Keerthana and Blessy

So here I come with the latest update of the event held today...

It was another fun-filled day for so many kids and volunteers. The atmosphere was full of everyone wanting to give something, but no one was aware that everyone will have so much to 'take away' at the end of the event :).. a second event with Kilikili couldn't have been better than this!

I reached the venue "Coles Park, Fraser Town" with my brother Pavan who's the newest kid on the block..to have joined me on my weekend programmes with a few organizations :) ...like Toybank and Kilikili.

I met up with all the volunteers whom I'd seen around 2 months back at the first event and had so much fun with, they were amazing last time... But today morning, for me all of this looked like the first event had happened just a week back or so!

We had a "registration team" which registers literally everyone coming to the event viz kids from various schools, volunteers, parents, care-takers and the teachers. Also there are steering committee members and guests too. So the first thing I did was to "register" myself by filling up a volunteer-profile form. Though my details has been with Kilikili for more than 3 months now, it was fun doing it again :).

While I was doing all the "hi-how r u doing-what's up" conversations with many of my friends from the previous event, kids from Goodwill Girls' High School arrived and few mins later the kids from Jyoti Seva - the latter a school for children who are visually impaired, arrived. Within no time, kids from APD - Association of People with Disability also joined us. I was thinking it's going to be one rocking event today!

In the first event we had children from 4 schools, but the objective for the first event was "to make play accessible" even for the kids with disabilities. But like I've mentioned in my previous post Kilikili also aims to lay foundations for a more inclusive society where kids are not discriminated on the basis of their abilities.

Working on the same lines, we grouped a kid from Jyothi Seva or APD with a kid from Goodwill and a volunteer to help them out in using the play space at Coles Park. I was paired up with Keerthana, everyone's favourite kid from the last event and Blessy from Goodwill.

So when me and Blessy started off by helping Keerthana play her fav "swing" in the park, in the next 1 hour, I could see Blessy take so much care of her, helped her play the swing-slide- basketball-swing over and over and am sure she enjoyed every bit of it. That was the idea of the second event today.

We wanted the students from Goodwill to play with the kids with disabilities and hence make them realize the importance of play in their lives and how much they enjoy playing... and also let them understand how important it is to welcome them into the society with open arms.

Thanks to Kilikili and thanks to Kavitha for letting us be part of such an important issue of the society we live in and also for giving us an opportunity to do what all of us would love to do - play with the kids!