My name in a newspaper in India!

Don’t ask me where, because I don’t know any Malayalam, but my name is in this article somewhere – my first time in a newspaper in India! (Maybe that’s a good thing?) This outreach of Free Handshake – Free Smiles caused a bit of a stir, in a good way, and a reporter came to find out what we were up to.

This was for a community outreach event by Poornadaya Vidyanikethan school, where I am spending the month of April as a volunteer.  On a Friday evening, we went into the town of Kaduvalingadan, in our Poornodaya t-shirts, carrying signs and extending our hands and smiles to interact with as many people as we could.  Sometimes we just smiled and said hi, sometimes we had rather long conversations with people.

My favorite moment was when a bus was getting ready to leave, I caught the eye of a woman on the bus and smiled and waved.  She smiled and waved back, and then the person beside her did, and then the women in front of her.  By the time the bus pulled away, the whole side of the bus was smiling and waving as we waved back, also smiling, waving at them until they were down the street like we were some unofficial committee 🙂

That moment captured the purpose of our outreach – to brighten their day, at the end of a long workday, near the end of the work week (they also work Saturdays here, so 6 days/week) and make people smile.  Because what isn’t improved with a smile? So here we were, complete strangers, making personal contact with them, and maybe putting a spark in their day and new thoughts in their minds.

While we were also handing out brochures for the summer camps the following week, the goal was really to demonstrate and spread the values of the school, or improving and being part of a community, of making people’s lives better.  On that evening, it was in a very tangible way, and it was pretty fun.

And it was enough for all of us to get out names in the local newspaper!