Events for International Yoga Day included classes across Amrita SeRVe’s villages in 21 states. More than a thousand adults and children gathered to celebrate the traditional practice of their ancestors. But beyond today, classes are taught on a regular basis in the communities.
Amar Samad says he now has a new life. Surgeons at Amrita Hospital in Kochi, Kerala removed a football-sized tumor from his jaw. Amar is a 19-year-old man from a poor community in the state of Jharkhand. The surgery, which was done at no charge, took 14 hours. It was the largest upper jaw tumor of its kind ever reported.
Once again, medical practitioners from Spain joined with local ones in Africa to bring free eye surgeries to people living in poverty. Doctors operated on 518 patients with 216 in Zambia, 232 in Kenya and 70 in Burkina Faso.
One woman in Spain was inspired to start planting sacred groves in her homeland as a way to restore respect and gratitude for Mother Nature. Now 512 trees are slowly growing and more than 600 people have taken part in the project.
In Kerala, 30,000 women with AmritaSREE Self Help Groups gathered to celebrate the success of their work. At the events, the women donated money from their SHGs to fund new homes and basic medical care for other women and their families in need.
It’s a big challenge, but some farmers in the village of Harirampura, Rajasthan have come together to begin the transition to organic farming. They have formed a farmers’ club and made successful sales of their first crop of organic wheat.
In Rwanda, students from both a premier vocational college and the slums just outside the city of Kigali joined together to learn how to repair motorcycles. It is Embracing the World’s first vocational skill training project to happen outside of India. The students are now inspired to achieve a livelihood along with the development of their country as a whole.
Embracing the World is bringing aid to the low-income and homeless people of São Paulo, Brazil. With 11 million people, it is the seventh largest metropolis in the world and has a booming economy. Despite that fact, one-third of its people live in slum-like conditions.
Four hundred eighty students who survived Typhoon Haiyan-Yolanda in the Philippines celebrate graduating from high school more than four years after the storm hit. Many of the children lost one or both parents, so Embracing the World worked to rebuild schools and provide scholarships for the children.
Forty-three Master of Social Work students with Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham decided to spend a month in 14 different villages across the country. The goal of the fieldwork was to practically learn what life is like in rural India, a place where 80% of India’s 270,000,000 poor live.