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Lent, generosity and choice

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It’s lent and so a time where many people decide to give something up. Favourites seem to be chocolate, biscuits, cake or coffee. Some people do all of them! There are also those who will give up a particular activity, such as Facebook or watching TV. However my favourite lent activity is not giving up, but trying to be more generous. The 40 acts campaign has been run for a few years and has excellent ideas and things to do in order to be generous. A couple of years ago I blogged about their hospitality idea. Today though, I was thinking about generosity in general.

I find that I quite enjoy being generous. Those times when you feel that you can freely give to others, maybe beyond their expectations, do make you feel good. These generous acts don’t all need to be about money, time, skills and effort can make a huge impact as well. I will again recommend 40 acts  to get you thinking about this. Small acts, giving someone a lift, spending time to have a chat, buying someone a drink or having people over for dinner can have a positive effect on us, as well as others. At Chennai Challenge we have been blessed with generosity from many places. Many people have been generous with their money in donating to us, others have used their time and skills to raise money for us, others, the generosity of venues being given for free. That is not even everywhere we have been fortunate, every team member has been generous with their time and skills in coming on the project and in India we have had huge generosity shown to us in terms hospitality. So a big thank you to everyone who has been generous towards us, it is greatly appreciated.

Back to 40 acts. Today’s challenge is all about choice, and letting someone else make a choice about what to do in your leisure time. The idea of choice is really central to what we do at Chennai Challenge. One of the hallmarks of poverty is a lack of choice. We are trying to increase the choice that people have. One big way we try to do this is by supporting education. Both Oasis and the YMCA run education programs, the YMCA with 2 schools and Oasis working in communities. Giving people an education starts to give people choices. The choice or career rather than being forced into one. The choice of how they live their life. I think that that is important.

So once again thank you for your generosity, please continue to be so, and lets help increase the choice that people have.

 

Brace for Impact

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It’s now September and all of this year’s Chennai Challenge team have returned to England. By now a plethora of pictures have been added to Facebook by team members, and soon there will be more pictures here on the website soon. This does not mean that things are over, or that the impact of Chennai Challenge has stopped.

So a few things that Chennai Challenge has made an impact with this year:

At YMCA  Boys Town Kottivakkum we have Provided

  • New mattresses for all of the Boys
  • School exercise books for all the boys
  • Medicines for the year
  • Pumps and pipe work for the septic tanks
  • A computer room, so that the Boys can get computer lessons from Bhumi
  • Funds to allow a drainage pipe line to be installed
  • A gift for each boy of a wash kit and pencil case

The work on the drainage has yet to start, but once completed we hope that this will bring an end to the flooding problems at Kottivakkum. This will connect in with the main sewers, and so is not causing a problem else where.

As well as this we took all the Boys away to Yellagiri Hills and shared a special meal with them at the end of time in India.

We have also pledged to donate 10 Lakh (1,000,000) Rupees (around £13,000) towards a rebuilding project at YMCA Fort School. This will be given as soon as the plans have been approved and all relevant permissions granted. This is about half the cost of the project, work will not start until January at the earliest due to the monsoon season that is about to start.

For Oasis we have donated money so that they may continue to run and serve people in Chennai. Our £3000 donation will help to keep paying staff and allow them to continue the work.

So our impact will be felt further through out the year, in a way in which you can see and touch.  You could go and see the exercise books and mattresses. Soon you will be able to see a new building a Fort School. These physical things will stay. But our impact is bigger than that. Our impact was made before we made any of those donations. To all the people we went to see we made an impact just by making that journey. The Boys at Kottivakkum, the students at Blue Edge and the Government School in B.V Colony were all thankful and excited that people had traveled from the UK to spend time with them. It has the impact that it makes them feel special. The staff at Oasis and YMCA  have us come and tell them how amazing it is that they are working in these places everyday, and they are encouraged. All the people we know in Chennai have the impact of seeing friends and growing in relationships.

Now all of this is great, but it does not tell the whole story at all. There will have been an impact on all of the team this year from the time they spent in India. For some it could be big and life changing,  for others it maybe more subtle, and some won’t realize the impact until later on. So I would now like to invite any one who has ever been to India, especially those who have been with Chennai Challenge, to comment below and say how this experience impacted on you.

Don’t be shy

 

Rob

India Time…

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‘India Time’ is a concept that the Chennai Challenge have created which describes the way that time can pass while waiting for things in India. Examples of this are in 2007 when Cathy and Tamsin had to wait 4 hours at a shop called Gold Mine when they were trying to buy project equipment. The reason why I am bringing up ‘India Time’ is because we experienced it today…

Today the team were meant to be going to Kottivakkum to run a morning programme at Boys Town at 10.30, meaning leaving Vepery at 9.30. This relied on our vehicle arriving at Vepery at 9.30… can you guess what happened? It is 3.00pm now and still no vehicle has arrived… so it has been hours since we gave up the plan to visit Boys Town. We gave up on that plan at around 12.00 noon and had a day of planning Yellagiri and relaxing as a team. This means we had a game of Uno, won by relative rookie Ellie Ellie Ansell, and also just chatted about everything from what we think the newbies on team B’s reactions to India will be to Tamsin’s memories of 2007… some very amusing stories in her old journal.

Yellagiri has been restructured as there are less boys at Kottivakkum than we thought there would be and activities have been delegated out to team members. I have the lucky privilege of leading a penalty shootout with Emma Kelly… should be fun…

Later today we are going to change money and have dinner at Spencer Plaza, the local shopping mall, and then we will meet Becky Swamickan of Oasis to get some more dates in our schedule! The Oasis team’s football match was cancelled because of pitch condition but I hope we can still watch a game at some point.

Everything is going great and I am loving blogging regularly, and Rob has said because I am the most socially networked team member it is only a matter of time before I get a Facebook friend request from an Auto driver. Thanks for reading :D Barney x