The winter of 2011 set in early and most of us were most unprepared to welcome her. Every season of the year brings along with it challenges to face life with grit and happiness. Come winter and the monsoon, the poor find it almost difficult to survive.

For the poor living on the margins of our society, life is a real struggle. Their homes which are thatched roofs with hay or a plastic sheet, gives them relief either from the biting cold or the lashing rain.

Seeing the poor shivering with cotton wrapping round their body, we felt an urge to reach out to them. With our little collection, we knocked on doors of the administration and the government and all we got were empty promises.

We did not give up, we approached our well wishers, the Sisters of the Holy Cross and their generosity together with our small collection enabled us to distribute more than 120 blankets on the 23.12.2011to the most needy: who live beside the drains, the widowed, the elderly and the lonely though there were other hundreds of deserving ones.

We at Aashray Abhiyan have been engaged with the homeless and the unorganized sector for the past seven years and during this time we had the opportunity to have an experience of their struggles.

The unorganized sector with whom we are engaged are the service providers of this city – the rickshaw pullers, the construction workers, the domestic helpers, the vendors, daily wage earners who strive to make all odds meet and find a dignified way of living.

Our engagement with them has provided us with an opportunity to be part of their struggles. We adopt the Rights Based Approach – educate- organize- agitate for your rights.

What often deepens our faith in human kind is their ability to rise above the most difficult situation and do it with such joy that it often questions us who live in the centre of society and are often oblivious of the pangs of pain these people go through.

Aashray Abhiyan is the organization through which we operate in Patna for the unorganized sector. We take up the issues of the urban poor – Aashray means shelter and Abhiyan means campaign. So we are campaigning for shelter rights.

I have been in Patna for the past 14 and a half years and I have a committed group of men and women who form the organization. I am the only religious and we have Hindus, Muslims and Christians in our organization as the fore front leaders.

We are grateful to God who used us to reach out to the poor. If each of us would donate generously there would be no need for the poor to struggle the way they do.

Our prayer at Aashray Abhiyan is that those who have more than they need would be touched by human need and would respond with the magnanimity which God reaches out to us – reach out with Love to continue the Christmas story.

Source CRI  - Dorothy Fernandes pbvm, Patna

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