Sunday morning smiles...

my outings with the Aashayein Foundations lately have been few and far between...but when I saw this week's venue, I decided to join in, as I had thoroughly enjoyed my previous visit to this place thoroughly...there were some familiar faces, some were new but the spirit of the place was unmistakably the same...this particular orphanage is a big and old one...it houses nearly 200 kids who are taken care of quite well...the organizers never allow outside food...even if someone wants to sponsor breakfast or a meal, food is prepared in-house and the sponsor just pays for the expenses...I was literally surprised looking at the size of the container in which the breakfast was prepared...the vessel was big enough to hold me in and still leave some free space for me to move around...and it contained huge amount of noodles - breakfast today for the kids...the whole thing got over within a matter of minutes...it was huge dining hall and kids were lined up along the length of the hall...breakfast was over in no time and before we could realize, the kids were out in the playground with balls and stuff...some of the volunteers joined-in with the kids for a ball game while a couple of us got into taking pictures...taking a camera out in such a place generally means inviting 'trouble' as each of the kids would urge for multiple pictures - solo, with friends, with some other friends, with friends' friends and so on...and the moment they hear the shutter go 'click', they'll run to you to check themselves out on the LCD...to believe, you need to see for yourself how these kids jump in joy on seeing themselves on the LCD...this went on and on for about an hour when someone walked in with a projector and a laptop...all the kids moved indoors and we pulled their pictures from earlier visits on the wall...the kids watched the pictures with open mouth and wide eyes - that was sure a surprise for them as they never expected the pictures to come back to them in this form...well, neither did we...

a really well spent Sunday morning...I initially thought of cycling to this place, which is about 22km from my home but later dropped the idea.