People
More than the work, the sheer act of getting out of the rhythm of work-a-day life, raising your head and doing something different- is the reward itself of volunteerism. Helper's high is a well known phenomenon. True voluntarism enriches both parties, whether we realise it or not. Here is the incomplete list of volunteers:
1.(June-July 2010) Heather Baer, a master's student in speech pathology at McGill University, Canada, volunteered for a month at Samagra and introduced some ingenious methods to help Vijay in speech therapy. She also went to the Smith Nagar centre thrice a week to teach English to the students there.
2.Suyash Kumar provides continous tech-support to Samagra and also assisted in making the stay for SIHI 2010 and Heather Baer more enjoyable by taking them around the city and interacting with them in general. He also helped some children learn how to use the internet(Making their own e-mail accounts and using them)
3. (May-June 2010)Palash Kumar and Yashwardhan Ahluwahlia volunteered to act as interpreters for SIHI 2010 to make social interaction for the group better and there is no doubt about their fluency in English and their social skills.
4. Jai Prakash Sunda came from Infosys on a 6 month sabbatical- to help the children and also to work on his own speech. He developed this new website. He went with Samagra team to schools and helped it to refine group activiies from their bible "Fifty Activities". He also helped sachin with TISA initiative, like attending ISAD at Maihar, setting up video conferencing with SHGs in otther parts of the country.
5. Nickolai Ordahl from USA gave us our first taste of Joomla. He made our first website. He started Spoken English classes among other things. He also brought a magic brass bowl: whenever he struck it, everyone, including sachin, sat down in the hall, quiet, still and magic-struck. Again when he struck the bowl after a looooong time, everyone came alive. The bowl is still there but the magic doesn't seem to be as potent as it used to be!
6. Nadia Skvortsova from Moscow taught many interesting vocal exercises to children: if a loco engine wanted to sing an aria, how will it sound? and act? etc. On return from Samagra, we believe she got her rewards promptly. Yes, she found 'Mr Perfect'!
