not know how to start with but once started, the rest of the time was just fantastic. Kids got connected with us as if they already knew us. Initially I was concerned that, not knowing the Kannada (local) language would be a barrier for me, but I must admit kids made it all so easy. We talked to them in Hindi, English & also in Kannada (those who knew the language) and they responded to all the languages with equal enthusiasm. And even they responded positively to Odiya(My mother tongue) too :-D. We played with them, we also used the Dell provided material like flash cards and number cards to help them recognize the numbers and alphabets. They could recognize all the vegetables in their play basket and I too learnt some of the Kannada names of those vegetables from the kids. We drew various shapes and pictures in their drawing books for the kids and they were so excited to fill those shapes and pictures with colors using their crayons. I was really surprised to see how neatly and beautifully some of those kids were filling the colors inside the pictures. I remember, I was very bad in drawings in my school days ;-). With every appreciation of their work they were getting more and more excited and were getting connected with us with extra enthusiasm. Never knew how the time flew and we have to come back to office :-).

Infrastructure wise the anganwadi was not so great. Many basic facilities were not present like toilets, drinking water etc. But do not want to put all those here as we have the appropriate forum for providing the feedback which will be consolidated and will be presented to the appropriate authority. Hope that works out and helps in improving the infrastructure.

Over all, I was looking for such opportunity for long time and thanks to the Dell Youth Connect team for providing me with such a wonderful opportunity. I am looking forward to more such opportunities and will also do it on my own on weekends by visiting the nearby anganwadis with my family.