“Giving is not just about making a donation, it is about making a difference.”
Charity is very important for each one of us because it helps in purifying our thoughts and soul just as donating blood purifies blood. We often think that donating a small amount might not make a difference but that is not the case because the amount might be small for us but it can have a huge impact on someone’s life. I personally believe helping someone gives such a satisfactory feeling. A small donation can make someone’s day. The sentence I just wrote is not merely a sentence but an ocean of feelings if we think about it deeply. Making someone’s day, making someone smile or feel relaxed for a while is such a blessing. People who donate are lucky to be the donating hands. Many of us create problems and brag about the difficulties we have faced but we don’t realise the efforts people put in to survive daily. There are people out there, sleeping on roads, in these cold nights thinking about whether they will have tomorrow’s meal or not. We just need to have feelings for others and start observing people around us. Indeed, this has helped me and will help anyone who starts doing this. This helps one’s mind and soul. The night you sleep after helping someone or making someone’s day is truly one of the best and satisfactory nights.
This was all about what donation means to me and my circle fellows. The activity was a very unique experience as we all might have donated individually at some point in our lives but collecting funds was really unique.
The experience was very new and unique for us. This was in some way a practical implementation of what we have been learning at AMAL Academy. We had to utilise our communication skills, leadership skills and our negotiating skills. None of our group members had the experience of doing so. The experience was unique yet a very good learning opportunity. In the first week, it was really a new thing but as we started making posters and going into details, we realised the cause for which we were doing it. It was the first time we all had to become leaders without an authority. Transferring our thoughts into someone’s mind is an uphill task yet each one of us performed it with full enthusiasm. The satisfactory feeling was mutual for each member of our circle. The response from some people was really supportive. They offered us to share our poster, send in their respective groups and put on their social media walls. The way some people were willing to help was such a good feeling. This feeling was unique as none of us had experienced it before.
We decided it in our meeting to do this task as a team. Amnah made the poster and Ahmad’s accounts were used for collecting funds. All the members actively participated in the meetings and worked brilliantly as a team to devise a plan in order to achieve our goal. We had decided a complete road map which we followed throughout the task. The first step was to share this poster on our statuses individually. This did not help us a lot, so we moved to our second step which was to message directly to each one of our contacts. This somehow yielded better results. This was followed by meeting the relatives or contacting the relatives we can in order to ask for funds. In short, the whole process was a blend of individual and team efforts. As this was a team task, in no way it could have been performed individually. At the same time, individual efforts are very crucial to make a team effort successful.
There were many challenges that we had to face while collecting donations. The first question people used to ask were, “Why are you collecting for them?”. Explaining this to each and every individual we messaged was not easy. The second issue faced was that many people said that they will donate in a while but we never received those donations. Some people did not bother replying to us which was a really bad feeling. . Some people didn’t take it seriously. There were some people who made fun of it like, ‘’KIN CHAKARON M PAR GAE HO’’ and “SADKA LENA START KR DIYA HAI”. We had already discussed that such responses will come and our strategy to overcome this was to reply to them humbly and explain to them our situation and task. We had a clear plan to focus on the positive responses and see the brighter side of the image. We positively responded to everyone asking such questions. Another issue our circle faced was most of us had different schedule and belonged to different cities. We wanted to organise a physical fundraising program but it was not feasible due to these issues but this did not stop us from working as a team and facing all the challenges we had.
We did not achieve this goal as we had planned. After seeing other groups collecting so much, we did think that we have not performed well. This was just a thought and our group stood firm and did not let this thinking overcome us. We remained positive and continued to put in all the efforts. I can not call this a failure as we learned from it, we gained valuable experience, we implemented our AMAL learnings practically and we worked as a team. This gave us a new experience, it helped us realise the issues people are facing and how some people are working for others in this self centred selfish world. These new experiences are our real reward. We accept our failure in not collecting a huge amount but this does not end here, our group will continue to collect donations whenever we could for the sake of humanity. I would end this blog with a wonderful quote
Thank You AMAL Academy for giving us such a unique and exciting activity. We will never forget the experiences we had and we are really thankful to you for this.
