Sasiri Hetak - phase 01

 Miles of Smiles 4.0

As Mother Teresa said, “It’s not about how much you do, but how much love you put into what you do that counts.”

Volunteering is a wonderful way to give back good service to the community. Researchers demonstrate that they have positive effects on people of all ages by boosting emotions of self-worth, social connection, and well-being. See what you may do to assist any friends or neighbours who are now having difficulties.

Children are valuable gifts given by God to the world. They are like flowers. They have a lot of dreams and their parents help to shade their dreams. Unfortunately, all children do not have their parents to paint their dreams in shade. As Leos, we thought we can support those children to shade their dreams. That little thought inspired us and we started to help the children to paint their dreams with wonderful colours. That was the first phase of our project.

There were two segments of our project. As the first segment, we selected the Mawpiya Sevana development centre children’s home at Maththegoda. There are 11 children in that home. We organized a motivational session for them which was conducted by Mr Lahiru Rathnayake. After that, we gave them snacks. Next, we conducted a small entertainment session with them. We thought that we could give them a reason to smile. Also, it is one of the purposes of our project and we could fulfil our purpose. They gave positive feedback on these sessions. Our main intention is to inspire them for quality education.

The second segment was conducted at the Mawpiya Children’s home at Gonapala, Horana. There are 12 children in that home. We organized a motivation session which was conducted by Miss Ama Fernando. After that, we gave the snacks to the children. We painted and sang songs together with them. It was an evening full of joy for those children and us too.

The children we encountered in the children's homes had a lot of issues before they even got there and they still do. Some of them have come there as a result of familial tension, others due to harassment by parents and others due to inadequate safety and amenities. Many heartfelt stories of them were told to us. They said that they experienced some stressful situations in school and did not get a chance to become a student leader or compete in other competitions as they lived without parents. They also said that they were punished in the school for offences that were not committed by them. The expressions on their faces were really sad. It is a sad fact that they are not able to experience happiness and fun in school.

Their feedback let us know that our motivational programmes had a genuine impact on them. We told them that they are lucky and they have every right to be selected as student leaders one day and we showed them how to use their hardships to fulfil their dreams.

Our main purposes of this project are to inspire them to get quality education and to explain to them the advantages of getting a quality education. We also achieved our main intention for this project. We could confirm it through their feedback and we think we could blush their dreams and give new hopes and dreams for their life. When we protect them and get them proper education, one day they will do the same things to society. Then we can build a super-excellent society.