Pune: Our first day!

Team Pune 2015 is very pleased to report that the first SCAW distribution of the year has been completed successfully.  The six team members working alongside several local Rotarians and volunteers handed out 800 bedkits today to the same number of excited children.

After traveling through villages and on country and mountain roads, the SCAW team arrived at a schoolyard full of eagerly waiting children and parents.  We were warmly welcomed by volunteers who draped each of our heads in a traditional cloth wrap while we were entertained by a drum brand and singing and dancing children. This was a great start to our tasks at hand.

Team SCAW: Karen Morgan, Faith Clark, Karen Bridgman-Acker, Dave Morgan , Eileen Rademacher and Isabelle Parliament.

The Rotarians explained to the children and their parents what would be happening today: each child would receive and change into a new school uniform, have their photograph taken, and be provided with a ‘bedkit’ consisting of many more items: pillow, ground mat, multiple blankets, mosquito net, shoes, backpack with school supplies, underwear, socks etc. These bedkits, containing items that were mostly produced locally, were very impressive!  And they were very well received – the parents and children had learned to say “thank you” and did not hesitate to repeat it at every opportunity.

The bedkits items were packed into large eco-friendly shopping bags, made at a nearby manufacturing plant.  We were invited by the owner to tour his facility, which was quite interesting; at this location, he employs approximately 550 people, over half of whom are women, who make a large variety of “bags” from hand sized to huge industrial container size. They produced the 4000 bags which will contain the bedkits for this year’s distribution over the next week.

It was a warm and sunny day in Pune today, the children and their parents were very pleased and appreciative of the generosity of the SCAW donors, the cooperative spirit was alive and well between the overseas and Canadian volunteers; all in all a great start to the Pune 2015 distribution!

Team Pune, 2015
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