Teaching Programs
Many of the children who come to our charitable schools have a deceased parent or abusive parents, while living in makeshift homes. Finding the schools as safe havens, the children come to the school to learn, eat two subsidized meals, play with their friends, and interact with all of the volunteers.
The schools would like volunteers to help teach English, teach physical education, play games with the children, help serving food to the children, and participate in offering first-aid, health, and dental checkups to the children.
Although many of our students are able to read basic English, they hesitate tremendously with oral communication: We need help to connect more English speakers with Indian students to improve their ease with the language.
As an English instructor in India, your classes will be filled with eager and enthusiastic students who want to improve their English skills. The volunteer work in teaching will also help build upon experience for those interested in a career in education, while exploring Indian culture.
Medical Projects
We offer several medical internships to volunteers with some exposure to medicine. Anyone interested in gaining exposure to the medical field may also learn in our medical internships. Medical projects include assisting hospitals and clinics in Faridabad.
Working in local hospitals and private clinics in Faridabad, volunteers can lend a hand by performing any of these activities, if they are qualified to do so:
• Assist in surgical procedures
• Help the nurses and doctors with medical tasks
• Measure blood pressure, temperature, height, and weight
• Dress wounds
• Administer injections
• Assist in the distribution of medications
• Provide suggestions to patients regarding nutrition, health, and sanitation
• Learn how to use medical technology such as X-Ray or ultrasound, while understanding the machine output
Care for Leprosy Patients
In India, Leprosy is a highly stigmatized disease: Although the stigma still persists, patients with leprosy are encouraged to come forward to receive treatment. The most effective way to prevent the disease, or to prevent transmission of leprosy, is with early diagnosis and treatment with the medication MDT.
Even healthy children of leprosy afflicted individuals, though not considered medically distinct from other children unaffected by leprosy, are not given permission to attend ordinary schools in India, because of this stigma. Assistance as a teacher is needed to help these children who cannot receive an equivalent education to those children born from parents unaffected by leprosy.
Additionally, you may help leprous patients as a part of a medical team by distributing medications to the needy living in the leprosy colony in Faridabad.
As a means of financial support, the leprosy colony has several looms, to create sheets and clothes: You may help teach the children to knit and stitch as a hobby or work with tailors to help support them.
Care for Orphans
In India, nearly countless orphanages depend on donations and contributions more privileged people, both local and foreign can afford to offer; however, the resource that orphanages need the most is people’s time. A disproportionate number of orphans in India are girls whose parents, preferring male children, cast them aside into orphanages. Though the orphanages do provide a safe and protective home for the children, these unlucky children lack warm, loving parents or even parental figures.
As a volunteer at an orphanage, your time spent with the children will help bring some happiness into their lives. You will help teach basic English to the children, draw, organize games, sing, dance, organize theater activities, or organize sporting activities. You will also help teach the children hygienic practices, or other customs, which you feel will be helpful with their routines. You may be asked to perform general or special tasks that can help the orphanage maintain itself. Working at an orphanage will require maturity, discipline, and of course, an interest in being around children.
Care for the Mentally and Physically Disabled
Children with mental disabilities are unable to follow instructions or understand oral and body language as easily as children without disabilities. These children are poor in ADL (activities of daily living, such as brushing teeth, buttoning shirts or pants, etc.) and display academic deficiencies.
Volunteers helping children with special needs will direct the children towards leading a more ordinary lifestyle. These projects will help volunteers gain training for caring for these special people.
Tasks for volunteers include maintaining the building where the children stay, preparing and serving meals, cleaning the home, teaching the children, and providing companionship to the inhabitants of the home.
Assisting Rural Women
Many women who live in rural India are illiterate. The goal of this project is to teach these women personal hygiene, basic calculations, basic computer skills, basic English communication, knitting, stitching, and life skills to gain the ability to analyze their own circumstances to use their knowledge for making changes when necessary. These skills will help these women in their efforts to become financially independent.
In addition, volunteers can learn from the women about their jobs with the women’s empowerment programs, and help the women in creating the items that they make to support themselves such as jewelry, plastic, and leather bags.
Working with the Elderly
Some of the elderly people in India are often pushed aside into homes or ashrams meant for old-aged people. The conditions in many of these ashrams/homes are subpar, yet the elderly are forced into these homes by their families due to various reasons including financial scarcities. Though they rarely receive visits from their family members, they still long for communication with other members of society.
If you would like to volunteer at such a home or ashram, they would welcome you with open arms to spend as much time as you would like with them. You can participate in activities with them, such as art classes, yoga classes, English practice, spiritual topics, discussion on Indian religion, culture, politics, etc. We are sure that you will find intellectual, as well as spiritual, enlightenment from their rich wisdom and life experiences.
Ayurvedic Hospital Assistance
• Under Construction
Free Legal Aid for the Needy
Indian courts are flooded with millions of cases and the most affected people are those who are purely at the mercy of lawyers, due to their own illiteracy and poverty. The maxim, justice delayed is justice denied, is fully seen materialized in India. Providing free legal services to the poor and illiterate class may be of great help for their all-around growth. In jails, there is a considerable number of prisoners who, either, do not even know for what offense they are behind bars, or their term of imprisonment would have been completed long before; yet, such people still remain locked up, as no one attends to their legal needs.
We may select some areas and attend to the needs of such people in various courts by providing legal assistance, or even lawyers at court. Visiting several confinement centers, we may find out various facts about needy prisoners and accordingly move to court to arrange for their release. In due course, we also envision setting up free legal aid centers for the impoverished in India.
Preservation of Indian Culture
In general, Ek Koshish’s programs revolve around the preservation of our Indian culture, by perpetuating cultural practices and by encouraging ecologically-sound practices: We realize that in order for our culture to remain intact, we must take care of our surroundings and maintain our own rituals. As such, we find that the best way to preserve our own traditions is through teaching others about the ancient customs of the land.
If you are interested in learning about Indian culture, through music, singing, dance, prayer, or Hindi, you are welcome to come to Faridabad and begin your lessons whenever you would like to do so. Please email us for questions about availability for you to embark on a journey to gain insight about our vast culture.
Cow Sanctuary Management
Cows are India’s most loved and prized animals. We love and cherish these benevolent and peaceful creatures because they are the most giving of all animals: They selflessly and freely give us milk and other dairy products; in fact, each and every part of the cow is used for one purpose or another. Highly potent ayurvedic medicines, from cow’s urine, milk, etc, have been manufactured in India for ages, a practice which continues to this day. It has even been established that cows help to save ecological turmoil, such as using cow manure to sustain farmlands, or using extracts from cow dung to repel disease-carrying mosquitoes (this a very brief summary of an extensive branch of literature on the topic). In essence, just like our own mothers, cows nurture us with milk: We respect the cow as the epitome of a maternal incarnation.
Nowadays, a relatively small number of Indians respect or even concern themselves with the reducing numbers of cows, and we have seen a dwindling interest in making strides towards protecting our cows or improving their breeds. Several organizations and movements in India have established cow sanctuaries: The primary goal of these cow sanctuaries is to protect cows, but the sanctuaries also produce milk for sale, offer free dung as fertilizer to farmers, and take in stray cows, which others have abandoned.
As a volunteer in these cow sanctuaries, you can learn about how to manage and maintain such establishments, while gaining hands-on experience of working on a farm. In our culture, working with cows is considered to be a spiritual and rewarding responsibility. This experience could serve as a basis for working to protect other helpless animals. We invite you to take this rare opportunity to immerse yourself in ancient Indian culture at the root of its ancestral environmentalism.
Projects under Consideration:
Ambulance
In Faridabad, though some major hospitals do have ambulances, these are only for the people who can afford to pay exorbitant hospital charges for the use of the ambulance. No public ambulance service is available: We want to provide an ambulance for needy people at the time of crisis, who cannot afford the cost of private ambulances.
At the moment, Ek Koshish does not have an operational vehicle to use, which could act as an ambulance, but we want to start a fund to raise enough for initiating a charitable ambulance program in the city of Faridabad. Ultimately, if we could coordinate our ambulance with the local police, we would have direct access to all emergency cries for help.
Eventually, once our ambulance program would be running, we could offer any interested volunteers the chance to tag along with the paramedics in the ambulance. As a component of the medical team, you could facilitate doctors, pharmacists, and nurses who work with the ambulance project. As a volunteer, you will:
• Examine patients
• Assist the doctors by taking measurements
• Help doctors in determining the patient’s immediate needs
• Help administer medicines
• Comfort patients
Mobile Workshops
We have two proposals for mobile workshops: one academic workshop, and one sports workshop.
The premise of our mobile workshop is to reach communities in rural areas that do not have access to appropriate education or tutoring facilities, or access to sports and recreational facilities. We would like to reach the villages, teach regularly, and help the children improve their critical thinking skills and physical performance.
In the long run, once the project starts running and we see promise out of the children’s talent, we would like to be able to sponsor these children in competitions and matches, to help motivate the children and encourage their hard work and efforts. Should their work show great potential, and should we reach enough funds to do so, we would like to sponsor the children for competitive athletics, college, or even higher education.
Installing Bathrooms in Rural Areas
In rural and slum areas of India, the bathroom facilities available are exceedingly unhygienic, so much so that many people can be seen defecating or urinating in open places. Even where there are lavatories available, the conditions are inhumane. We would like to build appropriate public facilities so that we can maintain the hygiene of the public while providing it an essential, yet basic, societal need.
Please feel free to come forward and help our society and this cause. If you have any questions or would like any information about the specifics about this endeavor, please email us, and we would be happy to elaborate more on this objective.
Facilitating Employment Options for the Unemployed
• Under Construction