Easter Celebrations at the Orphanages!

Festivals are such a good time to share love and gifts! I love to go and meet kids and the elderly on every festival that I can to spread love an happiness in any small way possible.
The smile I see on the faces of the people makes the festival even more joyous!

This time for Easter, I have decided to make baskets and take them to an orphanage here in MI. I haven't ever done this before so I am definitely looking for ideas online and asking people to help me too. I have bought a few baskets already and some gifts  to give away to the kids with a few of my friends so we can talk about Easter, it's significance and maybe even hide a few eggs for them to find.

I am trying to find as many ideas as I can to stuff the baskets with chocolates and gifts. I want to make sure I make this Easter a memorable one for the kids at the orphanage and they don't feel less loved. I am hoping to get together with three other friends and go there the Sunday and spend the entire day with them, playing and listening to them, maybe reading to them so they feel happy about the festival and have a good time.
Any suggestions to make it better would be greatly appreciated! :) Happy Easter in advance!

Valentine's with Volunteers! :)

They say Valentine's day is all about love and love is something to we need to spread and share! with everyone we can so this Valentine's day, my volunteer group and I decided to get together and share some love.

We all gathered at our community house in downtown Birmingham and sat together chatting and munching on cupcakes basically trying to decide what we can do to make someone's Valentine day special, someone who's not able to afford a grand celebration usually. So we ended up deciding to go to the Homestead Res Of Beverly Hills to spend some time with the elderly and make them feel loved.

We got there at around 1:30 in the afternoon after talking and making arrangements with the people there and took cakes, balloons and lots of other food items with us. Once we got there, we set up all the stuff in the community hall and invited everyone to come and make themselves comfortable. Everyone came in and they had a great time eating, talking, playing games and even singing songs! It was an awesome afternoon.

Once everyone was done doing whatever their hearts desired and ate to their content, we gave out little memoirs, as a gift for Valentine's day!

It was a great celebration and I felt very satisfied after it was done!
It's so true what they say, Happiness doubles if you spread it! :)

Celebrations & Volunteering - A trip down memory lane!

So since I belong to India which is a land of festivals and celebrations, I have grown up admiring the coming together of people of all ages and religions to celebrate each and every festival. It didn't matter if it was a Hindu, Muslim, Christian or a Sikh festival, we all got together to celebrate! And the celebrations didn't just involve eating, bursting crackers, wearing new clothes, decorating the houses during holiday time, it meant a lot more! It meant reaching out to the less privileged and make them feel less unfortunate, make them feel loved and a part of the celebrations of the entire country.

We went out to orphanages, old people homes and even temples, where people who didn't have family or enough money to enjoy festivals the way they would have wanted to and distributed sweets, clothes and fire crackers. The smiles we brought to each face made our festivals lighten up even more and the feeling of having so many people blessing you was amazing.

The next day, since everyone's had so much fun bursting crackers, eating and drinking at parks and other places, there used to be litter all around so we gathered kids and other volunteers and picked up the dirt from our parks! Everyone felt good about it and it helped keep the place clean at the same time. I feel a lot of what I am today, is thanks to the volunteering and meeting people of all walks of life. I believe I started to appreciate what I had and how privileged my life was, after I started volunteering and helping people who didn't have a lifestyle like mine. It was a great feeling! A feeling of happiness, satisfaction and that of doing something for the community.

Every festival we celebrated, we'd donate an amount my friends and I had collected to organizations, like HelpAge India or CRY and our parents would match up the amount. HelpAge India even gave us trophies for the amounts we collected and that made us even more proud and kept us motivated to do more.
I think a major part of my childhood's memories are these celebrations that involved volunteering and meeting kids and elderly and spending time with them, giving them a chance to have a great celebration.

Volunteering at Gleaners!

The past weekend was cold and snowy and I didn't feel like doing anything until I got a call from one of my friends who asked if I wanted to go and give some blankets, canned food and drinks that we had collected a while ago and some Peanut butter & Jelly sandwiches that the temple had made to the Gleaners' community over at Downtown Detroit. I was obviously more than happy to do it!
So we got into his Chevy Traverse and drove in the cold and snow. After we reached there, we were helped by some of the staff and other volunteers unload all the stuff. There was a lot of stuff but we all got together and got everything out. Once that was done, we were supposed to separate perishables and non-perishables and stock them before they were given out so that they didn't go bad. So we started doing that, made necessary signs to indicate what needed to go where and then filled up the huge cartons with all the collected stuff.
Once all the stocking was done, we just cleared up the rest of the area so that the huge boxes when required to be brought out have enough room to be moved about. So we just aligned everything to one side of the walls, cleaned up and marked all the entries. By this time we were tired and hungry, so we took a few minutes break, drank some water and got back to work.
Now we were just supposed to give out the sandwiches we had prepared. One of the associates at the community helped us organize the whole thing and we gave out individually wrapped PB&J sandwiches to everyone. Little kids were so happy that it almost brought a tear to my eye to think we waste so much food everyday and complain about how somethings are not as tasty as we would want them to be; and here I see little kids be happy with one sandwich. Made me count my blessings and vow that I would continue to volunteer and try to make a difference to the community in whichever little way it is possible from my side. We got done with giving out food and drinks, thanked Gleaners' for the opportunity and headed back home. All in all, I had a very tiring day but I felt more satisfied than tired because it gave me such a huge feeling of doing something good for the community. I hope to spread the word so that more people can join hands to try and bring about a little change from their side in whatever little way possible.