The girls of Vaidehi – Post1

We work closely with a destitute home for girls, Vaidehi Ashram.  This Ashram celebrates its annual day with great fervour and festivities every year. This Ashram shelters about 79 girls presently and looks after them till they find a stable job/ get married. And from what I have seen, they are taken care of really well *touchwood*.

Am so glad I got to attend this function yesterday and it totally made my day! For one, it took me back to those school days, when we used to wait for the annual day, practice from days before even if it meant working really hard to make notes and learn those missed lessons later,  try to figure different ways of missing classes and asking for permissions 😛 Nostalgia at its best!

For the other, the quality of the program – anything kids do is always sweet and when it is done so beautifully, with almost no flaws at all, it just leaves you open-mouthed!

Every single program was fantabulous.  Every single girl got a chance to be on stage. Karate demonstrations by the young girls, including breaking bricks with their elbow and getting a stone hammered on their back, left everybody spellbound!  Jhansis of tomorrow in the making 🙂

There was this one girl Bharati from Class2, who lost one hand and one of her legs in an accident – but that did not stop her from performing on stage. My eyes welled up, and I did not really know what made me cry – were the questioning tears that I failed to understand whatever it was that made one young girl suffer so much in life, along with losing her parents?  Were they tears of joy seeing the hope and confidence she stood for? Or in awe of those people who have dedicated their life to rear these girls so well!  Or was it a combination of all of them, along with the pride for this country of mine, such heart-warming things about which do not make it to any corner of the newspaper 😐

I also spotted this other girl, whose dupatta slipped down from her hair-do in between the performance, but she managed it so well, while she was actually stumbling over it again and again, and gracefully managed to drop it down completely – nobody knows when!!!!

The program ended with a splendid act depicting the life of Bhakta Prahlad, and this was in the form of a Sound and Light show!!! Amazingly done, with 4 different stage settings parallely – one the King’s court, Prahlad’s gurukul, the place where Prahlad was punished by being set on fire, and another on the terrace of a building some distance away to depict the scene in which Prahlad is thrown down from a height to kill him! The stage where the current scene was being played would be lit up, all with excellent synchronization and co-ordination!

The girls are also trained vocationally in candle-making, painting and other arts and crafts.  Here is one such painting.

And I bought this set, again made by these girls 🙂  Got that pretty pouch with the set too 🙂

Natkhat Nandalal poses specially for me 😀 Really!

Here’s a video of one of the performance from last year – again a Sound and Light show. The scene with the Kailas backdrop was arranged on the terrace of one of the buildings, hence the miniature look.

And just to give you a glimpse of how talented these girls are,  a few pics from last year 🙂

That’s it for now folks and I hope to blog about such things, because I regret missing updating so many such things in the last month 😦 May be I will do it sometime. Hope all of u had a gr8 start to the week  🙂