Karma-Yoga

With a passion to empower the society and drive to change the world, ten of us started with our very first Karma-Yoga visit on May 1, 2010. Ten minds were working on ten different ideas on how they could make a difference to a common villager’s life. Yes, I am talking about the Karma-Yoga project of Great Lakes, in which each student is supposed to spend 60 hours in a village for empowerment of the villagers.

On our very first visit, we headed straight to the Panchayat and then to the school. Panchayat visit proved to be fruitful in getting the important statistics like population of the village, sex ratio, main occupation, methods used for farming, issues faced by villagers and the like which we used later on for carrying out different activities in the village. Our next target was school. While on one hand, the visit to school brought smiles on everybody’s face bringing back memories of our childhood; we realised that this was the place where we could bring a positive change. With a promise to come up with a proper timetable to teach the kids and teachers Computers and English, we returned to hostel.

In the next few visits, apart from working on the plan of action for the school, we tried to gather some villagers and tell them importance of micro-finance. Great lakes along with a micro-finance firm- Rang De, had planned to help villagers take an entrepreneurial leap. By this time, we all realised that this was not going to be a cakewalk. With language being the biggest barrier, it was getting difficult for us to communicate with the villagers and build a relationship of trust. We managed to create awareness among villagers about micro-finance with two Tamil speaking members of our team. However, we couldn’t go ahead with this project due to some issues.

The teaching part at school was more of learning for us. While we taught MS Office and paint to our students (which included kids and their teachers along with the principal), we learnt how much planning is important even for the smallest of things. The computer classes proved to be successful with students showing interest and completing assignments correctly. We moved on to teaching Mathematics, Science and General knowledge as well in the school.We also planted saplings in and around the school and urged to school authorities and kids to take care of them.

Our next main project was organizing a health camp. We conducted a survey and found out the need for an eye check-up camp for the villagers. We fixed a date and started campaigning. Though people needed to get eyes checked, for some reason they were not very keen on coming to the camp on their own. On the day of eye-camp, we arranged for transportation for the villagers. They were taken to the camp site for check up and then dropped back to their houses.

As we look back now to those 60 hours, we understand the very purpose behind this project. It would be a sheer joy to learn that we were able to make some change to the village; but I can surely say that the Karma-yoga visits to village have transformed us all to better human beings.