What can we do to solve world's problems - Part 2 (Childhood)

Imagine entire generations of your family being born into bonded labor, with no hope of breaking free. What will you do?

In the Part 1, we discussed about the importance of literacy and how we can do our bit for solving the problem. To recap, if each of us could manage to make one illiterate person a literate, we could solve half of world's problems. In this part, we will discuss on the opportunities for doing our bit for orphaned young kids...

Childhood age is one of the greatest periods of human life. It is the period we learn the most, dream for the big, long for love, have pleasant attitudes and always laugh and fun. We all had a beautiful childhood. I could not imagine what would have happened if my parents threw away when I was 1 year old into a waste bin, or forced me to go for child labor or prevented from studying or tortured by a child abuser ... There are endless miseries that shatter the dream of the young souls. Manytimes, I skip reading such news as I dont have enough strength in heart to accept the truth and weep for them. But, I dont have to cry. Maybe, I can do something that can change their plight without sacrificing too much and it is definitely withing my reach.

I did my bit of research on this, and collecting material for various ideas. Some of them are:

1. Getting to know the organizations that does service on this. An awareness about the various organizations would always remind us of a purpose. It will always shows us there is something we could do, in the times when we totally wonder about the purpose of life. The more we know of them, there is a chance that we could do a little piece of timely help.

One of the persons about whom, I read a lot since childhood and have great respect is Mr. Vidyagar founder of the organization - Udavum Karangal which is a pioneer in orphanage management. It supports orphaned children and strives hard to make a great career out of the young lads. He runs a school, health facility, recreational facilities with his paltry fortune. It provides scope for volunteering and child support.

Sivanada Ashram works with the primary objective of protecting orphans, destitute women, the physically handicapped, AIDS-affected children, and the elderly.

Child Relief and You is another notable organization that works for the rights of every child in India, believes that all children are equal and have equal rights.

The other organizations of repute are:
World Vision
Plan USA
Save the Children

2 Donations & Sponsorship - This is one of the simplest ways to provide help. We can just chip in with our small contribution that can do great wonders to people. When we want to gift something for our closest friends or family, we generally gift them big and throw big parties. Some of them would not stay in our mind at all. This year, apart from throwing a big party, I wanted to gift my parents something special. I just had a meal sponsored for 100 kids in Udavum karangal for just $40 and it touched my parents a lot. They remembered it much more than than the $350 party I gave them. Its such a heart-moving thing that I found this year. I never imagined that 40 bucks could bring so much of happiness. We could also sponsor a child's education for one year, gift a computer, provide funds for a adding a teacher, build a classroom.... For every dollar, we can create wonders in someone's life.

3 Volunteering. More than just giving funds, we can go a bit farther and volunteer ourself for an organization. Many organizations accept volunteering and volunteers are typically assisted in doing a project of their own, with the organization. For example, we could go on a summer to one such organization and teach the kids, few hours a day and spend the remaining time, say touring. We could also use our imagnination to solve some of their problems, and you would wonder how much our expertise can be of use to them. It is one place, where our works can really make a decision of life and death in a kid's life. Udavum karangal has a link for their
opportunity page here.

4 Create Awareness. May times, we might not be able to provide donations or voluteering due to lack of money or time or both. But, we could do our bit to create an awareness about the organizations with our friends. We could speak with our boss or school to see if they have some used computers to be given to orphanages. We could suggest our friends to have their birthday parties along with spending for a "party" in a orphanage. We could give the organizations more publicity by putting it in our noticeboards and blogs or we could make our organization donate a free product that they are making. Say, Microsoft could be asked to give free OS CD's for the computing systems in the organizations.... The list is endless, bounded only by our creativity.

(Kindly chip in and add more suggestions and types of services we could do. You can also submit your articles to me by putting ur url, in the comment section or suggest some article points. Let us try to do our bit of service. Please.... )