Bhagawan has said that the hallmark of true Seva is spontaneity and purity of intentions. He has commanded that when Seva calls, all should unite as it can quench the thirst of spirituality.

The alumni community pray to Swami that He accept the Seva being done by alumni across the globe, especially in these trying times faced by Humanity. For our hands may be many but our heart belongs to Him.

Bangalore

Sai Krushna Charitable Trust’s school with 300 students has had to run the academic year online for rural children due to the pandemic. This would not have been possible without the efforts of the volunteers who created a content with 3000 educational videos on Sai Krushna Charitable Trust YouTube channel, for classes from 1st to 9th standards which are made available completely free, to ensure the continuity of the classes.

The helpline

The COVID helpline has been a major alumni initiative where technical support and training is provided by alumni at SKCT while the SSSO and alumni across the country work on ground to fulfil requests of covid affected patients. The helpline was revived from Apr 2021 and currently runs for residents across 9 regions including Karnataka, Telangana, Mumbai, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, West Bengal, Delhi, Tamil Nadu and Himachal- Chandigarh. A team of 68 doctors were on-boarded to help the callers for consultations. The helplines of certain metro cities began receiving an average of 1500 calls per day, per city. Apart from consultations, the platform provided information for the ICU beds, oxygen cylinder availability, medicines, ambulance, plasma and food.

The platform has onboard ~1000 volunteers (including >300 Non-Resident Indians). As on date, there have been more than 42,000 calls to the helpline.

A live dashboard has been created which can be accessed in the link below, to track the requests across Delhi, Chennai, Bengaluru and Telangana.

http://www.sathyasaireach.com/saidemand/

The team has taken up empowering the families who lost the bread-winner of their family, in terms of Career Counselling, Upskilling, Industry Networking and Placement free of Cost.

Chennai

A 125 member helpline team was set up in Chennai where alumni played an active part. The helpline supported in arranging hospital beds and oxygen supplies which were acutely in short supply in the month of April. The helpline volunteers on some days had to work till 1 AM given the requests from patients kept coming during the peak of the pandemic. Alumni procured few concentrators for serving the patients and subsequently worked with SSSO TN to procure a larger number of concentrators. The Concentrator seva has been expanded to other districts of Tamil Nadu as well

The SSSO launched the ‘Sai Amudham’ program to provide free food to COVID affected families. Alumni joined this initiative as volunteers to facilitate home cooking or delivering food at the doorstep of patients.

Delhi

The NCR region was one of the worst affected in the second wave of the pandemic. SSSO Delhi had initially set up an informal helpline where around 20 alumni had joined as volunteers. Later, through the support of Sai Krushna Charitable Trust a structured call centre helpline was set up where the volunteers from US could also support the service of information dissemination. Given the volume of requests, the volunteers were structured in groups like Demand vertical (front end), fulfilment vertical (collating information on hospital beds, medicines, Oxygen supplies) Tracking team and backend technical team. The feedback received from the beneficiaries was very moving as many of the patients have not experienced Bhagawan physically but felt His love through this service. In the words of a critical patient ‘People have not seen God, but through your service they have experienced God’.

Hyderabad

In early May 2021, a helpline was initiated by alumni in the city of Hyderabad guiding patients on medicine, food, plasma, oxygen and hospital beds availability. The information provided was reliably verified, actionable and timely. The helpline worked for 13 hours a day catering an average of 1300 calls daily with calls going up to 2000 during peak of the second wave. As the requirement increased, so did the volunteers inspired by Swami’s call for service. 50 brothers from abroad joined the initiative and with SSSSO volunteers joining the seva, the volunteer base increased to 600 catering to the entire state of Telangana serving 60 towns and hundreds of villages. The district youth were trained by alumni. As part of the seva, 30 oxygen concentrators were dispatched by SKCT of which 15 concentrators were dispatched to three towns – Mahabubnagar, Warangal and Karimnagar. 500 covid affected families were provided wholesome food for a period of one week till they recovered. The menu with nutritional intake was prepared by Dr K Anil Kumar based on his extensive research which has won many accolades. The senior alumni coordinated the logistics and delivery while the entire cooking process was managed with utmost dedication by a team of alumnae of SSSIHL

Chandigarh

On 20th May 2021, the alumni in the presence of Hon’ble Governor of Punjab and Administrator UT Chandigarh, Sh.V.P.Singh Badanore had set up a 50 bed hospital at Sports Complex of Govt Sr. Secondary School Sector 8, Chandigarh which is completely free of cost to help and support the underprivileged and poor sections of the society including people from neighbouring states of Punjab and Haryana . The facility has been set up by Sri Sathya Sai Gramin Jagriti led by brother Amar Vivek. Of the 50 beds, 20 are equipped with Oxygen Cylinders and 30 with Oxygen Concentrators. The unique feature of this centre is that apart from providing medical facilities, this centre strives to uplift the patients’ thoughts by engaging the patients in indoor games, yoga and is equipped with video screens displaying positive videos

Kashmir

Under the aegis of Sri Satya Sai Seva Organisation, the alumni of Sri Satya Sai Institute of Higher Learning, got a wonderful opportunity to participate in a medical seva in Srinagar, Kashmir.  Six alumni brothers – Shyam Kishore, LVM Kishore, Yeshab Giri, Anindya Dasgupta, Eshaan Sharma and Jaganath Rao participated in the seva along with 25 seva dals of Delhi-NCR region. 600 patients benefited from this camp for which 10 doctors accompanied the volunteers from different North Indian states. Along with the medical camp, the brothers also participated in bhajans conducted at the Shankaracharya temple and Kheer Bhawani temple – it felt like the whole valley reverberated with bhajans being sung in our Lord’s glory.

Key takeaway from the Srinagar seva was witnessing the love blossom in people which can be felt in below anecdotes

In Talapor, there were many villagers waiting for the volunteers.  Seeing one of our brothers struggling with the materials to be carried, one local person rushed to help.  The brother was pleasantly surprised by the gesture especially since the group had heard that there was trust deficit among the locals towards outsiders. When the brother thanked him, this local person immediately retorted in Kashmiri “You have come from such a long distance to help us, can’t we do even this much?”  This was Swami reminding the brothers of “Brotherhood of man and Fatherhood of God”.

Another instance was the group’s tempo driver Mr. Ali who seemed quite skeptical of the whole program and thought that the group were in Srinagar for an outing and probably just superficially doing some ‘tick a box’ service like some NGOs do.  He kept asking questions, wondering what the group was up to and the purpose of the seva camp.  The SSSSO State President tried explaining the Sai philosophy and teaching that all religions are one and take us towards the same God, but he was not able to comprehend and continued to be skeptical. At the medical camp site, when Mr. Ali saw our boys wearing scarves and carrying huge cartons of medication, sometimes literally on their head uphill to the medical camp site, Swami’s magic worked on him.  Very soon he started lending a helping hand. The Seva Dal scarf having multi religious symbols including the Crescent Moon and Star was of significance for Mr. Ali which he accepted with all humility and respect.

The constraint of language barrier turned into a seva opportunity for Mr. Ali who volunteered to help with the translations. While translating some of the beneficiaries’ experiences he became emotional as their experiences touched his heart.  As the seva came to an end, Ali with moist eyes told that this was the first time he saw such selfless seva activity.  He committed to join any seva activity conducted by Sai Organization anywhere in Kashmir. 

Finally, the icing on the cake during the camp was the distribution of toys to small children present at the camp.  Their faces lit up with lovely smiles as they were overjoyed on receiving the toys.  It was like Swami smiling through each one of them, feeling happy, and saying “Chala Santosham”.