Stride for Sanitation: Empowering India’s Communities One Step at a Time

Hello everyone, my name is Ayan Mishra. I am 12 years old. I go to Saint John’s High school and live in Shrewsbury with my mom, dad and dog. Today, I will be talking about the 5k for Sewa event. The ‘5k for Sewa’ was a 5k walk/run that I organized with the help of senior Sewa volunteers of the Boston chapter to help raise funds that would be used to build toilets for underprivileged kids in the rural parts of India.

When I went to India in the winter, my mom went to some government schools to help with Sewa International’s SHE (Sanitation, Hygiene and Empowerment of the Girl Child) program. I was curious to see what a government school looked like in India, and to my surprise it was very different from the ones we have here in America. When I saw the condition of the toilets, I was a little disappointed since some of them were not functioning. I heard my mom talking with some girls, and how they were dropping out of schools because of the same reason. Somehow, I was concerned about the fact that a basic amenity like education was not accessible to some of these kids because of the poor quality of toilets and I wanted to do something about it.

I was brainstorming ideas on how to help and raise funds, and I got the perfect idea, a 5k run! I told my parents about my idea and they told me I should plan and present it to the Sewa weekly call. I mapped out a path on Assabet River Trail, created a simple slide show about my idea and presented it to all the Sewa volunteers during the weekly call. All of them motivated me to go ahead with the idea and approved it!

I was super excited, and started with designing the flyer for the event, so that we could promote it on all social media channels. Once the flyer was approved, along with my dad and Sanjiv uncle, we went to the trail, nearby gyms and shops, to stick the flyer on the notice boards. We also heard of a festival called “Hudson Fest” going on, so we handed out flyers to people walking by.

During the call, we also had decided on giving out t-shirts to the first 100 signups, that I designed and ordered through the vendor that Sewa usually works with. I had a lot of help from Rohini aunty, Pramod uncle, Harish uncle, and many more volunteers who reached out to their friends to help drive registrations. Geetu aunty, helped us find a sponsor for our event, along with Akash uncle who got a sponsor for the event through his company. We also had some help from HSS volunteers on the day of the event. Overall, we made a lot of progress, and almost had 84 registrations on the day of the event!

On the day of the 5k, we set up a registration table, 3 water stations, a table for check in’s where we gave out the t-shirts and a beautiful balloon arch that Kajal aunty helped me with. We had our sponsors inaugurate the event, and Pramod ji start the walk/run by blowing the conch (shank).

We had 80 registrations in the morning and we got about 20 walk-ins, which helped us reach our registration goal of more than 100 registrations! We were able to raise close to $4000 that will help us build close to 6 toilet units, helping more than 1000 kids in India! I am very thankful to the entire Sewa Boston team for giving me the opportunity to execute my idea, and helping and guiding me throughout the process. I cannot wait for our ‘5K for Sewa’ event next year now!!