One cent one life

Today Jens, Faizan and I had a meeting about establishing a charity organization for helping poor people. It was our first meeting where we discussed and agreed upon many important things, for example:

1. Goal: Health and Education as primary goals. Medical assistance to the people through providing free medicines and/or bearing treatment charges. In education sector, our goal is to distribute learning material among the children and improving learning environment e.g. furniture / rooms in poor schools. More importantly, we also want to help the poor children financially so that they go to school rather than doing labour job.

2. Towards setting up an aid organization: Since none of us (two computer science students and one budding chemical engineer) has an experience in running / building an organization, we have to learn how to set up one. For that, I would seek help from my best friend Alvin who is working as a Finance & Admin. assistant in Pakistan Centre for Philanthropy Islamabad. His organization assists philanthropists in setting up corporate and staff-training as well as certifying NGOs. Alvin would surely be a great source of help for this cause. Moreover we have to open a bank account for the charity so that people could transfer money into it and that the funds are accessed in a controlled way.

The overall discussion was not just on paper, we also made some real progress. As our first project, we would start from helping one poor person in my home town Layyah (Pakistan). This person who brings grass for our cows from a village everday on bicycle needs medicines for his paralyzed father. One week medicines cost around 3 euros which is nearly half of the money that he earns a week through selling grass. Knowing from my mother that this person really deserves help, we decided to buy medicines for his father for 6 months (~78 euros). This would be our first real trial. In Layyah, I would seek help of another great friend Mushtaq who is a sales representative in a medicine company. He would buy the medicines at cheap prices and would track how the money is spent.

Immediately Jens offered his donation, and soon me, Faizan and Sadiq gave our little contributions. In no time, we collected 50 euros and 50 cents. Faizan and me have coin boxes in our rooms where we and our friends drop cents left from the shopping. This would also increase the amount figure a bit. Moreover, we have to talk to our friends and spread this message to others so that more poeple join us and we could return something to the world by aiding people who need us in bad times.

Lot to be done. O God, give us the strength to do that.