ON 26 January at 08:46 am 2001 a massive earth quake struck Gujarat centered around the town of Bhuj, killing approximately 20,00 people, devastating the lives of millions in an unprecedented way, in recent Indian history. Thousands lost their loved ones and millions of lives were turned up side down. India woke up the next day to see on TV the horrendous damage caused by the earthquake.
Every normal citizen felt crushed and stunned unable to absorb the reality that was unfolding before them, On top of it follow on tremors were continuing ,as all earth quakes do. The whole nation was glued to the TV in the following days. Needless to say I spent sleepless nights thinking of what I could do. Actually there were many of us who felt like that , frozen and unable to think coherently as what can we do from here in Tamilnadu , being thousands of kilometers away. But Distance is always conquered by love from the heart which proved to be true .The funny thing was none of us knew hindi apart from one person and not many in rural gujarat knew hindi.. just Gujarati or kutchi as we discovered .!!
A flurry of phone calls from me to like minded people was all that was needed to get going . It was decided that a team of us headed by me will go directly to the affected places and distribute relief to children. I felt children were neglected as the government was giving relief of basic items for survival only. It was decided to concentrate on children as no one knew the psychological trauma they were undergoing on losing parents, relatives, no school to go, no books , nothing to play with .
After injecting a considerable amount of money from my pocket and collecting money from well meaning people our group set off by train to Ahmadabad. From there we hired a van and went directly to the affected area , especially areas near the Indo Pak border that were remote. Usually relief tends to pile up in major town as road connectivity is better. The way was littered with broken homes and house rubble all around, it was then the reality struck home. We saw people hunched up together in groups looking forward to the next relief convoy with hopelessness in their eyes Children milling around them knowing not what to do.
The government officials were very co operative in giving us all the help in permissions etc. and a school to stay in . In the night I slept on a charpoy in the open fearing earth quakes , we did feel tremors now and then during the period of stay. There were desert scorpions and poisonous snakes which come out at night. The area was a semi desert with shrubs here and there with no trees. Initially we went to survey the surrounding villages and asked the villagers what they really wanted . When we told them about our plan for children they were overjoyed. So we travelled back to Ahmedabad and bought toys, medicines, books, pencils, charts ,etc for the children. Children loved cricket sets the most. Also we got some dholaks for temples as well. The temperature was a cool 45 Celsius!! We heard it goes to 50 celcius as well!! For the First time we had a taste of what the desert heat can be. Well the villagers laughed at us eating rice and sambhar as they ate mainly bajra based foods. I lost 7 kg in 10 days as we were going to villages without eating but gained the love and respect of the villagers who had no idea why we came from such far away of place they had not heard off!. But they over overwhelmed that some body so far away thought of them . We had gone there 2 times to Gujarat to do relief work in span of 2 months
So the out come was the feeling of extreme satisfaction of being able help fellow humans , earning the love of the people, and that Distance and language was not a problem if the heart was there. Last but not the least a healthy drop of 7 kg of body weight.!