Seva Karya is a part of the day dedicated to Seva, in other words selfless service. It’s essentially an hour of the day, the kids take out to clean everything. From the school, the bedrooms, the bathrooms, the kitchen, the outside paths, the mandir, the gaushala and start preparations for lunch and dinner. They do all this at 7ish am and they are always smiling. Obviously, they are doing it because they are told but they do it happily. More importantly, this part of the day is also trying to embed essential sanskaars in to the students. That of Seva. As most have come from such harsh working lives already that this seems like almost easy work for them. It becomes a duty. Maybe this is something we could have at SSV, instead of a year out for Prabandhika duty?

In my dinacharya post, I very (and naively) casually said that ‘they work the farmlands’. In hindsight, I feel so entitled. It was probably the most emotional part of my journey so far. I joined them yesterday for a couple of hours in the 35 degrees minimum heat. This was by no means an easy feat. It was probably the most (physical) hard-work I’ve ever had to do, or at least up there. 10 year old’s do this. It’s just crazy. They should be out, having fun, being children. Not just at this school, but even when they go home. When I questioned some of the elders they said that in comparison to the number of hours they work in the field at home, this is easy work. All these kids come from farms. This way kids quite literally get to reap what they sow. I most likely will never agree to kids doing this, but by god they are much more capable of doing it than I am. We just so happened to working on cutting chana (chickpeas) that day. Chana that the kids were going to have for breakfast. Just an FYI for all the non-farmers reading this post: farming Chana burns (itches) your hand. These kids have hands and feet 10 year old’s should not have. They are out in the fields, with no shoes, no gloves and so happy. They are so happy to do this for their school. This motto of hard-work is so ingrained. This is true Seva.

Chana

Hard work completed 🙂

First time on a+