A Gandhi Jayanti Celebration
October 2nd 2008, Gandhi Jayanti, a time for us to remember the father of our nation, India. We at Sarvodaya, Stanford thought this to be an opportune day to spread the message of kindness, love and service that Gandhiji left us with by donating some Klaptops.
We were fortunate to have a few laptops that one of our volunteers secured from the company that he pursued his summer internship with. The generous folks at SDG donated to us IBM laptops that were not being actively used by their employees. In particular William Leon was instrumental in helping us with these machines. These machines although being a little slow were in prime shape for regular use such as editing documents and more importantly surfing the web. Infact all the machines were equipped with internal wireless lan cards. We were able to install Ubuntu in all but one of these machines. A few hours of refurbishing and these laptops were revived and ready to be used. Here we are with the refurbished Klaptops. We were so happy that our photo looked more like a toothpaste commercial :)
Refurbishing the laptops was the easy part. The more difficult part was for us to identify institutions or people who would be interested in accepting and using these machines. One of our volunteers contacted a social worker, Elaine, he had worked with as part of a clothing drive a few months back. Elaine came back to us with hope that she would try to identify folks who might need such machines. As luck would have it Elaine came back to us with a positive response. She recommended to us the Opportunity Center in Palo Alto that runs as a medical center, home and teaching center for orphans and other homeless.
We had the Klaptops ready and Elaine helped us organize the logistics of meeting the folks at the Opportunity Center at Palo Alto on the 2nd of October, 2008. We were greeted by three volunteers of the opportunity center who showed us around the facility and gave us a detailed description of the activities that they perform at the center. We were very impressed with the scale of the operation and the quality of work that they were doing at the center. We handed over the Klaptops to Philip, the Director of the Opportunity Center. We also gifted them the beautiful Smile Cards to introduce them to the easy and cool way to spread the message of kindness and love. Here we are with the volunteers from the Opportunity Center.
All in all it was a fantastic and satisying experience and a great way for us to celebrate Gandhi Jayanti.
We were fortunate to have a few laptops that one of our volunteers secured from the company that he pursued his summer internship with. The generous folks at SDG donated to us IBM laptops that were not being actively used by their employees. In particular William Leon was instrumental in helping us with these machines. These machines although being a little slow were in prime shape for regular use such as editing documents and more importantly surfing the web. Infact all the machines were equipped with internal wireless lan cards. We were able to install Ubuntu in all but one of these machines. A few hours of refurbishing and these laptops were revived and ready to be used. Here we are with the refurbished Klaptops. We were so happy that our photo looked more like a toothpaste commercial :)
Refurbishing the laptops was the easy part. The more difficult part was for us to identify institutions or people who would be interested in accepting and using these machines. One of our volunteers contacted a social worker, Elaine, he had worked with as part of a clothing drive a few months back. Elaine came back to us with hope that she would try to identify folks who might need such machines. As luck would have it Elaine came back to us with a positive response. She recommended to us the Opportunity Center in Palo Alto that runs as a medical center, home and teaching center for orphans and other homeless.
We had the Klaptops ready and Elaine helped us organize the logistics of meeting the folks at the Opportunity Center at Palo Alto on the 2nd of October, 2008. We were greeted by three volunteers of the opportunity center who showed us around the facility and gave us a detailed description of the activities that they perform at the center. We were very impressed with the scale of the operation and the quality of work that they were doing at the center. We handed over the Klaptops to Philip, the Director of the Opportunity Center. We also gifted them the beautiful Smile Cards to introduce them to the easy and cool way to spread the message of kindness and love. Here we are with the volunteers from the Opportunity Center.
All in all it was a fantastic and satisying experience and a great way for us to celebrate Gandhi Jayanti.
# posted by Abhinav @ 1:55 PM 
