Austin Chapter
| Austin Home |
| About AID |
| Vision |
| Events |
| Projects |
| Donate |
| Meeting Minutes |
| Newsletters |
| Contact Info |
| Aider Zone |
Compassion wherever there is suffering. Conviction that the compassion is strong enough to eliminate suffering. Courage to make this conviction a reality. This is AID.
|
|
The problems of poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, sanitation, over-population, religious intolerence, social inequalities and corruption reinforce each other. One problem leads to the other and feeds on another. Therefore the solutions to these problems have to be interconnected, just like the problems themselves. This interconnected nature of the problem does not stop with the poor people - it affects all of us. Our inability to tackle these problems, to take the initiative, to trust and work with others and to overcome our shyness and fear, is as much a part of this web of problems and has to be tackled along with the other problems. AID Approach
Holistic Development : Seed Villages
AID
Strategy
Immediate
Goals
AID at a glance
History of AID i)Motivation: It was the early 1990's. Out of curiosity I went to a mela organized by some Indian groups . The theme was to tell slogans in front of the Capitol Building in Washington DC. "Kashmir is India, India is Kashmir.....India is for Peace" and so on. Joining the crowd I shouted a few times with much enthusiasm. A Pakistani group came and distributed some pamphlets. Not much happened that day. Everybody went home. What's the point in such efforts, no one has a plan on what to do next beyond slogan shouting. At best, a senator may come out and say a few words and everybody claps. It was the early 1990's. In university campuses groups of students would discuss issues like poverty, capitalism and politics. On the newsgroups there'd be people flaming each other on sensitive topics related to India, fundamentalism and development. What's the point of all this -- you don't go deeper into a problem by mere discussions -- the knowledge is just lateral -- on many many topics--- beyond the obvious, there is little insight. At best it creates an awareness of the problems and on why mere discussions can't solve them ii)The Beginning: One day I saw that there was a new group.... Action India or something. I was excited, for I was looking for an opportunity to do something. I started reading the mails -- this time we were discussing action! "it will be great if we all acted" one would say. "Is this the right time to act" said another ...... needless to say, there was no action!! There is no point in being critical, for the problems are tough. I decided that I should have the strength to trust others, for the important thing is that almost everyone, the person who discusses or the person who quietly wonders, has good intentions and is well-meaning. I sent a mail "Village Education Project" . If we contribute $10 a month each we could take a village in India where there was no school, and find someone who would be willing to teach there if we paid a small stipend. The challenge was to identify a village and a motivated teacher, make an appropriate syllabus and talk to the village children and inspire them to come to classes. Would anyone be interested ? iii)The Response: "If you are starting an organization I can help keep the accounts" said one mail. Some of my friends and office-mates said they'd be happy to contribute money for such a cause. Someone said their native village needed help and would provide details. We soon realized that strength lies in team-work. Even for one project of educating a village we need many people with different interests and abilities working together. What's more ... a day ago I was depressed, just thinking about the scale of problems and feeling that only a concientious politician or people with some kind of power or other could only do anything about them -- but today I realized that actually working on the problem, even if it was just a small start, made any previous notions I had about it by mere speculation, look irrelevant. It is important to work together with several people to solve a problem. We know implicitly that this is true for any problem in our professional carrer. The same is true with the poverty problem. iv) The Name: We decided to open a bank-account as people promised to donate money regularly. Being agraduate student from India, I didn't have much knowledge of the procedure in USA fornon-profit organizations. Riyaz, Venu and I were thinking hard as we drove to a bank --what shall we name our organization? Every 5 minutes we were excited about a differentname. Finally when the teller called us, we still didn't have a name. We filled out the rest ofthe form and we were thinking desperately -- the words like India, Progress andDevelopment we thought should be there for obvious reasons, but what other words can wehave so that the entire acronym itself would mean something. I asked the teller how sheknew that this would be an account for a non-profit organization rather than something else-- I was still foggy about the rules. She said "oh such accounts normally have the words likeassociation in them"...... and she asked "you mean you don't know what your organization iscalled??"..... I said, "Oh we are the Association for India's development .... AID" and sheapproved the form and smiled , "good luck, it seems like a wonderful cause!" v) Building up By now we also decided that it was a good idea to tackle all the problems..... as they are allconnected to each other, and over-all development of an individual or society has so muchmore meaning. Besides the challenge of addressing pressing problems like over-populationrequires us to work in all fields -- for arguments can be made that the economics of a poorfarmer is such that it favours large family size -- so the issue of employment comes in whatappears to be mainly Family Planning (medical) problem. Or for that matter the apparentcorrelation observed in Kerala between literacy and women's empowerment to the drop inthe average number of kids in a family. Besides it is much more efficient to tackle all problems at once than tackle them separatelythrough different efforts. For example, going to a village and getting their local involvementitself requires a lot of effort. Having gone this far and having got everyone excited to work in aspirit of cooperation and friendship, if we just tackle only one problem, say illiteracy, thensomeone else will have to repeat all this effort when they want to solve the infant mortalityproblem of the village -- which requires us to get people aware on oral rehydration therapy-- doing the counter-intuitive thing of giving water to a child who seems to be unable to holdit due to diahheria. I also felt that from the point of unleashing creative energies and efficiently using the talentand motivation of every person who volunteers to help, it is a good idea not to reduce theactual challenge, for truthfully, we want to see every problem solved and so there must existthe required "can do" spirit that we shouldn't bottle due to a lack of vision. AID moves on ...Keeping the initial commitment.... |
Oct 19, 2004