Aryan Beria, 10th Grade
Last year I went on a service trip to India through CORD. CORD, Chinmaya Organization for Rural Development, organizes a service trip to their northern center in the summer and their southern center in the winter.
To be eligible to go on this trip you must be a high schooler attending Chinmaya mission and be selected through a process. My service trip went to the CORD center in Sidhbari, Dharamshala in the summer of 2023 for a total of two weeks. However, severe flooding in Dehli caused our group to take shelter in the Delhi Chinmaya mission for three days. This was a fun experience because we got to connect with each other, sightsee Delhi, and meet Swamiji. Throughout my time in Sidhbari, I visited local Chinmaya missions, met with the local Chinmaya Umang, attended a Mahila Mandal meeting and visited the CORD center. Through this experience, I understood the difficulty of rural life and how grateful I should be for my life. A key theme of these programs was that they were often self-run because I realized that it’s more important to help people help themselves than to give outright help. In Sidhbari, I also taught local Chinmaya groups about proper hygiene, planted rice in the fields, aided people in making jewelry that they could sell, and discussed American life with teenagers. Everyone I interacted with showed me how the cards you got dealt shouldn’t and doesn’t define who you are. They all convinced me that with enough hard work I can fix any problem that comes across my life. If someone were to ask me if they should themselves go on this trip, my response would be that it will be fun, it’s an opportunity for Seva, you will get tons of volunteering hours from it. And the food at the center was really good! So if you are considering going on this trip I would encourage you to go.
