Aarti Home

In the summer after my freshman year of college (2007) I spent five weeks teaching English at this wonderful organization called the Aarti Home (pictured above).  Those five weeks were the happiest weeks of my life and, collectively, the most meaningful experience I have ever had.  The Home was started 15 years ago by my personal hero Sandhya Puchalapelli.  What started as a simple effort to take care of a few orphaned children has turned into a full fledged NGO providing shelter, education, and love to over 80 children.  Out of these 80 kids, about 70 of them are girls abandoned by their parents because of deep-rooted economic and cultural forces that disfavor daughters.  The luckiest of the girls are those who were abandoned as babies, untraumatized by the event that left them at The Home.  Others, sadly, have been sold, prostituted, or chosen to run away from a life of domestic abuse.  It completely breaks my heart and makes me sick to my stomach that these children have been through these types of things that no child should have to endure.  And yet, these children are able to live their lives with so much gratitude for the people around them. They are more eager, curious, and lively than many other children I have work with.  I started this blog so that I can share with everyone the stories and lives of these children.  I don't mean this blog to be a "look-what-kind-of-horrible-things-there-are-in-the-world", because quite honestly, these are the happy stories.  Without Sandhya and without The Home, these kids would all be out on the streets stealing and lying to survive, if not dead.  Instead, I want this blog to be both a tribute to the resilience and awesomeness of the children, and a reminder to us that it's really not that hard to make big, positive changes on other people's lives; we just have to put our minds and hearts to it.