Makkala Jagruti

On 24rd June 07, the iVolunteer-ASHA Group was at Makkala Jagruti an NGO, whose focus is to work with underprivileged children in the area of education. However, we were there to enrich the children’s knowledge on HIV/AIDS. The age group of the children was between 11years to 16years.

The program started at 11:15 AM and as usual the agenda was to have
- Ice Breaker Game
- Skit
- Details about HIV and
- Quiz

We were about to start the Ice Breaker game of Idli-Vada-Dosa but to our surprise the children already knew the game. However we went ahead with the same game and made it more exciting by picking few delicacies, which the children liked – Biryani, Masala Kallekai (Masala Groundnuts), Soup and Chum Chum (sweet), instead of the usual Idli-Vada-Dosa. Children really enjoyed the game.
It really doesn’t take much time to get along with children, their innocence and naughtiness reminded us of our good old school days. Childhood is the best time of a person’s life.

Coming back to program, the game had set a very good platform to move on to the next point on agenda - the skit. After a brief introduction of the actors, Vijay and Sayeesh started the skit with great enthusiasm and were very well supported by Neetu – the Doctor, Asha – the Wife, Amit – for making the stage arrangements and the new volunteer Tarangini – as the Nurse.

We could make out that the children were watching the skit with immense interest. This facilitated the Narrator (Vijay was the Narrator since Asif hadn’t come) to smoothly give away the punch lines of the skit on Modes of HIV Transmission and Prevention after each scene.

The inquisitive mind of a child was very much evident, with the kind of questions or doubts they came up with after the skit. Vijay answered all their questions, cleared all their doubts and also ensured that there were no misconceptions left. It was relatively tough to address their questions especially at their level of understanding, since many of them were too young and didn’t precisely know about sexual contact, condoms etc.

But, we were able to prevail over all these challenges and were able to provide the accurate information about HIV/AIDS. The children expressed their gratitude for having received so much knowledge about HIV/AIDS and thanked all the volunteers.

This was one more success story of iVolunteer-ASHA Group…

Meeting at Ivolunteer office (May 19, 2007 -- 2:30 PM to 4:15 PM)

My friend and I were playing scrabble; Suddenly I looked at my watch and almost shouted "OMG!, it is 2:00 PM". "So, what happened?", She asked me. "I have a meeting in Koramangala at 2:30 PM and we haven't done our lunch; Let's make it fast" I started wrapping up the board and letters while she went to kitchen to get the food. We finished the lunch by 2:15 PM and then I started by formula 1 race from Jayanagar to Koramangala.

Exactly at 2:30 PM, I was in Ivolunteer office in Koramangala where I met Vijai who just joined Ivolunteer. He is interested in spending time with HIV/AIDS infected people. I said, "Wow, that's an excellent Idea". We don't have this color in our group at present and I am sure Vijai will have great time here and he will share some of his experiences through this forum. Welcome Abroad!

Anshu, Asif and Harsh joined me soon and we decided to wait for others. In the mean time I contacted Sayeesh, Neetu, Moin, Parul on their mobiles. Neetu had some emergency, Moin and Sayeesh were not joining us because of some personal work and Parul's phone was not reachable. As Claire, Sunitha and Vijay already informed so we started the meeting.

PPT review: The main agenda of the meeting was to discuss the PPT but as we didn't have Moin and Parul (who were supposed to come up with Ideas) so we skipped this step for the time being.

WHO PDF review: Harsh circulated one pdf by WHO last week and he brought couple of copies of print out. We had a look at different slides and found that it is covering all the possible points in a nice and coherent manner. Harsh proposed an Idea of embedding the voices of characters in the presentation to make it more interactive and attractive. We started counting minimum number of characters required and the count was four which included two boys and two girls. Again we stuck up as there was no girl in the meeting so we moved this item as well to next meeting. We started discussing the technical details of the presentation. As it was WHO presentation so we need to get an official approval for the same. Also we needed a voice recorder and notebook to merge voices and presentation slides. Hence, we finished our meeting with some ARs.

AR: Amit: To get the WHO approval for using the presentation material
Harsh: To get the voice recorder to record the voices
Asif: To bring his notebook to merge the voice with slides


Attendees (In order of appearance): Amit, Anshu, Asif and Harsh

Meeting at Ivolunteer office (May 12, 2007 -- 3:30 PM to 6:15 PM)

3:30 PM -

I reached the iVolunteer office in Kormanagala and found Sunitha, Moin and Mukul waiting for others. Soon Vijay joined us in the office followed by Parul, Sayeesh and one new volunteer Neetu (Welcome to the group Neetu and I am sure you will have fun here). As we settled down and were enjoying the snacks sponsored by Sunitha, Harsh also joined us. Soon we finalized the following Agenda for the meeting:

1. An introduction about ASHA Foundation and team members for new member Neetu.
2. Watch video clips brought by Amit and discuss their usage with different target audience
3. Improvements in the skit
4. Event planning for employees of 'The Park Hotel".

Introduction - Sunitha told us the detailed history of ASHA Foundation and its progress till date, then all the volunteers shared their stories about joining Ivolunteer and ASHA Foundation, their motivations and experiences. In the end the new volunteer (Neetu) narrated how did she come to know about the 2 organizations.

Video clips - Then all of us started reviewing the video clips downloaded from youtube.

Couple of them were covering the basics of the HIV/AIDS and few others were interviews of HIV/AIDS patients. In the interview videos, all of patients highlighted about the discrimination and humiliation experienced by then from the society. In couple of videos we found quite good information to put in the start of our presentations. After looking at all the clips we found that most of the videos are targeted either for one particular way of transmission or for one particular section of the society. So we finalized that we can use some of the video clippings (not the entire video) in our presentations at different places to make it more interactive.

Also we all felt that we need to shoot some videos on our own keeping our requirements in mind.

Skit improvements - We had couple of successful skit sessions at Juvenile home and SOS village and it is time that we need to look at the next level which is improvements in current script. Apart from the ideas which we discussed in the mails, we found couple of more improvements in the skit like avoiding the visit of Badri to brothel and the scene of taking drugs.

Planning of the "The Park" event - We couldn't discuss much about it as we were short of time and the event date was not yet finalised.

Attendees (In Order of appearance) - Sunitha, Moin, Mukul, Amit, Vijay, Parul, Sayeesh, Neetu, Harsh

Journey So Far...

It was a routine Friday evening; I had finished all my work in advance so that I can sprint back home to enjoy the weekend. However that day, 16th December 2005, I had to go elsewhere – No. 99, Cox Town, Bangalore (the old address of iVolunteer, Bangalore office) to meet Ms. Antonette Lopez (earlier Center Manager).
I reached the iVolunteer office with lots of desire to change the world but to my surprise I saw a message, which said, “Stop thinking about making this world a better place, because intensions don’t make difference, Volunteers Do”.

Even Anna conveyed the same message during our brief talk on volunteering, different kinds of social issues and the various NGO involved. She explained certain basic etiquettes of being a volunteer (Do’s and Don’t) and she also made me realize that I need to start small but think big; Subsequent to my chat with Anna I decided to start with “environmental issues”. I felt happy about taking the right strides in fulfilling my societal goals. But even after 2 months no work or volunteering opportunities came my way, which was annoying me.

Then one fine day I received the iVolunteer-Monthly Newsletter of January 2006 where I read about volunteering opportunity in ASHA Foundation regarding AIDS Awareness. Though this wasn’t my initial choice of issue, which I wanted to work for, the impatience and also keenness to do something made me contact Anna, got the necessary details and reached ASHA Foundation.
Spoke comprehensively with Sunita (Counselor) and Dr. Glory Alexander (Director of ASHA Foundation) about the support which I can provide and also understood their requirements. Dr. Glory fixed Sunita as the Project Coordinator for all the volunteering activities on behalf of ASHA Foundation.

But managing volunteers or delegating volunteering activities was completely new for Sunita and volunteering was new to me. In essence we both didn’t know where to start or what to start or how to start?

But we didn’t have to worry since we had the able guidance of iVolunteer, which helped us form a small group of volunteers including me, Gaurav, Claire, Shilpa, Sayan, Vinod and Arun. We called ourselves iVolunteer-ASHA Group.

Sunita gave us exhaustive knowledge on HIV/AIDS and knowing the harmful effects of this virus further strengthened our desire to volunteer for this cause. All of us brainstormed a lot for over a month and decided upon our strategy of spreading AIDS Awareness.

The first event was publicizing the AIDS Helpline numbers through SMS to all our friends…a simple beginning but surprisingly it was a huge success. Counseling calls started pouring in on ASHA’s AIDS helpline. Thus the message was very clear “Many people require knowledge or awareness about AIDS and we as volunteers need to do provide it”.

And as in all stories after a good beginning the author says, “The rest is History….”. It is the scenario with our group as well;

However over the past few months the volunteers have changed but the initial desire, enthusiasm and zeal has remained the same and we have continued to spread awareness about HIV/AIDS to various section of the society in different forums through different means – SMS, EMAIL, Internet Communities, groups and blogs, Street Play, Presentations, Talk, Workshops, Display of Posters and games.

CLick Here ----> The event so far....

Feedback: SOS village - Bangalore (May 06, 2007)

The event on Sunday was one of the best execution till date we had and I like to appreciate the efforts put by Claire and Prarthana for their

prompt performances in the play. Three cheers for your guys!!! About the improvements, these will keep going and we will never be perfect

so don't be disappointed by that and let's move forward with positive attitude. --- Amit Mittal

Congrats to everyone for making the show a hit. --- Claire Philip

Kudos to iVolunteer-ASHA group for continuing its excellent work on spreading HIV/AIDS Awareness.

Yesterday's AIDS Awareness event at SOS Village for rural women (as part of their Family Welfare Program) was a big success, thanks to the best efforts put in by all the volunteers - Asif, Amit, Vijayanand, Claire, Sayeesh, Asha, Shilpa, Mukul and Prarthana. I could make out that the women were really very happy for gaining the knowledge on HIV/AIDS....since many of them personally came and thanked Asif, Me, Sayeesh and other for imparting the knowledge. I guess we incorporated most of the areas of improvement which we had identified after the last session. Also, we did really well in making it more women related talk than men related session (by displaying placards and stressing on prevention of Mother to child transmission) --- Vijayanand Nagaraj

This time we were did do the whole show great except for a few hiccups here are there. Plaques really helped get the attention. --- Asif