January 6, 2024
The Small Details
Since the first day we arrived in Bangalore, one of the first things I have noticed is how the people we have met are not only willing, but excited to help us. I saw this the first couple of days in small ways; for example during our first activity, the scavenger hunt, a stranger approached my group simply excited to explain the history of the building we stood before and even helped point us in the direction of our next clue, wishing us good luck despite being confused as to what we were doing. Or when an older lady saw a few of us timid to cross the street and helped guide us through the oncoming traffic. Today, we saw this desire to help others on a large scale. A feeding-three-million-students-every-day type of scale. This morning our bus arrived at Akshaya Patra, an NGO that creates mass quantities of food to feed kids across India. Before the tour of the building, we were told Akshaya Patra provides meals for nearly 20,000 schools, and I sat there wondering how they could possibly be reaching such a large population. But as I looked around the conference room, I noticed the carefully designated yellow outlines on the table marking where tissues and water belonged, and it became clear through small details, the precision and efficiency being exercised that allows for the success of the production.
Akshaya Patra utilizes gravity in their favor so we made our way down the building following the food transform from bags of dry grain to cooked meals being loaded onto a truck ready to be delivered to schools. While watching the employees stir massive amounts of food in pots that stood taller than themselves, I felt admiration for their commitment to contributing to their greater good. At the end of our tour, someone asked how COVID impacted the organization, and their reply was they made more meals than ever before, and in place of the closed schools, they fed their community, showing the organizations’ intrinsic desire to help others. Finishing the tour, I looked at the building, and it felt too small for the amount of change they produced everyday, and yet I watched a truck drive off ready to feed thousands of children.
There are at least ten other examples that come to mind of interactions where people lent their help or expressed excitement to teach our group something new. It has become my goal to take the time to notice and appreciate these gestures no matter the scale. Personally, as an Environmental Engineering major, where my classes tend to center on the catastrophic and irreversible nature of climate change, I sometimes feel that the issues that await me are so large that no matter what I do or the success I achieve, my work won’t make an impact. And I have definitely had similar thoughts in respect to the projects we will be working on while here. But having the privilege today to visit an NGO that has been consistently growing and expanding their impact and even experiencing the kindness and altruism of strangers in short interactions, I feel a strong sense of hope and I am assured change is a continuum, built from the collective efforts of individuals’ actions.
By Phoebe
