THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: It was yet another occasion for them to make that difference and bring a smile on umpteen faces. ‘Make a Difference’ aka MAD, the nation’s notable youth volunteer network, was scripting yet another success story on Sunday, as we caught up with its volunteers at Christ Nagar School, Kowdiar. They were toiling hard teaching some 100-odd children, both boys and girls, drawn from orphanages in the city, about aeroplanes, aeromodelling and the basic principles that make a plane fly. The sessions were part of the placement activities of MAD, under which the children attend career-oriented sessions. The children, from Hindu Mahila Mandiram and Jayamatha Boys’ Home, sat through presentations and sessions where they were taught how to make simple planes, rather gliders.It was heartening to see the MAD volunteers patiently explaining the make of planes and helping out each student who attended the programme. And participants of the sessions like Reshma, Vijayalakshmy and Rahul were short of words when asked to share their excitement.‘’MAD has been providing English communication skills to underprivileged kids. Placement is another activity we undertake, as part of which they get to know about different career options,” said Karthik Pillai, an employee with Ernst and Young, who heads the placement activities of MAD in Thiruvananthapuram. The English course is a five-level programme of 100 hours each and the placements programme runs side by side to keep them aware of the career options. The Thiruvananthapuram unit of MAD is now over two years’ old and has 70 volunteers, who like their counterparts across the country, put in two hours of a week for the deprived children. The day’s activities at Christ Nagar started off with the making of paper planes. Then they were taught about the basic parts of a plane, were given materials to make their own planes, which they flew at the end of the day. “They made the planes using balsa wood,” said Vivek Rajkumar, an alumni of IIT, Chennai, who is a design engineer, and who led the plane-making sessions. The touching part of the whole endeavour was that the wood was brought from Chennai for the children and the volunteers sat down for hours together, to get it polished, cut them into pieces and had them packed in 100 kits for the children. Vivek also trained a group of MAD volunteers to help him with the plane-making sessions. Jawahar and Aswin Prasad, both commercial pilots, and associated with the Trivandrum Flying Club, led presentations on aircraft. The children were shown how a plane flies, about its parts, about different kinds of aircraft etc. And they had lots of questions to ask, said Aswin, who is a MAD volunteer as well. It was 20 students of Kochi who formed MAD in 2006 with the motto ‘To bridge the inequality in society through education.’ ‘’These underprivileged children are in no way inferior to the children who are fortunate enough to study in good schools. It is that they are not being given the opportunity due to various reasons. They don’t know much about the world outside, about the kind of opportunities available. We give them an exposure to that aspect. And we are thankful to the principal of Christ Nagar School for having given us the space to hold the aeromodelling programme, which is our first placement activity of this year,” said the MAD volunteers. MAD has been trying to bring out underprivileged children into the mainstream, ‘’so they can choose their careers based on their potential and interests and not their financial constraints.’’ Besides Kochi and Thiruvananthapuram, MAD now has branches in Pune, Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Mangalore, Bangalore, Vellore, Chandigarh, Hyderabad, Nagpur and Chennai.
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