From now on, instead of conducting a party for all the children whose birthdays were during the month, we plan to give each of them a small gift on their actual birthdays. This will give them greater joy than having to wait for a party to be conducted at the end of the month, along with others.

Since it is the holiday season, there has been a lot of movement of visitors in and out of the wards. We have observed that many of these distribute bakery products, which has not gone down well with the doctors and the children’s diet. So, this time, we decided to bring about Fruit Awareness, and gave out moosambis to those in the ward instead.

We are also proud to say that one of our children, Ayesha, has been learning magic from the stage magician Nagendra, and will be on TV this week. She will also be performing for the other kids at Samiksha before she gets discharged this Saturday.

The children at Samiksha are happy to have written these notes to us and have given us permission to keep them with us and print them on to our website as part of our work. Soon these will be up on a link called ‘Testimonials’ under “Stories we have to tell”

Thank you all!

Cheers!

We request those who have recently expressed interest in the Foundation’s work to come and be a part of the celebration. We will also be distributing our next round of school kits on this day.

We would greatly appreciate sponsorships for this event as well as our other upcoming birthday celebrations.

• Information on volunteering at the Foundation has been elaborated. It can be found on a new page, titled What You Can Do.
• Details for sponsors, including bank information and specific one-time and monthly program requirements have been listed out on the Be A Sponsor page.
• Our three Areas of Action have been moved into our vision statement.

Following the orientation on the 31st of March, we have interns both working on our research projects and teaching hands-on at Kidwai Hospital.

From the 1st of April, we have had two permanent staff working with us: Mrs. Vidyawathi and Ms. Parvati are our qualified librarians and early childhood education specialists.

We are now at Kidwai Memorial Institute of Oncology the entire day, three days a week. This decision was made after a year of research and working there and receiving feedback from caregivers and medical staff. This is turning out to be a good arrangement for the children, and they love it.

We invite you to be a part of our summer activities. Please contact us, by calling:

Sandhya – 98452 31106
Manjari – 98451 98983
Vijaya – 98454 53696

or sending us an email at:

happinessquotient[at]gmail.com
manjari[at]samikshafoundation.com

We are looking forward to seeing Rajesh and his team and having a great morning with our children at the wards.

Program scheduled at 11.30 am at the Dharamshala near  Kapoor ward at Kidwai Memorial Institute of Oncology, Bangalore.

Cheers!

The scenery there includes:

• Curriculum vitae of some of our core team members
• The scanned versions of the handouts we have for parents and for volunteers
• Reports and presentations – our quarterly reports, important research, presentations and minutes of our meetings

The documents page uses a newly made form system. Click the bubble next to the document you wish to see and hit “Show/Hide Document”. Hit the button again to hide the document.

Adobe Reader is needed to see the documents, which are in PDF form. If you encounter any problems viewing the documents or have any suggestions regarding this section, please send them to aditya[at]samikshafoundation.com.

Happy reading!

We have have been working for almost a year now with the children at the hospital. Swami Yogaratna, our Yoga teacher and consultant, has been working on a  very unique module to help the kids with cancer, which involves creative visualisation techniques towards self-healing and happiness.

Many of us have been observers or volunteers at some of her classes. We at the foundation now  feel that this should be the methodology that  we should adopt in some way in our individual modules, in order to achieve our common goal of giving the children the necessary spiritual and educational support during their treatment.

In order to develop a better structure to our working methodology there, we wish to conduct an orientation program for our core team and all our volunteers who work  hands on with the children and their caregivers. This would be the primary item for discussion at this orientation.

RSVP to Shobhana – drskiyer@gmail.com, Manjari – manjari@samikshafoundation.com, or Sandhya – sandhya@samikshafoundation.com.

It’s been a great year for all of us at the Samiksha Foundation. A lot of learning has taken place, both for us and for the children. Our Foundation has grown from an idea to reality, and we have been joined by a whole lot of creative and talented people.

We are grateful for everyone who contributed to our work this year: our fabulous trustees, volunteers and core team, everyone we met who decided to support us and spread the word to others, and the children, who, in fact, seem to have taught us far more than we have taught them.

We look forward to seeing you again next year (or, rather, next week). Here’s hoping that the year (and folder) named 2010 will be filled with joy, contentment, prosperity, humour and positive learning experiences!

- The Samiksha Foundation Team