Little Helpers at The Ashoka Tree

The Ashoka Tree had our first donation drive this past weekend where we collected a whole load of clothes, books and sanitary pads for Father Tezza’s School in Wynad.

Fr. Tezzas School is indeed a special school run for over 108 special children with various mental challenges up in the mountains in Wynad run by nuns.  What struck us as special is the story that Sr. Bincy, of Fr. Tezza's School, had to tell us of how they wake up some days with no rice to feed their children (they need approximately 16 kgs of rice a day) and pray about it - to find that, miraculously, they have somebody who comes up with a donation of a sack or two of rice by afternoon.  It's stories like these that inspire us to work harder to make life just that little bit easier for these children.

While it was lovely people contributed, what made the occasion even more special was the number of other children from the apartment complex who came over that Saturday morning to help us sort out our donations. 

Our little helpers at The Ashoka Tree got together as part of the ‘kids club’ activity, to help spread the word around a week before about Fr. Tezza’s school, before we actually came in to collect clothes and books.  We spent time telling these children about the other side of the world - children with ‘no mamas and dadas’, children who had ‘no extra clothes to wear or no other games to play other than with the sticks and stones outside’, children who ‘don’t have enough to eat at home so go to school because of the free lunch they get there’ and children who had ‘no books to read other than the ones they got in school’.  What actually felt good was watching these children realize the greater cause towards which they helped that morning – listening to them tell us about how they would help more children around our community, hoping these thoughts would last longer than a day and realizing that we’ve made a difference – if just a small one.



More than anything, what the team at The Ashoka Tree realized on Saturday was how important it is to take that extra effort for a simple idea you might see on a flyer, to help people you haven’t seen and don’t know personally, to think about someone other than yourself.


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