By Volunteer Uppasana Baruah, FHI Guwahati
Right since the first few days in college, I was so much looking forward to volunteering. I searched online for organisations taking in volunteers and even asked friends if they knew anything about such a thing. Fortunately during the second year in my college, one of my friends let me know about Fly Higher India – FHI, a non-profit organization working for children to instil life skills in them. I couldn’t wait a minute to ask her about the details to join in as a volunteer.
After applying for as a volunteer, I along with the other volunteers were informed about the date for our first event. We were supposed to go to ‘Jyoti Snehalaya’, a children’s home in Guwahati. I was more than excited to meet the children and interact. It was 17th of November, 2019 at around 10:00 A.M when we reached the venue.
The theme was ART-MUSIC-THEATRE. I had already packed along sketch pens and scissors to make art and crafts and my fellow volunteers were ready with colours and chart papers. When we met the children who were all girls, we first had a brief interaction asking each other’s names to get along well. We started off with ‘antakshari’ and then moved on to art and theatre. We decided to enact a short story with a moral lesson. For this, we and the children together made props like paper tree, crowns, wands and masks for the characters. The story was named ‘The Golden Touch’ which is more profoundly known as The Midas Touch. The characters were played by the children and the moral of the story was explained to the children that greed only leads to grief. The children also had fun making art. It was lovely to see all of them sharing a beautiful bonhomie with each other. The children were extremely friendly and jolly. And just like we made them comfortable with us, they too fondly gelled with all of us.
I had the most gratifying day with these bunch of cheerful and vibrant children. It was not only them learning something new, but also us learning the gestures of communicating, interacting, bonding and helping, something we do not realise in text books. Something we all grasped that day.
I feel proud to be a member of Fly Higher India. I am frantically waiting for the next event and looking forward to meeting amazing children in the future and growing and evolving with them.
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