Adopt a Tree; Protect Environment & Earth

The details of the Uk Volunteer's Team Visit & experience prepared by Nicholas, member of the Visitor team, is mentioned below.

Dear Friend !

Pauline and I spent two days with RSKS in mid-September 2019. After Pauline’s graduation from SOAS, University of London in July we had set off to travel by land from Turkey to Almaty in Kazakhstan. From Almaty we flew to New Delhi and had a few days before meeting up with the team at RSKS. I’m a student at Oxford University studying for a master’s degree and Pauline is now a freelance photographer. We hoped that we could contribute by offering to take photographs and providing writing.

We were picked up at the train station and, after a night’s sleep, taken to the office to meet Dr Deepak Sharma and the team. we were taken to see the first of many projects that RSKS undertakes in and around Ajmer. The Taromporal Negan slum area - about a 30 minutes’ drive from the office – lies off a main road amongst farm land and concrete buildings under construction. The people we met were living in small tents which created a open space to cook, sleep and store what belongings they have. RSKS have started an initiative which seeks to provide women from the slums with free sanitary nepkin & towels.

Each time the team comes to hand out the pads they also give lessons on hygiene and disease prevention. On the day we visited a long line of children stood with their short arms outstretched before them before passing soap along the line and having warm water splashed over their hands. RSKS has made efforts to improve school attendance for these children but many of the parents are afraid that their children will be taken from them – the school is a 3km walk away. As in all the places we visited the people were happy that RSKS started to work with them. They sang songs and played games with the children. Parents joked and talked to each other from the side-lines.

From looking at the work on hygiene that RSKS is undertaking we went to see how they are helping women create their own businesses. In Bheem Pura, a small village amongst the cultivated fields on the outskirts of Ajmer, we were introduced to a group of six women who, on that day, were applying for agovernment micro-financing loan. The women had organised themselves into a self-help group in order to share the burden of the loan and support each other in their individual business ventures. One woman was using the loan in order to grow and sell flowers which are made into garlands to be worn around the neck. A member of the group took us out to her crops. She stood amongst the yellow and violet flowers, holding a couple up in her hand and posing for photographs.

Most of the work that RSKS carries out is the education of young women and girls, better livelihood and street child welfare etc. In the poorer areas surrounding Ajmer – in villages like Laxmi, Udan school, Bhanwata –education is at its weakest. This is particularly true of girls who often don’t go to school in order to work or look after parents. We were shown a class that was learning English. The teacher would point to pictures or letters on the walls and the class would speak each word: cat, mouse, rrrr, seven. The idea is that by providing these students with an education, no matter what schooling they had already received or were receiving, the villages could benefit from a sustainable and healthy workforce able to meet what challenges lay in its future. Many of the classes end in games and all the students told us how much they enjoyed and relied on the classes and their classmates.

The most memorable moment from our couple of days visiting the initiatives of RSKS came at our last stop. The village of Naglani is where RSKS have set up a class to teach crafts to women from the area. The students are shown how to work with moulds, how long to leave the clay to set and then how to decorate with paints and ornaments. The students then sell their creations and are thus able to gain an income through their work. The women were clearly proud of what they can do. And rightly so. They had made items for Kayad Festival which was going on at the time we were in Ajmer. The craft students talked us through their work and showed us how it was to be displayed. We had to leave them eventually and we were sad to say goodbye.

It can often seem impossible to make a positive change in the world around us. Our time at RSKS taught us that by targeting areas which could benefit from improvement and working in a sustainable way the future might be brighter than one can sometimes expect. We will always treasure the time we spent with Dr Deepak Sharma and his team in Ajmer and we think of it often as an example of the good people can provide each other.

Thank you
Nicholas & Pauline !
UK

Links:

• 2019 Top-Rated Nonprofit
• RSKS Official Facebook page
• RSKS's Wikipedia Profile