REGION ONE
In 2017, youth all across Region One set their sights on serving the children, elderly, and low wage workers. In Australia, youth volunteered at the Minnawarra house, a community house for needy families. They strengthened their personal connection with children by incorporating the Human Values into activities that will help children build self-confidence and gain life skills.
In Fiji, the youth helped facilitate a monthly medical camp at the Dilkusha orphanage home, where around 40 children were assessed by a medical team comprised of a dentist, dietician, pharmacist, and general practitioners. Medical camps are being utilised across the region, spearheaded by The Divine Mother and Child Health programme. providing service in Australia, Indonesia, and Singapore. This programme provides medical and dental screenings, and allows medical professionals to identify potential health risks, especially to younger women and older children.
Project Home Meals in Singapore is a programme that provides food for low wage migrant workers. There are more than one million such workers in Singapore, which makes up about 20 percent of the total population. Even though they are thankfully not homeless, the migrant workers suffer unconscionable exploitation, so the youth decided to act, guided by Swami’s message of ‘Serving Humanity.’ The team, comprised of 20 to 30 chefs and five to six drivers, deliver 300 home-cooked food packs every Sunday.
Japan turned its Seva towards helping the elderly by going to an elder care facility and sharing their pure love and gratitude for them. Many of the residents do not have close family members or friends to visit them, so the youth wanted to rekindle that spirit. Some presented beautiful handmade cards meant to hang in their rooms, others sang songs to which the elderly could dance, and others read children’s stories to them so they could reminisce about their childhood. By the end, they had all the elderly in the room feeling like youth again.
Earlier in the year, the Singapore youth joined the Malaysia youth and participated in the Seva activities in Malaysia. Let us take this as inspiration that when we come together, we can achieve anything. This was the spirit of the Second Asia Pacific Youth Meet as over 700 youths from nine countries gathered in Malaysia to put in to practice “Seva For Transformation.” They held a medical camp, a provision camp providing dry rations for needy families, ‘Ananda Cares,’ as part of the Needy Women and Children Empowerment programme and Narayana Seva.
The conference culminated with Bhagawan announcing the launch of “Sri Sathya Sai Medical and Dental Outreach programme,” The youth have since acted on these instructions and are serving packed food to needy families, homeless, and school children, Arati as well as having a medical camp providing extensive care, treatment, and prescription medication.