Volunteering Yoginder Sikand writes about Asha Niketan, a community for the intellectually challenged, which provides love, warmth and care for all its members.
With a small and neat campus, Asha Niketan, located in Koramangala, is truly the 'abode of hope' that its name proclaims it is. I've occasionally visited it over the last several months.
Its charter describes it as a community of people with and without intellectual disabilities, sharing life together and celebrating the value of every person based on mutual relationships and trust in god.
Home to a community of some 40 amazing people, around 30 of Asha Niketan's members are intellectually challenged adults, the rest being assistants who live with them as members of a small family.
Although Bangalore has several institutions catering to intellectually challenged people, Asha Niketan is probably the only one that is structured as a family unit, providing its members love, warmth and care.
Fourteen of the intellectually challenged members of the Asha Niketan family live on campus, in cheerful and airy rooms. Some of them have no family or have been abandoned by them. The rest are day workers, living with their parents and commuting to Asha Niketan five days a week.
Most of them are aged 20 years or above. The oldest, Georgie, is 85. Their mental age ranges from one to about five and some of them suffer additional handicaps related to speech and physical disability.
Life's vocation
Paul, the current leader of the community, has served in Asha Niketan for 25 years. He was a fresh graduate when he volunteered to spend his holidays at the centre and in a short while decided to make it his life's vocation, staying on ever since. "It's the love that I receive and am able to share with the members of this family that keeps me going," he says. Serving the mentally challenged is Paul's way of serving god.
"Being their friend, so that they know that there is someone for them, gives me the satisfaction that I am fulfilling a purpose in my life. A well-paying job elsewhere could never give me that. Life isn't all about making money, after all. Sharing their joys and pains, everyday, I learnt so many new things.
"From them, I've learnt how to love and forgive - they are very loving and hold no bitterness in their hearts. They are innocent, spontaneous and transparent, unlike so-called normal people and speak from their hearts, just as they feel, without any pretence or calculation. It isn't that they don't occasionally fight with each other, but they soon forget all about it. They are spiritual in their own wonderful ways. They've taught me how suffering can be transformed into love," he adds.
Life at Asha Niketan follows a regular pattern. Members get up early - some need the help of assistants to bathe, shave and for other necessities. Breakfast is followed by half an hour of silent meditation, which is sometimes accompanied by soft instrumental music. Then, after they chat a bit, they set about working in one of the many small workshops located within the premises.
Work is light, but it helps the members spend their time productively and together, giving them a sense of self-worth as productive members of society and capable of earning just as everyone else.
Visit Asha Niketan on any week day and you'll find its member laughing and cracking jokes as they go about weaving mufflers and bath-mats, smoothening bits of bamboos to be made into picture-frames and pen-holders, embroidering bits of cloth to turn into greeting cards, folding old newspapers into paper-bags or making candles.
After lunch and an hour's break, it is back to the workshops - sunny, fun-filled workspaces - till tea-time, after which everyone comes together again to chat or play. Once a week the family goes out - to the local park or to a temple or church, where they spend the pocket-money that they earn from their work on ice-cream and juice. Once a year, the entire family goes on a vacation - to a hill-station or a beachside town.
Dropping by
Occasionally, volunteers drop by and spend time at Asha Niketan. Some, particularly those from abroad, choose to spend several months living as a part of this family for a learning experience and exposure to an amazing way to live, love, care and share. Volunteers can serve in many ways: helping in the workshops and promoting their products, mobilising funds, assisting in the kitchen and best of all, chatting with and helping members of the family.
Members of the Asha Niketan family come from diverse religious, caste and class backgrounds but are mercifully unaware of such humanly-constructed differences. Seeing them love, laugh, argue, chat, work, cry, shout, play and meditate together, you'd definitely wish all other families were that way! You will definitely agree on how wonderfully different the world could be then.