The person who is reading this ……………

During my initial visit to Saigon in 1986, I was pleased to see that the poverty level was quite low. My first impression was that there are no beggars on the street and this clearly was a benchmark to an earlier trip in one of the third world countries where I came across at least 2 dozen people within the terminal building, of which half did not have limbs. Much to my distraught, I later found out that a large number had been amputated on purpose in order to gain sympathy. And this was actually done on an orchestrated / collective basis where children were bought by gangs who made money from the males and the females were sold into prostitution.

Having lived in Singapore and Thailand, I had never witnessed this. But the visit to Saigon was not the end as my next stop was Cambodia, where again I witnessed what I had seen in the third world country, perhaps to a lesser degree. And this disturbed me…

By early 1990, I visited an orphanage. What I saw devastated me as one out of five children was dying below the age of 5 years for lack of simple amenities, starting from God’s gift to us – WATER, and subsequently water borne diseases like Cholera, Diphtheria, Typhoid, Dysentery, Jaundice and many more.

Finally, I visited Vientiane Laos, where there seemed to be a total standstill in terms of economy. However, due to the high influence of the Buddhist way of life, there were many helping hands, ensuring that there was adequate food and the bare necessities of life. Nevertheless, due to lack of funds, there was an unusually high rate of blindness, people dying of simple things like flu, untreated chicken pox, cholera, and in the villages there existed polio. Another alarming fact was the absence of any proper education system.

With my parents’ blessings, I then decided to start as what would be the seed of ‘In Sewa Ltd’.

We started off with basic donations such as providing buckets, so that the monks could bring water from the well to the schools. This was the beginning to what is today….

Now and tomorrow and in the future, the vision of ‘In SEWA’, is to operate in absolute transparency, discipline, truth and in the name of God to do whatever little we can to repay the immense gifts ‘HE‘ has bestowed upon us.

-Rikhi Thakral