Nishtha Diwali sports program for our local school children was held on October 28th, the first day of the week long school holiday, on Rakkar playground. This was an open sports program which means everybody could take part in any game they liked; girl or boy, young or adolescent, everybody had a chance to play. We invited 3 Government and one local private school for this event which our community centre staff had started preparing two weeks ago. Clearing bushes, removing stones from the ground, purchase and checking of sports material, ordering refreshments, preparing prizes and putting together a schedule of games was all done by our staff.
The children started to gather on the ground from 9.0am under clear blue skies and lovely autumnal sunshine. As per our schedule, By 10 am we had more than 100 students all rearing to play. Mohinder opened the games by giving a short introduction talking about how physical activities are good for us in all kids of way: for our bodies, our minds and our involvement in our community. Vijay, Ankush, Sakshi and Ravindra all helped the kids to create teams and play the games according to simple rules and rotate so everyone got a chance to play cricket, football and badminton and to do skipping, skipping, hoola hoop and frisbi. It was spectacular to see the ground filled with so many children enjoying themselves playing games.
At 12 am. The second session, athletics began. We organized 100m and 200m races as well as long jump and high jump. These were particularly fun as the children used all kinds of innovative techniques to clear the jumps. All the kids got an equal chance to show their temperament and effort in the games, their happy and tired faces by the end was clear evidence how much they enjoyed the event.
At 1:30 we collected all the children in the shade of the school and gave out water, bananas, oranges and packets of snacks “Namkeen”. We all applauded the children for their involvement in the games and distributed prizes to everyone: t-shirts, pens, pencils and colors all of which had been donated by kind visitors to our centre.
